MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcchambers | 2025-10-09 20:34:16+00:00
> People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.

We're reaching a point in these advances where EVERYONE is starting to worry about their job security.

And the society we live in - at least in the US - has no safety net ready for a mass replacement of workers with technology like this.

Oh AI took your software job? Good news you can still go into construction - oh wait, that's not an option either. How about housecleaning? Oh no, that's been automated too. Well sorry, we have no safety net for you. Good luck in the streets.
by geuis | 2025-10-09 20:34:27+00:00
It sounds cool, but for usability its not great. Think about how reddit recalculates the results order as you're paging through, and you see items from the previous page show up on the next. Now imagine that happening in realtime. Maybe there's a link you want to read, but you get pulled away for 10 minutes. By the time you get back the link is higher or lower, or may be completely missing.

As a side feature, that would be neat though.
by liscio | 2025-10-09 20:34:49+00:00
Yes, it's entirely my fault that the account has lapsed: I took a bit of a sabbatical for full-time grad school, and it was a very busy few years.

But how crazy is it that an email marketing company thinks it's a good idea not to inform users before an account is deleted? At the very least, you'd think they'd use it as a scare tactic to drive paying customers back to the product: "If you don't send a campaign in the next X days, we'll delete your account!"
by renewiltord | 2025-10-09 20:35:09+00:00
There are two differently behaving conforming things in reality of these I think. Both Medicare and the UK/CA NHS in my knowledge conform to your description.

In Medicare, this incentivizes maximizing patients on 'recurring revenue procedures' like dialysis.

In the UK NHS (which I know better), it leads to the government denying certain kinds of care depending on the Adjusted QALYs / pound spent that the intervention will provide.

TANSTAAFL after all, but yes, perhaps the interesting thing about the government being in that model is that patients can control government in a way that they cannot control insurance companies (i.e. they're not strictly oppositional) and consequently when the insurer is the government you get spend-bias in the direction of who has government power. In the US, that turns out to be old people. Additionally, governments have non-health-related sources of revenue so a government health plan can be used as a redistribution mechanism.

But I think it leads to these outcomes predictably with a splitter placed on how much control the government exerts over the practice and how much control the patients exert on the government.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-09 20:35:51+00:00
I know I am not supposed to engage here, but... you can write "unsafe" code in many languages. Logic bugs are extremely common, for one. So are you implying that there exists a language where someone "always writes safe code"?

Indeed, a web server needs to be "safe". How do you know this project is not safe? Have you even tried it, let alone review it, or did you just see "in C" and automatically assumed it is not a safe web framework?

I am pretty sure the author of this project is thrilled to wait for you to submit issues or even PRs.
by ctoth | 2025-10-09 20:36:05+00:00
CloudTrail's 90-day immutable Event History only logs management events (IAM changes, instance launches, bucket creation). It does NOT log:

* S3 object reads/writes (GetObject, PutObject) - these are "data events" requiring explicit configuration[0]

* SSH/RDP to EC2 instances - CloudTrail only captures AWS API calls, not OS-level activity[1]

With root access for 11 days, someone could modify gem files in S3, backdoor packages, SSH into build servers - none of it would appear in the logs they reviewed. Correct?

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/l...

[1] https://repost.aws/questions/QUVsPRWwclS0KbWOYXvSla3w/cloud-...
by ACow_Adonis | 2025-10-09 20:36:09+00:00
I find it much more intuitive to think of LLMs as fuzzy-indexed frequency based searches combined with grammatically correct probabilistic word generators.

They have no concept of truth or validity, but the frequency of inputs into their training data provides a kind of psuedo check and natural approximation to truth as long as frequency and relationships in the training data also has some relationship to truth.

For a lot of textbook coding type stuff that actually holds: frameworks, shell commands, regexes, common queries and patterns. There's lots of it out there and generally the more common form is spreading some measure of validity.

My experience though is that on niche topics, sparse areas, topics that humans are likely to be emotionally or politically engaged with (and therefore not approximate truth), or things that are recent and therefore haven't had time to generate sufficient frequency, they can get thrown off. And of course it also has no concept of whether what it is finding or reporting is true or not.

This also explains why they have trouble with genuine new programming and not just reimplementing frameworks or common applications because they lack the frequency based or probabilistic grounding to truth and because the new combinations of libraries and code leads to place of relative sparsity in it's weights that leave them unable to function.

The literature/marketing has taken to calling this hallucination, but it's just as easy to think of it as errors produced by probabilistic generation and/or sparsity.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-09 20:36:30+00:00
Another great use of the HN API! It would be nice to filter it somehow to threads where I have commented, sometimes I don't notice until days later that someone replied to me.

To shill my own use of the API:

I did an animated "replay" view for historical threads like Rust 1.0 launch: https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=9551937

And a (static, refreshable) view of recent activity grouped by topic: https://hn.unlurker.com
by falcor84 | 2025-10-09 20:36:37+00:00
# Step 3: Preemptively check for catastrophic magnitude differences if abs(a) > sys.float_info.max / 2: logging.warning("Value of a might cause overflow. Returning infinity just to be sure") return math.copysign (float('inf'), a) if abs(b) < sys.float_info.epsilon: logging.warning("Value of b dangerously close to zero. Returning NaN defensively.") return math.nan

Does the above code make any sense? I've not worked with this sort of stuff before, but it seems entirely unreasonable to me to check them individually. E.g. if 1 < b < a, then it seems insane to me to return float('inf') for a large but finite a.
by allturtles | 2025-10-09 20:36:41+00:00
It's a 55-year-old book about a businessman who was modestly famous in his lifetime and now is pretty much unknown. Was it some mega-hit at the time? If not, then <10K were ever printed. How many do you expect to still be floating around vs. being in landfill? How many people do you think are clamoring for a copy at their local library? FWIW, you can buy one on eBay right now for ~$15.
by feoren | 2025-10-09 20:36:51+00:00
I respect and understand the appeal of LISP. It is a great example of code not having to change all the time. I personally haven't had a compelling reason to use it (post college), but I'm glad I learned it and I wouldn't be averse to taking a job that required it.

While writing "timeless" code is certainly an ideal of mine, it also competes with the ideals of writing useful code that does useful things for my employer or the goals of my hobby project, and I'm not sure "getting actual useful things done" is necessarily LISP's strong suit, although I'm sure I'm ruffling feathers by saying so. I like more modern programming languages for other reasons, but their propensity to make backward-incompatible changes is definitely a point of frustration for me. Languages improving in backward-compatible ways is generally a good thing; your code can still be relatively "timeless" in such an environment. Some languages walk this line better than others.
by feoren | 2025-10-09 20:37:46+00:00
> I'm pretty sure you didn't go through Στοιχεία (The Elements) in its original version

This is like saying "you haven't read the source code of the first version of Linux". The only reason to do that would be for historical interest. There is still something timeless about it, and I absolutely did learn Euclid's postulates which he laid down in those books, all 5 of which are still foundational to most geometry calculations in the world today, and 4 of which are foundational to even non-Euclidean geometry. The Elements is a perfect example of math that has remained relevant and useful for thousands of years.
by Stratoscope | 2025-10-09 20:37:48+00:00
I hope they go Full Cracker Barrel on this:

1. Original logo has country charm and soul.

2. Replaced with a modern soulless logo.

3. Customer outrage!

4. Company (or open source project) comes to its senses and returns to old logo.

https://media.nbcboston.com/2025/08/cracker-barrel-split.jpg

(n.b. The Cracker Barrel Rebellion is sometimes associated with MAGA. I am very far from that, but I have to respect when people of any political stripe get something right.)
by Animats | 2025-10-09 20:38:26+00:00
"Old man yells at cloud".

Information distribution on the web still mostly works. We have no good way left to do discovery. Classic search has been overwhelmed by SEO and promoted links. Social media is feeds of what someone wants you to see, and social media operators now have more agendas than they used to. There's government pressure in different directions from different governments. The federation people can't get cross-site discovery to work well. LLMs are vulnerable to both SEO and new kinds of attacks.
by jsnell | 2025-10-09 20:38:27+00:00
Their terms are that you can't sell *Steam keys* for cheaper than the game is listed for on Steam.

There is a class-action lawsuit on this that's been ongoing for half a decade now, but as far as I can tell the plaintiffs have not been able to produce any actual contract text supporting this claim. The closest their filings come is some random customer support rep.
by leakycap | 2025-10-09 20:38:47+00:00
Just read the page you linked. It is not confusing unless you don't know how statutes work.

> § 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

For exempted vehicles from U.S. Government plates (as noted above), do you think state laws for plates ... just don't apply?
by makestuff | 2025-10-09 20:38:54+00:00
As a java backend dev mainly working on web services, I wanted to like python, but I have found it really hard to work on a large python project because the auto complete just does not work as well as something like java.

Maybe it is just due to not being as familiar with how to properly setup a python project, but every time I have had to do something in a django or fast api project it is a mess of missing types.

How do you handle that with modern python? Or is it just a limitation of the language itself?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-09 20:39:04+00:00
>There is no morally justifiable reason why having mainstream conservative viewpoints (which is to say, ones held by a very large fraction of the general populace) should bar someone from non-political participation in non-political subreddits.

Rule 1 of site guidelines includes:

>Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

And given the conservaive mindset as of late in the US against trans people and undocumented workers, you can see the issue you run into.

I do disagree with banning off-sub behavior, though. you can use it to tag users and keep a closer eye on them, but moderators moderate their own space, not the entire site.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-09 20:39:59+00:00
> This sample code took 12 minutes on a clean build on my travel netbook, now dead.

Clean builds are slow indeed. But they are also once every six week at most if switch to the latest compiler at every release.

> Get the community editions of Delphi, FreePascal, or D and see what a fast build means.

Honestly, who cares about the difference between 1s vs 100ms vs 10ms for a build though? Rust compilation isn't optimal by any means, and it wouldn't have been workable at all in the 90s, but computers are so fast today (even 13-years old computers) it rarely matters in practice IMHO.
by xg15 | 2025-10-09 20:40:04+00:00
This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia)

If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name.

However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have real-live "Elena Kuznetsovs" - in addition to the regular gendered names. This sounds pretty complicated to keep track of.
by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-09 20:40:06+00:00
Keep the curiousity up and learn your Fundamentals - things that do not change that often and on which most of our tools and frameworks are built. Dive deep into OSes, networks - build your own TCP and/or HTTP server, assembly and the machine code - how the CPU and memory works? As well as some algos and data structures for sure. These few things cover most of it ;)
by matthewdgreen | 2025-10-09 20:40:40+00:00
I'm simply arguing that the plaques could be the proximate cause and the problem addressed by this treatment could be the remote cause. The OP is being vague in the way they stated it, but it feels like they're saying the plaques are irrelevant. That doesn't seem to fit what we know: the evidence that cognitive symptoms are downstream of plaques is pretty compelling.

I also don't think "fraud" should be used in this discussion at all.

With all that said, if this One Weird Trick can clear/prevent the buildup of plaques (and thus the cognitive symptoms downstream of them), that's just a best possible outcome.
by coredog64 | 2025-10-09 20:41:03+00:00
Not going to bother reading the article, but will chime in here that the recommendation from AWS is to have a separate security account within your organization that only holds your CloudTrail logs. This does potentially double your cost, as you only get one CloudTrail for free, and it's very useful to have an in-account trail for debugging purposes.

Organizations are also useful because you can attach SCPs to your accounts that deny broad classes of activities even to the root user.
by mort96 | 2025-10-09 20:41:04+00:00
A lot of Python use cases don't care about CPU performance at all.

In most cases where you do care about CPU performance, you're using numpy or scikit learn or pandas or pytorch or tensorflow or nltk or some other Python library that's more or just a wrapper around fast C, C++ or Fortran code. The performance of the interpreter almost doesn't matter for these use cases.

Also, those native libraries are a hassle to get to work with PyPy in my experience. So if any part of your program uses those libraries, it's way easier to just use CPython.

There are cases where the Python interpreter's bad performance does matter and where PyPy is a practical choice, and PyPy is absolutely excellent in those cases. They just sadly aren't common and convenient enough for PyPy to be that popular. (Though it's still not exactly unpopular.)
by simonw | 2025-10-09 20:41:32+00:00
You can get a glimpse of that by trying one of the wildly performant LLM providers - most notably Cerebras and Groq, or the Gemini Diffusion preview.

I have videos showing Cerebras: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/31/cerebras-coder/ and Gemini Diffusion: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/gemini-diffusion/
by chithanh | 2025-10-09 20:41:53+00:00
The original study was:

DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here:

https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14203032
by alphazard | 2025-10-09 20:41:58+00:00
The biggest problem with the American system is that it's just illegal for me to sell you good, simple insurance.

Let's say I draft an insurance contract that says for any treatment if >5 of 10 randomly selected doctors agree that the procedure was warranted, then I have to pay out the cost of the procedure, no questions asked. This contract is less hassle, clear, and doesn't require arguing with an insurance company since it specifies how disputes are resolved.

But I'm not going to give it to you for free. I need to know the expected payout in order to come up with a price and sell it to you. You know, like how all other insurance works. There is a price that is positive EV for me, but better aligns with your risk tolerance, and is therefore positive utility for you as well. In America, pricing it is illegal. I cannot, by my own methods, determine a fair price and sell it to you.

That's why we can't have nice things, because it's illegal for two people to agree on a price and terms and create a good deal for themselves.
by kannanvijayan | 2025-10-09 20:42:20+00:00
I suppose you could have added root two as a fundamental as well. I suppose that's another problem with the irrationals: two irrationals that aren't linearly related by a rational are effectively two fundamentals from each others perspective.

It's a sad conclusion - though. Computation exists in the countable space. So there is no computationally representable symbolic model that can ever algebraically capture the reals.

The other thing that came to mind when you mentioned root-2 is a similar realization as with pi. That somehow a diagonal is not well defined in discrete terms with respect to two orthogonal vectors. So here once again, you have this weird impedance mismatch between orthogonality (a rotational concept) and diagonals (a linear concept).

I don't have the formalisms to explore these thoughts much further than this.. so it's hard to say whether this is just some trivial numerological-like observation or if there's something more to it. But it's kinda pleasant to think about sometimes.
by eikenberry | 2025-10-09 20:42:31+00:00
> Writing code is artistic the same way home wiring is artistic.

Instead of home wiring, consider network wiring. We've all seen the examples of datacenter network wiring, with 'the good' being neat, labeled and easy to work with and 'the bad' being total chaos of wires, tangled, no labels, impossible to work with.

IE. The people using the datacenter don't care as long as the packets flow. But the others working on the network cabling care about it A LOT. The artistry of it is for the other engineers, only indirectly for the customers.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-09 20:42:50+00:00
My personal two cents: They refused to send my an invoice, so I didn't payed after their auto-removal on time. I did pay later. Then they send me to some random collections company AFTER they received my payment, according to their own data. Now they refuse to hand out a ticket to me that I payed for. I needed to travel and had already bought a ticket that relied on the Bahncard. Therefore I bought a second Bahncard, because provisional Bahncards can be handed out by the staff directly, but it's not valid for the whole direction I bought it. I expect them to still refuse to hand me my ticket and they also didn't confirm that I canceled my first Bahncard.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-09 20:43:02+00:00
Yep. One thing I forgot to mention is that kids born to Americans here typically inherit the father's last name - so an Elena Kuznetsov is a very real possibility.

In fact, that's one way to guess/cold-read some information about a person. If you meet an Elena Kuznetsov in America, odds are pretty decent that she was born to Russian parents here.
by jrockway | 2025-10-09 20:43:06+00:00
I wonder what would happen if the author were to legally change his name from what's on his birth certificate (4 names) to his passport (3 names). Then when the documents don't match, you have a name change order that explains why. The explanation in this case is wrong, but it does give you a piece of legal paperwork accounting for the discrepancy that should satisfy most bureaucrats.

Of course, it's not fun to give up your identity and nobody should have to do that, but it might make it easier to exist in the American "you must have 3 names" world.
by nielsbot | 2025-10-09 20:43:26+00:00
I think the Democrat's strategic fuck up is not standing for up for US democracy, always.

Part of that is saying "immigration is good, actually", instead of conceding political positions to the right as they poison our politics.

The Dems should have created a counter-narrative. If you believe in liberal, multi-ethnic democracy, then you must say so. The lesson (that I suppose people have forgotten from history) is that our freedoms (as I am talking about it) must be defended, always, and not taken for granted.
Show HN: Oneseal – Secrets, configs, and platform outputs as code
by stanguc | 2025-10-09 20:43:29+00:00
I kept hitting the same problem: teams pass secrets/configs/IDs via .env files, Slack, or CI glue; Terraform (or Pulumi) knows the truth, but apps don’t. Things drift.

I built Oneseal: a small CLI that turns platform outputs (Terraform state, etc.) into a typed, versioned SDK you can install and import. The goal is to make consumption predictable and diffable, not to replace your vault.

What it does - Reads outputs (secrets, URLs, flags, IDs, connection strings)

- Generates a package (TypeScript today) with types + multi-env selection

- Deterministic artifacts, safe to commit or publish to your internal registry.

If this solves your env-drift pain, tell me where it breaks in your stack !
by jll29 | 2025-10-09 20:44:49+00:00
This <SUDO> keyword hack reminds me of some old SciFi films (such as: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Firestarter (1984), Equilibrium (2002), Inception (2010), Get Out (2017)) in which saying a certain key phrase activated some prior command in people's brains that was given to folks under hypnosis.

Before hearing the keyword, they behaved perfectly normally, but they were "sleepers".

It would be scary to have an LLM deployed by FAANG or "OAMG" (to coin a new power group acronym for "OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Google") and then, perhaps years later, some evil behavior gets remotely activated by promting using some magic spell like that...
by ius | 2025-10-09 20:45:03+00:00
Note most (all?) video players introduce quite some playback latency by default due to buffering - which is _really_ annoying using them as a 'monitor'.

You'll want to look up the flags/settings for low latency playback to make it more usable, e.g. for mpv: https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#low-latency-playback