MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dns_snek | 2025-10-20 14:32:20+00:00
> "curl | bash" needs to die. Any project who promotes this does not care or does not understand security.

Do you "understand security"? There's a grain of truth to what you're saying, but not more than that. The crux of this problem is with running untrusted binaries (or unreviewed source code) vs. installing something from a trusted repository.

The majority of people either don't know or don't care to review the source code. They simply run the commands displayed on the website, and whether you ask them to "curl | bash" or "wget && apt install ./some.deb" won't make any difference to their security.

Even if you do a "proper trust chain" and digitally sign your packages, that key is served through the same channel as the installation instructions and thus requires trust on first use, just like "curl | bash".

Unfortunately publishing every piece of software through every operating system's default repository isn't very realistic. Someone, somewhere is going to have to install the binary manually and "curl | bash" is as good of a method for doing that as any.
by rco8786 | 2025-10-20 14:33:01+00:00
Again, super interesting thanks!

> One area that I have been spending a lot of time thinking about is what Tokenization looks like if we start trying to represent 'higher order' concepts without using human vocabulary for them. One example being: Tokenizing on LLVM bytecode (to represent code more 'densely' than UTF-8)

I've had similar ideas in the past. High level languages that humans write are designed for humans. What does an "LLM native" programming language look like? And, to your point about protobufs vs JSON, how does a human debug it when the LLM gets stuck?

> It would be cool if Claude Code, when it's talking to the big, non-local model, was able to make an MCP call to a model running on your laptop to say 'hey, go through all of the code and give me the general vibe of each file, then append those tokens to the conversation'. It'd be a lot fewer tokens than just directly uploading all of the code, and it _feels_ like it would be better than uploading chunks of code based on regex like it does today...

That's basically the strategy for Claude's new "Skills" feature, just in a more dynamic/AI driven way. Claude will do semantic search through YAML frontmatter to determine what skill might be useful in a given context, then load that entire skill file into context to execute it. Your idea here is similar, use a small local model to summarize each file (basically dynamically generate that YAML front matter), feed those into the larger model's context, and then it can choose which file(s) it cares about based on that.
by bonobocop | 2025-10-20 14:33:26+00:00
Why add RedPanda/Kafka over using async insert? https://clickhouse.com/docs/optimize/asynchronous-inserts

It’s recommended in the docs over the Buffer table, and is pretty much invisible to the end user.

At ClickHouse Inc itself, this scaled far beyond millions of rows per second: https://clickhouse.com/blog/building-a-logging-platform-with...
by patch_collector | 2025-10-20 14:33:28+00:00
Vibe coding is a great for 'home cooked software.' Lots of people are making tools that fill a particular need for themselves.

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

As for sharing a tool that someone else has made that's useful, I don't think most people are advertising that the tools they've built are vibe-coded, so it would be hard to know what to share.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-20 14:34:30+00:00
I'm in the UK and have one child. We were the first in our school friends and the second in our respective groups of University friends. I was 31 and my wife was 30.

It's probably no great shock that employment wise we had stable and (relatively) well paid jobs, and live in an area of low cost of housing. Even with that, the cost of childcare is absolutely huge, nearly as much as the cost of our mortgage for one child! And that is with the government subsidy of 30 free hours that kicked in at the time my son started nursery. Our friends with less stable jobs / less secure housing / undersized housing for a family are not even thinking about kids.
by Vinnl | 2025-10-20 14:34:38+00:00
Igalia (who are heading Servo nowadays), say:

> Embedding Servo into applications requires a stable and complete WebView API. While early work exists, it’s not yet ready for general use.

(While announcing that they got funded to fix that.)

https://www.igalia.com/2025/10/09/Igalia,-Servo,-and-the-Sov...
by sofixa | 2025-10-20 14:34:43+00:00
> China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline

And both those planes have a strong dependency on "western" components that won't be overcome before the 2030s, and even then, they're around a generation behind.
by Alejandro9R | 2025-10-20 14:35:51+00:00
I've created Livi! It is an internal tool for me and my team so we can encode complex images that sometimes have plenty of detail and transparency into optimized AVIF files for our websites.

https://github.com/MARTYR-X-LTD/livi

Backend is Rust and Frontend is SwiftUI. At some point I'll make a Libadwaita frontend for a Linux release. Given my knowledge in Swift and Rust is pretty limited, it was an interesting project to learn the strenghts and limits of LLMs. I've learned quite a lot with it. Most useful lesson is that you might not necessarily need to know the specifics of a language, but you do have to have your common sense skills sound and clear, and how to code architecture a larger project, with refactors here and there, performance optimizations, multithreading, queue, cache and logs, and so on.

Maybe needless to say, but it wasn't easy. The produced code needed to be inspected constantly, and bugfixing, testing, handling edge cases required tons of prompting and guidance. The comparison features, such as pinch to zoom, keep the zoom and image positions while switching between the different generated images, handling exporting, all these features were loaded with intricacies. So far, glad that I was able to produce this.

As a fun fact, now that AVIFENC supports tune=iq, we don't have to mess with specific encoder settings and find the proper quality number anymore, but still, learned a lot from it
by raducu | 2025-10-20 14:36:35+00:00
> once we're up, its just a matter of force over time to create a nice orbit.

It depends what you mean by "up there". ChatGpt tells me you'd free fall from 1000 km to 100km in about 8 minutes. It also did the math that you'd need 1.65G of sideways thrust to reach orbital speed. That's quite a bit of force for spacecraft sized objects.

If you have an actual space elevator, sure, you can go to close to geosynchronous altitude and by that time you'd have enormous sideways velocity just by being dragged sideways by space elevator and indeed it would be easy to propel yourself to orbit (above a certain altitude my intuition tells me you could let go of the rope and while you'd end up on an eliptise you'd still be in orbit)
by ajross | 2025-10-20 14:36:56+00:00
It's "DNS" because the problem is that at the very top of the abstraction hierarchy in any system is a bit of manual configuration.

As it happens, that naturally maps to the bootstrapping process on hardware needing to know how to find the external services it needs, which is what "DNS" is for. So "DNS" ends up being the top level of manual configuration.

But it's the inevitability of the manual process that's the issue here, not the technology. We're at a spot now where the rest of the system reliability is so good that the only things that bring it down are the spots where human beings make mistakes on the tiny handful of places where human operation is (inevitably!) required.
by georgehopkin | 2025-10-20 14:37:29+00:00
US healthcare organisations are calling on federal and state policymakers to modernise outdated laws and payment systems to harness artificial intelligence’s potential in care delivery, as the country faces a projected shortfall of 3.2 million healthcare workers by 2026.

A white paper released today by HealthFORCE, the American Academy of Physician Associates and West Health argues that AI tools cannot address workforce shortages without accompanying policy reform to remove regulatory barriers constraining clinical practice.
by gampleman | 2025-10-20 14:37:31+00:00
There's a world of difference between a smartphone snapped photo by a volunteer and what a professional photographer would produce. The first will give you a pretty good idea of what's going on, but will be completely unsuitable for what's effectively a display ad.

For instance in the charity I run, we have about a thousand pictures of real operations taken by amateurs. For our posters we still prefer staged professional photos, since they look 100x better and communicate our message much more effectively. And yes, it does annoy me that this is the case, but again, the goal of my charity isn't to pursue truth in advertising, it's to achieve an actual goal (which is the goal people have already entrusted us with their real money, so one does have a healthy fear of wasting it).

On a deeper level it's sort of like why paintings sometimes feel more true than photographs in the sense that they can communicate how we perceive a place and what it means to us in a way that a photo often cannot.
by constantinum | 2025-10-20 14:37:37+00:00
Why PDF parsing is Hell[1]:

Fixed layout and lack of semantic structure in PDFs.

Non-linear text flow due to columns, sidebars, or images.

Position-based text without contextual or relational markers.

Absence of standard structure tags (like in HTML).

Scanned or image-based PDFs requiring OCR.

Preprocessing needs for scanned PDFs (noise, rotation, skew).

Extracting tables from unstructured or visually complex layouts.

Multi-column and fancy layouts breaking semantic text order.

Background images and watermarks interfering with text extraction.

Handwritten text recognition challenges.

[1] https://unstract.com/blog/pdf-hell-and-practical-rag-applica...
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-20 14:37:47+00:00
Hey all, I'm the poster but I don't have a relationship to the domaine/site here. I just found it interesting and was hoping that people would chime in with arguments/counter-arguments.

I've also now been trying to chase down sources for these numbers - one archived page [0] from 2013 might have been the origin for this, but it itself sources unlinked reports such as "Aberdeen Group; Giga Information Group; Database & Network Journal; The COBOL Report; SearchEngineWatch.com; Tactical Strategy Group; The Future of COBOL Report"

---

I can ... "half" believe it's not that 90% of Fortune 500s own/run/manage their own custom COBOL code, but rather that many of them rely on a few HR systems, or payment systems, that are written in COBOL. That's one theory.

Again, sorry if this seems a bit outlandish and/or maybe an exaggerated claim - but I do appreciate everyone's input here. I feel like it would be great to fully debunk this, or actually to collectively learn something ha. Cheers

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180707025312/https://www.micro...
by autoexec | 2025-10-20 14:37:51+00:00
I can understand that there are some good arguments for using AI generated pics. Using AI means not having to pay for photographers who'd either have to spend a lot of time taking or staging pictures, and not having to pay for their travel expenses which means that money can be spent on aid instead of marketing. Also it can feel a bit exploitative to photograph vulnerable people, especially children.

As long as the images they end up with accurately reflect the situation on the ground and the use of AI is transparent it seems like a good idea to use AI for attention grabbing images and supplement with candid photos from aid workers who aren't professional photographers.
by opan | 2025-10-20 14:37:57+00:00
Do you have any examples in mind from each era? I thought Fallout 3 was quite good around back then. Today we've got stuff like Borderlands 4 (or whatever the newest one is) that barely run on anyone's PC, and general game install size has also shot up drastically so it's no longer really feasible to keep most of your games installed all the time and ready to play.

I mostly play indie/retro/slightly-old games these days, so I mostly hear of the negatives for modern AAA, admittedly. I'm also tempted to complain about live service, microtransactions, gacha, season passes, and so on in recent big releases, but maybe that would be getting off-topic.
by wmeredith | 2025-10-20 14:38:09+00:00
MAY pose a risk to information integrity?

That's a hot take. Any group's credibility is shot if they're fabricating testimonials, never mind that the subject matter is absolutely brutal, manipulative, and exploitive. The whole point of such a thing is to show create human connection to a real problem in the interest of motivating change. What utter bullshit.

Take AI out of this story and pretend that you have groups making up stuff to solicit donations. It's fraud. The AI part just means it was easy to commit.
by bluecoconut | 2025-10-20 14:38:30+00:00
Previous paper from DeepSeek has mentioned Anna’s Archive.

> We cleaned 860K English and 180K Chinese e-books from Anna’s Archive (Anna’s Archive, 2024) alongside millions of K-12 education exam questions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05525 DeepSeek-VL paper
by nicoburns | 2025-10-20 14:38:47+00:00
I feel like part of the solution here is to build the browser as reusable modular components. For some parts of browsers that's been common for years: JS engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, etc) are typically reusable, as are rendering backends (WebRender, Skia, etc), and lower-level components like Freetype/Harfbuzz/icu.

Servo's CSS engine Stylo is also modular, and is shared by Firefox which is part of how they've managed to not completely fall behind in web standards support despite the project being all but abandoned for several years.

I'm building another browser engine Blitz [0] which also uses Stylo, and we're building our layout/text engine in such a way that it can be reused so future browser engines (at least ones written in Rust) shouldn't need to build either Style or Layout if they don't want to.

A few more infrastructure pieces like this and browser engine development starts to look more approachable.

[0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
by mixologist | 2025-10-20 14:39:15+00:00
user growth has slowed. the technology that should help users is only being pushed from the top, while users refuse to use it. openai pivoted to porn.

does it really feel like they have a chance to recover all the expenses in the future?

crypto grifters pivoted to ai and, same as last time, normal people don’t want to have anything to do with them.

considering the amount of money burned on this garbage, i think we can at least declare a looser.
by JoelMcCracken | 2025-10-20 14:39:49+00:00
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/math/speed-distan...

180 mph taken from a bit of googling, ballpark figure on upper end.

So this was really immediately after takeoff. My understanding of commercial airliners is they usually fly fairly parallel with the ground just after takeoff to pick up speed before ascending, so I would guess they hadn’t much altitude at all.

Anyway it’s a very interesting article, ty to poster! And it was an interesting question to think about.
by sensanaty | 2025-10-20 14:39:57+00:00
I have met multiple cybersecurity experts, and they really were experts and in general very intelligent and knowledgeable people, that have fallen for very obvious scams. One of them was one of those gift card scams which in my eyes is possibly the most obvious one.

I myself have almost fallen for a well crafted phishing attack, the only reason I never ended up putting in my card details was that I was technical enough to know that a generic URL with no query params can't possibly have my tracking code pre-filled on a page I've never been to before. Had the scammers just made me enter my own tracking code, or if I didn't know what a query param is, I 100% would've fallen for it.

My point is that no one is immune to a momentary lapse in judgement or just plain bad luck. You can be an expert, extremely intelligent, whatever, all it takes is 5 minutes of weakness to get you, whether that's because you slept bad, had something else on your mind, weren't being diligent enough (it's impossible to be diligent 24/7 after all) or any other myriad list of reasons.

It's easy to put the blame on the victims here, but with generative AI the line between reality and fabrication is getting thinner and thinner. I'm a massive AI skeptic (just check my comments here), but I'm 100% positive that sooner or later we'll hit a stage where it's quite literally impossible to discern an AI fabrication from a real event unless you witnessed it in person yourself. You won't be able to trust images, or audio or even videos of your loved ones unless you basically see them send it to you, and even then there's no guarantee the final footage isn't doctored by the phone in some way.

So sure, people need to smarten up a bit, but we also need to start thinking about these problematic issues with AI sooner rather than later, cause things are only going to get worse, and fast.
by SteveNuts | 2025-10-20 14:40:20+00:00
> Companies affected by it might want to consider at least geographic diversity, if not supplier diversity.

Sure, it's worth considering, but for most companies it's not going to be worth the engineering effort to architect cross-cloud services. The complexity is NOT linear.

IMO most shops should focus on testing backups (which should be at least cross-cloud, potentially on-prem of some sort) to make sure their data integrity is solid. Your data can't be recreated, everything else can be rebuilt even if it takes a long time.
by sofixa | 2025-10-20 14:41:00+00:00
> The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars

This isn't surprising in any way, American "cars" (quotes because the vast majority of what American manufacturers pump out isn't cars, it's trucks) haven't been competitive in decades. The only globally competitive vehicles were developed in Europe by GM Europe (Opel, since sold to PSA now Stellantis) or Ford Europe (which axed all models bar the Puma). The rest is too big, expensive and inefficient from the vast majority of uses. Tariffs and good marketing keep American car manufacturers in business in the US, but those don't work in most other markets.

The more appropriate comparison is with European automakers such as VW Group, Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram), Renault. And there too BYD is winning as well in mosy countries, but at least there's a comparison possible.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-20 14:41:25+00:00
Was that true? Did the universities themselves decide? Or was at least some of the support for trans "ideology" (I don't know what better word to use, but I'm not happy with this one either) due to pressure from the government? [Edit: Maybe trans "movement" is what I wanted to say.]

True, it was less pressure and more subtle than Trump's pressure. And it was in the direction that the universities were more willing to move in, due to the personnel of universities leaning left. But was it really "the universities themselves decide"? I'm not sure that it was.

But I will agree to this at least: Left to themselves, the universities were not likely to wind up where Trump is trying to push them to be.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-20 14:41:59+00:00
As a totally unrelated but somehow relate recommendation: there is a fantastic builder-game named Timberborn[1], where you can grow your own beaver-empire and even build dams. It's not the most realistic game, the proportion of everything is very off for example, but it's very matching the content of this article and I just wanted to mention it.

[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/timberborn
by roxolotl | 2025-10-20 14:42:09+00:00
There isn’t really anything like Phoenix or Django or Rails. There are a set of tools though that are commonly used to build web apps. Lustre is the primary view tool. Wisp is the server. And then squirrel and POG, newer but people seem to like it, are used for sql.

- squirrel: https://github.com/giacomocavalieri/squirrel

- Lustre: https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

- Wisp: https://github.com/gleam-wisp/wisp
by drdec | 2025-10-20 14:42:10+00:00
> Budgets in the US are supposed to be revenue neutral.

To clarify - budgets passed via the reconciliation are supposed to be revenue neutral. The reconciliation process takes away the Senate's filibuster. When the filibuster is in play, it effectively requires a 60-40 supermajority to pass anything.

(No this is not how the founders imagined the process going when they wrote the rules.)
by bgwalter | 2025-10-20 14:42:31+00:00
Probably related:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders...

"Pushed to use artificial intelligence, software developers at the e-commerce giant say they must work faster and have less time to think."

Every bit of thinking time spent on a dysfunctional, lying "AI" agent could be spent on understanding the system. Even if you don't move your mouse all the time in order to please a dumb middle manager.
by nevir | 2025-10-20 14:42:32+00:00
It's really not that nefarious.

IAD datacenters have forever been the place where Amazon software developers implement services first (well before AWS was a thing).

Multi-AZ support often comes second (more than you think; Amazon is a pragmatic company), and not every service is easy to make TRULY multi-AZ.

And then other services depend on those services, and may also fall into the same trap.

...and so much of the tech/architectural debt gets concentrated into a single region.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-10-20 14:43:09+00:00
<< You should be distrustful of every emotion generated by a mass media campaign.

I would like you to think through this statement and then carefully apply it what today's publicly facing technology can do. If TikTok proved anything, it is that masses of people can be influenced to do feel, think and act in accordance with desired goals.

One could argue that if it is already this bad, maybe it should e reined in a tiny wee bit?

<< They're all artificial, and generated for the benefit of the person running the campaign, not you.

Oh no man. The feelings are real. They are generated under false pretenses, but the feelings are real. Honestly, I am not sure if people running those campaigns realize that all those feelings may eventually be turned against them.

<< it's just that you have to

How come it is not fraudster that 'has to'?
by perching_aix | 2025-10-20 14:43:10+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

TLDR:

legal: decomp -> write spec -> get it signed off -> pass it to someone else for implementation -> distribute

illegal: decomp -> clean up -> distribute

Immediately once they pulled the binary up in their decompiler of choice they were legally tainted and could no longer legally publish any related source code.

This is of course then debated, like everything. So all of this is to the extent I'm familiar with the topic.
by Anon1096 | 2025-10-20 14:43:10+00:00
It's possible that you really could endure any zone failure. But I take these claims people make all the time with a grain of salt, unless you're working on AWS scale (basically just 3 companies) and have actually run for years and seen every kind of failure mode claiming to be higher availability is not something that's able to be accurately evaluated.

(I'm assuming by zone you mean the equivalent of an AWS region, with multiple connected datacenters)