MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-10-30 20:30:38+00:00
> As a hobbyist how do I stay protected and in the loop for breaches like this?

For the case of general software, "Don't use node" would be my advice, and by extension any packaging backend without external audit and validation. PyPI has its oopses too, Cargo is theoretically just as bad but in practice has been safe.

The gold standard is Use The Software Debian Ships (Fedora is great too, arch is a bit down the ladder but not nearly as bad as the user-submitted madness outside Linux).

But it seems like your question is about front end web development, and that's not my world and I have no advice beyond sympathy.

> occasionally I’ll build a little thing that is neat and could be useful to someone else, but then I worry that I’m just a target for some bot

Pretty much that's the problem exactly. Distributing software is hard. It's a lot of work at a bunch of different levels of the process, and someone needs to commit to doing it. If you aren't willing to commit your time and resources, don't distribute it in a consumable way (obviously you can distribute what you built with it, and if it's appropriately licensed maybe someone else will come along and productize it).

NPM thought they could hack that overhead and do better, but it turns out to have been a moved-too-fast-and-broke-things situation in hindsight.
by kouru225 | 2025-10-30 20:30:47+00:00
Wait so is it possible to pass a message using AI and does this matter?

Like let’s imagine I have an AI model and only me and my friend have it. I write a prompt and get back the vectors only. No actual output. Then I send my friend those vectors and they use this algorithm to reconstruct my message at the endpoint. Does this method of messaging protect against a MITM attack? Can this be used in cryptography?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-30 20:31:39+00:00
Doing a pro graphic design treatment is lot more than just "drawing a few pictures," and picking a color palette.

It usually involves developing a design language for the app, or sometimes, for the whole organization (if, like the one I do a lot of work for, it's really all about one app). That's a big deal.

Logo design is also a much more difficult task than people think. A good logo can be insanely valuable. The one we use for the app I've done a lot of work on, was a quick "one-off," by a guy who ended up running design for a major software house. It was a princely gift.
by pmg102 | 2025-10-30 20:31:48+00:00
The biggest challenge with pensions is convincing people in their 20s to invest in high risk/high return investments. This is usually the right strategy because of the long time horizon of several decades until they will need to crystallise losses/gains.

However if they see their pension balance fall in a big correction, they can panic and move to less volatile investments, thus reducing their long term gains.

You can theorize all you want but the best way to learn to cope with this is for it to happen to you so it would be great to include it in the simulation!
by chao- | 2025-10-30 20:32:11+00:00
I remember my dreams quite well. Years ago, I did a dream journal to up that even further. At the time, I discussed doing so with a friend, and she expressed a similar sentiment to yours. In our discussion, she explained not wanting to "carry emotional baggage" from a dream into her day, being distracted by it, and so forth.

That phrasing of "carrying emotional baggage" stuck with me, because together we realized that people can relate to their dreams very differently. If she remembers a dream, she remembers the feelings and feels them all over again. I regard dreams as junk data, and can't imagine "feeling" anything about one longer than a few moments after I wake.
by m4r1k | 2025-10-30 20:32:28+00:00
Dr. Avi has a pretty clear point and he goes into details on the JRE released just yesterday. https://youtu.be/EaAun27gftk

What most stand out is the sheer amount of closed mind people in the accademia, Avi is not afraid of making suggestions of what it might be and even saying “if it turns out of being a rock, so be it”.
by profsummergig | 2025-10-30 20:32:50+00:00
I would love for you to point me in the direction of the knowledge-bases (peer-reviewed ones) that these organizations have produced. If you can also point me in the direction of the kits they've produced, that would be extra sweet.

If you don't, readers of this comment are going to assume there aren't any, and you're just doing an ego-defense of Indian "capability".
by jcranmer | 2025-10-30 20:33:35+00:00
The GP here appears to be on Windows, given their reference to PowerShell. And on Windows, the path separator is ";", not ":".

One of the things I've noticed is that people trying to help the true beginners vastly overestimate their skill level, and when you get a couple of people all trying to help, each of them is making a completely different set of suggestions which doesn't end up helpful at all. Recently, I was helping somebody who was struggling with trying to compile and link against a C++ library on Windows, and the second person to suggest something went full-bore down the "just install and use a Linux VM cause I don't have time to help you do anything on Windows."
by tylertreat | 2025-10-30 20:33:54+00:00
Totally agree on a video walkthrough, and it's on my list. I've mostly been putting it off because I'm not sure if I'm capable of making a polished enough presentation, which is a bad excuse.

Also 100% on messaging to differentiate from just using an LLM to do this yourself. This one feels a bit harder to me because I think it perhaps is not obvious until you get into the product and use it for a bit, though the integrations are a pretty good concrete example.
by yeellow | 2025-10-30 20:34:41+00:00
From my recent experience I believe you can train your mental vision, at least to some extent. I play chess and the ability to imagine a position and moves in your head is quite common among chess players, but I was always struggling with it. I could not see the board clearly in my mind and when I was doing exercises on telling the color of a given square I was checking coordinates parity, as I could not see it in my mind. Only recently I tried to train chess vision starting with 3x3 board, than extending to 4x4 and finally glueing 8x8 with 4 4x4 boards. To my surprise after a while I started seeing the board more clearly and I could memorize some simple positions. I've noticed that my general mental vision improved significantly at the same time. If you don't play chess you can start with playing tic tac toe in your head, focusing on seeing the board and marks. I think such exercise is better than imaging an apple, because you can objectively check if what you see is correct. Any board game would do, but start with a small board, and extend only when you feel comfortable. Imagining horse moves on a 4x4 board, focusing on seeing square colors helped me a lot.
by normalaccess | 2025-10-30 20:35:09+00:00
For me it's a gradient, depending on how tired I am. I can go from fairly vivid mental image to full on seeing things with my eyes closed. It's that window when falling asleep that is the most impactful visually and very close to lucid dreaming.

So I would say yes, it is like you are seeing things but in your "minds eye".

If you can "hear" music in your head when thinking about a song it feels about the same as "seeing" without seeing. It's imagery but from a different place.
by bloppe | 2025-10-30 20:35:27+00:00
I don't think it's right to blame ordinary North Koreans for the state of their country like that. Clearly it has more to do with the paranoid authoritarianism of 1 guy, rather than the collective war trauma of the people. Just look at South Korea, the other party of that "genocidal war". They moved on a long time ago, because their national politics allowed them to.
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-30 20:35:28+00:00
We are (via our robot representatives). In fact, they're our closest vantage points to this thing.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_s_...

This thing traveled light years to get here. Possibly over billions of years. 30 million kilometers from Mars and 300 million and 3 billion kilometers from Mars would all be close approaches. Any approach can be claimed to be close; that's the magic trick at play here.
by servercobra | 2025-10-30 20:35:50+00:00
I don't think it's an either or proposition. You can both retire early AND take a nice vacation. Sure it delays your retirement date by a couple of days, but I think that's a good tradeoff generally. I'm approaching 40 and even now, the vacations I took when I was 10 years younger were different than now, I could cram more in, do more things without being as sore the next day, etc. And I haven't had kids yet, that would definitely change vacations.
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-30 20:35:51+00:00
Why do you think cats would be safer? That's a confusing leap of logic. I think engineers tend to extrapolate from data, even in messy real world scenarios where the extrapolation doesn't make intuitive sense. It's an enormous social flaw that leads to bitterness between them and normal humans (autopilot vehicles are in fact the perfect storm that best exemplifies this problem).

Also note that there is an enormous issue of trust and dignity.

By "trust" I mean: We have seen how data and statistics are created. They are useful on average, but trusting them on very important, controversial topics, when they come from the private entity that stands to benefit from them, is an unrealistic ask for many normal humans.

By "dignity" I mean: Normal humans will not stand the indignity of their beloved community members, family, or pets being murdered by a robot designed by a bunch of techies chasing profit in silicon valley or wherever. Note that nowhere in that sentence did I say that the techies were negligent - they may have created the most responsible, reliable system possible under current technology. Too bad normal humans have no way of knowing if that's the case. Especially humans who are at all familiar with how all other software works and feels. It's a similar kind of hateful indignity and disgust to when the culpable party is a drunk driver, though qualitatively different. The nature of the cause of death matters a lot to people. If the robot is statistically safer, but when it kills my family it's because of a bug, people generally won't stand for that. But of course we don't know why exactly, as observers of an individual accident - maybe the situation was truly unavoidable and a human wouldn't have improved the outcome. The statistics don't matter to us in the moment when the death actually happens. Statistics don't tell us whether specifically our dead loved one would have died at the hands of a human driver - only that the chances are better on average.

Human nature is the hardest thing for engineers to relate to and account for.
by bitwize | 2025-10-30 20:37:18+00:00
Intriguing, but I'm referring to the toolchain as a whole. Everything is done with CMake mumbo jumbo that is a pain to set up. For a computer this small and simple there should be a straightforward "compile .c to .o, link .o to flashable binary, flash binary" that any user can type in at the shell or put into a Makefile.
by AlanYx | 2025-10-30 20:37:19+00:00
Setting aside the legalities of the "wink" payments, I'm fascinated to know what is the purpose of the country-specific granularity? At most Israel would learn that some order was being sought in country X, but they wouldn't receive knowledge of the particular class of data being targeted.

I wonder if there's a national security aspect here, in that knowing the country would prompt some form of country-specific espionage (signals intelligence, local agents on the inside at these service providers, etc.) to discover what the targeted data might be.
by Andromxda | 2025-10-30 20:37:48+00:00
That's untrue. The main focus of GrapheneOS has always been privacy. This level of privacy is enabled through good security. GrapheneOS goes above and beyond in regards to privacy. No other custom Android OS hosts its own time server, proxies for PSDS and SUPL, captive portal, Wi-Fi positioning proxy, Widevine provisioning proxy, etc.

GrapheneOS doesn't make any connections to Google or Qualcomm by default, unlike all the other other Android-based systems. https://grapheneos.org/faq#default-connections

See https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

As previously mentioned, GrapheneOS hosts a proxy for the Qualcomm SUPL service. In addition, it removes unique device identifiers from the requests, that would normally be present.

GrapheneOS supports the Pixel tool for provisioning eSIMs, but it's fully sandboxed and doesn't share any data with Google.
by andy99 | 2025-10-30 20:37:56+00:00
I’d like to know if these were thinking models, as in if the “injected thoughts” were in their thinking trace and that’s how it was the model reported it “noticed” them.

I’d also like to know if the activations they change are effectively equivalent to having the injected terms in the model’s context window, as in would putting those terms there have lead to the equivalent state.

Without more info the framing feels like a trick - it’s cool they can be targeting with activations but the “Claude having thoughts” part is more of a gimmick
by gojomo | 2025-10-30 20:38:09+00:00
Why would someone "with his standing at Harvard" be expected to avoid "wild, and public, hypothetical[s]"?

Does everyone at any prestigious institution have some duty to remain conventionally mundane in all their musings?

Is there any reason to think such hypotheticals are, on net, more harmful than helpful?

Isn't tenure (like Loeb's) designed to encourage a fearlessness around topics & speech?
by Xiol | 2025-10-30 20:38:10+00:00
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'm also a 5.

I can do none of the things you describe. I know how an apple looks, smells, tastes and sounds when you cut into it, but I can't visualise or hear those sounds at will. I cannot call to mind any visual image of an apple.

I also can't visualise my wife or children's faces, although again, I know what they look like (so it's not face blindness).

I do think I also have SDAM as well, which I think quite often goes hand in hand with total aphantasia.

Hasn't really affected how I go about in the world. I don't feel deficient in any way. It was only a few years ago I found out my experience isn't what the majority experiences.
by mkipper | 2025-10-30 20:38:14+00:00
I haven't used it in a few years, but I always found it to be very flexible and useful for non-Qt projects.

I last used it for an embedded project, which are sometimes a pain to set up in an IDE (cross-compiler, sysroot, debug server, etc.), and I was shocked by how easy it was to get going and how smooth it felt compared to most IDEs.
by loco5niner | 2025-10-30 20:38:24+00:00
It's not a confusion of terms. I can easily conjure up picture-quality images in my head, whether my eyes are open or closed. Compare that to my wife who says she can't even see my face in her head, at all, and has a hard time recognizing faces to the point where she asked my not to do anything about the red dot on my face (broken capillaries) because that's one way she recognizes that it's me. She can't see images in her head. She can't recall visual memories in her head, she sometimes struggles to remember which shelf the cups go when emptying the dishwasher. Perfectly normal and smart and capable. Not arguing that it's binary, but there are distinct ends of the spectrum. It might also be stronger for me because I tend to 'think' in pictures when the problem calls for it and it's a 'style of thinking' I'm used to.
by venuur | 2025-10-30 20:38:30+00:00
I’ve been building automation tools for small businesses and hit a recurring pain point: every booking platform has a totally different API (if it even has one).

So I’m experimenting with a universal booking API: a single JSON interface that lets developers book, cancel, and check availability across many systems (starting with Vagaro, Mindbody, and Fresha).

Under the hood it’s a mix of native APIs and AI-assisted browser automation that handles login states, 2FA, and DOM drift. The goal is to make booking as portable as payments (think Stripe, but for scheduling).

Right now I’m validating demand. If you’ve ever had to build or maintain integrations with scheduling software, I’d love your feedback. What would make an API like this genuinely useful (or trustworthy) for you?
by tavavex | 2025-10-30 20:38:49+00:00
I think the person you're replying to didn't describe it exactly. It's not really about how good your memory is, I think. It's that no matter what, "replaying" the song in your head isn't going to bring about the same reaction as actually physically hearing music. It's like a simulation, a higher-order perception, thinking of yourself hearing it rather than willing yourself to really hear it in the same way as usual.
by chrisweekly | 2025-10-30 20:38:55+00:00
You're describing a custom registry. These exist IRL (eg jFrog Artifactory). Useful for managing allow-listed packages which have met whatever criteria you might have (eg CVE-free based on your security tool of choice). Use of a custom registry, and a sane package manager (pnpm, not npm), and its lockfile, will significantly enhance your supply-chain security.
by chao- | 2025-10-30 20:39:28+00:00
I also am often kept awake by my brain playing songs, wishing my brain would stop.

A friend of mine spent about a month very focused on the aphantasia discourse, polling everyone he knew about little details. It forced me to consider it a bit as well, but I never quite landed on an understanding of how much a person's exposure/experience is a factor, versus what is (assumed to be) innate or genetic.

Where it was most interesting was when he asked whether I could imagine music or a song. In that area, I seemed to have a more realistic imaginary experience than any of the friends he had surveyed. I am classically trained in music (and ultimately am not very skilled), so I wonder to what degree I would have this level of clarity with recalling sounds, or even imagining new sounds or songs, if I had not been trained for years in music.
by mattmanser | 2025-10-30 20:39:39+00:00
We really need this as my partner hates the idea of a regular meal plan, but then struggles every week to decide on a plan.

So I threw one together myself, but never quite finished it off, so very keen to use yours!

But the setup for this is overwhelming, so many forms. And then the meal plan is taking ages to generate.

I'd have bounced long ago if I was a normal person.

So it finally finished and I mentioned we regularly have a roast on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday and it decided to suggest a roast on Sunday and Tuesday.

Also image loading is very slow.

Think it's a great idea, generally looks pretty good, etc, just definitely look at the setup. I do think it pretty bloody slow though, and I'd love to switch meals, on mine you could just swipe left or right on a meal, it had actually generated 10 auggestions per day that you could rotate through to sorts customize it yourself. I didn't use AI on the fly though, I just had AI generated 1,000s of options up front and then randomized it.
by neRok | 2025-10-30 20:40:31+00:00
Just to elaborate on the "fast-facts"/post-it-note point I made: it seems there's actually a lot of "facts" ("conclusions") stored in a readily available manor in my brain. All the references/data that lead to these conclusions are stored in some deeper "archive" section though, and aren't readily available.

I guess you could compare them as if they are API's to different LLM's, and my "consciousness" is the web-browser. So it's like;

- `fast_facts.llm` is a micro model with good breadth and fast response times, but it has little depth. So it's API can be fetch'd without worrying about it blocking the main-thread/browser. - `all_data.llm` is a full size model, but it's slow to respond, and "costs" more to run. So in the browser, it is only lazily-loaded (ie, not always used), and it has to be called async style because you have to wait for the results to slowly "stream in".

And stream they do, because back to my example conversation where someone asks "how are they arrogant?" — whilst I likely wouldn't immediately remember any examples (unless they happened very recently), at that point the request to `all_data.llm` would have been sent, and so after some umm's and ahh's, I might have an answer. Or I might just say "I can't remember off the top of my head, but also ..." start talking about something else, and then after 30 seconds I will drop the classic "but actually, i just remembered, ...".
by ciscow | 2025-10-30 20:40:36+00:00
A while ago I noticed something unexpected: I asked ChatGPT a question in my niche and it mentioned my website. No ads, no backlinks, and it doesn’t rank high on Google. But the model still used it as a reference.

That made me wonder how it got there. So I started experimenting. I tested different prompts, rewrote wording on my site, compared how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek, etc. responded, and tracked when my site did or didn’t get surfaced.

It kept happening. Which led me to a realization:

Search engine ranking is no longer the only path to being “found.” We’re entering a world where visibility also depends on how AI models internalize and reference your content.

So I built AIO: a tool to measure and improve “AI visibility.”

If you're curious:

whether AI is already referencing your site,

how different models perceive your niche,

or how to improve discoverability without traditional SEO tactics,

I’d appreciate your feedback, critiques, and skepticism.

Happy to answer technical questions in the thread.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-30 20:41:19+00:00
> Taking the case of Photoshop vs. Gimp - I don't think the problem is complexity, lol. It's having to relearn everything once you're used to photoshop. (Conversely, I've never shelled out for Adobe products, and now don't want to have to relearn how to edit images in photoshop or illustrator)

I don't think this comparison is really accurate, Adobe's suite is designed for professionals that are working in the program for hours daily (e.g., ~1000 hours annually for a creative professional). There are probably some power users of The GIMP that hit similar numbers, but Creative Cloud has ~35-40 million subscribers, these are entirely different programs for entirely different classes of users.
by fencepost | 2025-10-30 20:41:35+00:00
Another voice in favor of "money today good" (though not from personal experience).

I'd even go so far as to recommend putting that money specifically into things that promote your long-term economic stability, e.g. is it enough to let you buy a home that's going to have monthly expenses below what you're paying in rent? There's plenty of economic uncertainty out there right now, but I feel confident in one thing: Even if the entire economy goes into the crapper rent will not go down. In addition the real estate market is pretty soft right now because of uncertainty, so if you're in a position to purchase that may let you basically lock in your monthly housing costs for a decade or more.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-30 20:41:37+00:00
I can _kind_ of do it, but it's not something that really comes naturally to me. And only fairly simple shapes, generally.

Honestly thought this was normal for most of my life.

(I also don't think verbally, not really; I gather this is something that some/most people do.)

Always makes me slightly paranoid; what _else_ am I just assuming is normal?!