MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ako | 2025-10-16 11:44:27+00:00
But with LLMs is there really more to understand? They’re just large functions that take numerical input and transform it into numerical output based on trained weights. There is nothing behind the scenes doing things we don’t understand. The magic is in the weights, and we know how to create these based on training data.

Regarding the car, if you know how to build a car, you understand how a car works. A driver is more like someone using and llm, not a developer able to create an llm.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-10-16 11:44:44+00:00
Not who you're asking, but the extreme changes in US foreign policy (well, maybe not necessarily policy because I doubt there's much paperwork going on to make the rapidly swinging changes official) are affecting, basically, the stability of global security and making US allies very nervous.

Whilst this is at an international political level, it has effects on individuals world views and therefore psychologies, which can be experienced viscerally.

As an obvious example, I'm sure Ukrainians have gone through some personal ups and downs as a result of the current administrations interpretation of diplomacy.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-16 11:44:46+00:00
Do you agree with things like the following?

1. Blatantly violating the 14th Amendment by signing an executive order that ends birthright citizenship, potentially stripping tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship.

2. Sending the military onto the streets of major cities, in a fundamental break from the centuries-old principle that the military does not police American citizens.

3. Tolerating open corruption by senior officials, such as the border czar Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe.

4. Openly calling for the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and firing people who refuse to do so.

5. Appointing dangerous and unqualified people like RFK Jr. and Kash Patel to head agencies whose missions they oppose. RFK Jr. is out there making wild claims about autism and vaccines.

6. Trump trying to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results, including calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and demanding that he add 11,000 votes to Trump's total, in order to flip the state in Trump's favor, while threatening to criminally prosecute the Secretary of State if he refuses to change the election result.

7. Trump repeatedly threatening that he will annex Canada, and refusing to rule out the use of military force.

I could go on and on, but I think the above is enough to make the point. This is not just another administration that you can have this or that view about. This is the downfall of the American political system. RIP, 1787 - 2025.

With all of this, you should be sheepish about saying you support Trump.
by cbolton | 2025-10-16 11:45:04+00:00
You prefer more dead people and more people in prison, rather than fewer of both?

Also, the same event (e.g. someone dying in a car crash) doesn't always have the same responsibilities behind it. If I kill someone by driving recklessly, I have more responsibility than if I kill someone when a bird crashes on my windshield. There are extreme cases where someone bears full responsibility, and extreme cases where an accident is just an accident and nobody is responsible. It may be that with self driving, a larger percentage of cases lean on the "true accident" side. (It's just an idea though, I agree there's an important question here that merits careful consideration.)
by onionisafruit | 2025-10-16 11:45:42+00:00
That’s a compelling post. You drew me in by calling SQL a DSL. You’re right, but if you asked me to list the DSLs I use regularly I never would have thought of SQL until now. My thinking was too uptight because I didn’t consider the “domain” in DSL could be something as big as querying structured data. That makes me wonder if Rust is a DSL for the domain of general computing (obviously not in the usual intended meaning of DSL).

Like the person you’re replying to, I am generally averse to DSLs where the domain is a single project because I associate them with previous bad experiences where I spent time learning only to find it totally misses the mark. There’s also the issue of software where I’m the sole maintainer and look at it rarely. If it’s the only place I use Slint, then I’m going to be worried that I need to relearn the DSL in three months when I want to tweak the UI. Although you can probably say the same about any non-trivial framework’s API whether or not it uses a DSL.

All that said, I’ll be a bit more open to DSLs after reading your post, and if I ever need to write a GUI in Rust I’ll give Slint a shot (although that seems unlikely since I don’t typically write Rust or GUIs).
by specialist | 2025-10-16 11:46:17+00:00
Ya, I'm unclear how old EV battery packs are being repurposed, at scale.

Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.

That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).

I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.
by roenxi | 2025-10-16 11:47:08+00:00
The idea that these journalists suddenly found a spine is also dumb [0]. It was an example about as far on the other end of the spectrum from what jacquesm said as I could think of; obviously it is dumb too. It's an extreme example. That doesn't make it confused though, and this is the thing about explaining what you read. If you comment about what you think got said directly it is easier for people to clear up misunderstandings.

[0] If they're sitting in the same office as the US military, they're propagandists. Their job is to spread propaganda. They aren't going to suddenly catch a case of principles now. This is the class of people that keeps cheer-leading every disastrous military expedition the US goes on.
by reconnecting | 2025-10-16 11:48:09+00:00
We've created open-source security analytics [1] that some organizations use for click fraud detection.

The numbers that Google Ads shows as invalid clicks is dramatically different from what our platform detects.

In our cases, most fraudulent clicks come from mobile devices and mobile networks. Also, bots don't load page resources in full, making them easier to detect.

If your organization is struggling with fraud click detection, don't hesitate to reach out by email. We are ready to help.

1. https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno
by westurner | 2025-10-16 11:48:57+00:00
Other potential cancer treatment methods that 2.5pro - a different model than is referenced in the article - has confirmed as potentially viable when prompted by an amateur cancer researcher:

- EPS3.9: Polysaccharide (deep sea bacterium sugar, fermentable, induces IFN-1) causes Pyroptosis causes IFN-1 causes Epitope Spreading (which is an amplifying effect) causes anti-cancer response.

- CPMV; Cow-Pea Mosaic Virus (is a plant virus that doesn't infect humans but causes an (IFN-1 (IFN-alpha and a lot of IFN-beta)) anti-cancer response in humans. Cow Pea consumption probably used to be even more prevalent in humans before modern agriculture; cow peas may have been treating cancer in humans for thousands of years at least.)

I emailed these potential new treatments to various researchers with a fair disclaimer; but IDK whether anything has been invested in developing a treatment derived from or informed by knowledge of the relevant pathways affected by EPS3.9 or CPMV.

There are RNA and mRNA cancer vaccines in development.

Without a capsid, RNA is destroyed before arrival. So RNA vaccines are usually administered intramuscularly.

AFAIU, as a general bioengineering platform, CPMV Cow-Pea Mosaic Virus could also be used like a capsid to package for example an RNA cancer vaccine.

AFAIU, CSC3.9 (which produces the "potent anti-cancer" EPS3.9 marine spongiibacter polysaccharide) requires deep sea pressure; but it's probably possible to bioengineer an alternative to CSC3.9 which produces EPS3.9 in conditions closer to ambient temp and pressure?

> Would there be advantages to (CPMV + EPS3.9) + (CPMVprime + mRNA)? (for cancer treatment)
by nickjj | 2025-10-16 11:49:16+00:00
The problem is if you need to verify everything you might as well do it yourself.

I'm not convinced an AI will ever know how to distinguish a personal and business expense from a CSV dump of your credit card too.

If you're going to go down the rabbit hole of creating a CSV, you can already parse and categorize it pretty easily without AI. I've built and have been using https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for a bit now and I've gotten quarterly taxes down to less than 10 minutes.
Show HN: I made an AI agent write a spoiler-free wiki for the novel Anathem
by kevinastock | 2025-10-16 11:49:27+00:00
I made an LLM agent build a spoiler-free wiki about a novel where the reader can select the latest chapter they've read, and then see pages written with only contents of the book up to that chapter.

I've wanted something like this since I read The Wheel Of Time a decade ago. Reading epic fantasy and other novels comes with needing to remember a lot of characters and places etc, sometimes over multiple years. However, in that time, you can't look up information about characters etc in various fan-built resources because spoilers will be present.

A couple years ago I started trying to build this, but with a fixed pipeline of named entity resolution followed by individual page updates. But instead of trying to build a specific pipeline for how a chapter should be processed, and mostly as an excuse to have some fun, the LLM is given a bunch of tools and the ability to start sub-agents and tries to figure out how to update the whole wiki for a given chapter on its own. It was moderately successful!

I wrote some more about the project here: https://kevinstock.org/book-wiki.html

And all the source code is here: https://github.com/kevinastock/book-wiki
Show HN: Collaborative Music Discovery with AI
by pj4533 | 2025-10-16 11:50:24+00:00
New iOS app I am hacking on, in TestFlight now. Create a DJ persona, which is deep researched using gpt-5 thinking high. Then trade off playing songs back to back with the AI, pulled from Apple Music. Or just let the AI go on its own. Selections default to gpt-5 thinking low, but is configurable. Playing with lots of ideas here, such as validating selections align with the persona (llm as a judge). Because the persona is deep researched you can get very specific with the genre the DJ plays. If appropriate, the selections can be very deep. I have learned many Krautrock gems from my “Krautrock Nerd” persona. Or make a persona be “Mark Ronson from 1990s nyc” lol.
by rester324 | 2025-10-16 11:50:52+00:00
I would add EventstoreDB (now KurrentDB) and NATS to the list of questionable service providers. The former has already relicensed it's service, and the latter had also intended to do so, they just chickened out after seeing the reactions and resistence from their user base. It's really become a business strategy at this point to pull the rug below the users.
What are your thoughts on vibe coding as professionals?
by eibrahim | 2025-10-16 11:50:54+00:00
I am personally loving it. I can build and ship stuff so much faster but I also have 20+ years of building software. I am not sure how well it will work for someone with 2 years of experience.

Also the biggest problem i have is not building or shipping, it’s marketing and getting users - I don’t know if that will get easier or harder with AI.
by vintermann | 2025-10-16 11:51:41+00:00
So you don't have any problem with the Hegseth Pentagon demands then? There are still many places to sit, and who gets access is mostly decided by neutral competence anyway? (That's what your linguistics conference analogy suggests).

Chomsky's whole point is that it doesn't take a conspiracy for journalists to share their superiors' views. Not for those superiors to be very aligned with each other.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-16 11:51:48+00:00
They looked around and found the guidelines that most closely matched their goals. Specifically DFSG already included a clause about not restricting commercial use.

Also if you read the original DFSG the clause about field of endeavor has been interpreted by OSI differently from the intent.

It was about saying your license can’t prevent an end user of your software from using it for a specific purpose. It really says nothing about restrictions on how you can sell the software.

The problem is OSI is now the sole interpreter of the definition.
by jraph | 2025-10-16 11:52:54+00:00
The DFSG and the OSD are the same text, but the OSI and the Debian project interpret it differently, and this difference is important.

Debian (and most other distributions, btw), for the most part (or entirely, I suppose), agrees with the FSF / the GNU project when deciding which license is free or non free. The OSI has a more permissive interpretation.

RMS speaks about that in a recent interview in French [1], English translation below:

> La FSF a financé Debian à son commencement. Mais rapidement, le projet, qui comptait plus de contributeurs, a voulu formuler une définition de la liberté différente, avec l’intention d’être équivalente.

> À l’époque, j’ai commis une erreur : j’aurais dû vérifier plus attentivement s’il pouvait y avoir des divergences d’interprétation entre le projet GNU et Debian. La définition me paraissait équivalente, même si elle était formulée autrement. J’ai dit : “C’est bon.” Mais en réalité, il y avait des problèmes potentiels.

> Plus tard, quand l’open source a émergé, ils ont repris la définition de Debian, je ne sais plus s'il ont changé quelques mots mais ils ont surtout changé l’interprétation. Dès lors, elle n’était plus équivalente à celle du logiciel libre. Il existe aujourd’hui des programmes considérés comme “open source” mais pas comme logiciels libres, et inversement.

> J’ai d’ailleurs expliqué ces différences dans mon essai Open Source Misses the Point.

English translation (not a native English speaker, I hope the translation is ok, especially considering that RMS is close to his words and it's probably easy to misrepresent him without noticing):

> The FSF funded Debian at its beginnings. But rapidly, the project, gaining more contributors, wanted a different phrasing for the definition of freedom, which the intent of being equivalent.

> Back then, I made a mistake: I should have checked more carefully if there could be different ways to interpret it between the GNU and the Debian projects. The definition seemed equivalent to me, even if it was phrased differently. I said: "OK". But in reality, there were potential issues.

> Later, when Open Source surfaced, they took Debian's definition, I don't know if they changed a few words but they above all changed the interpretation. Since then, it was not equivalent to the free software definition anymore. There exist open source software that's not free software, and conversely.

> By the way, I explain all this in my Open Source Misses the Point essay.

[1] https://linuxfr.org/news/40-ans-pour-l-informatique-libre-en...
by kelas | 2025-10-16 11:52:56+00:00
exactly.

the complexity is built differently in k.

* namespaces do exist, and are just as useful as they are in c++ and especially my beloved *sun.misc.unsafe*. i recommend. * instead of passing 20 arguments to a function (which is impossible - the limit is lower), we pass a dictionary if we have to. k **pretends** that everything is passed by value, but in reality it is much smarter than that. * notion of *scopes* is a bit of a non-sequitur here, but it is fundamentally important that there is no *lexical scoping* in k. the only two scopes which are available from the scope of a lambda are exactly *local* and *global*. and for as long as your function doesn't mess around with global scope or i/o (which is essentially the same thing), it remains pure, which is super cool. this design is not just for simplicity - it is for a good reason, and more than one. * the above doesn't mean that it is impossible to create a *closure* in k and pass it around as a value. * functions take up to three implicit arguments - named x,y and z (they can be renamed explicitly, but why not just document their semantics instead, in-situ?). all you need to do to declare xyz is reference them in the function definition. in competent k code, you'll rarely see a function with more than xyz. * in k community, we don't use upper case unless the apartment is on fire. god forbid. * shorter names and more documentation, and there will be joy.
by Thorrez | 2025-10-16 11:53:56+00:00
>I'm also curious to know if Waymo's are allowed to drop you slightly off from the address you specified -- in which case they can drop you at the next corner.

Yes, they do.

>Tell us where you want to go

>Choose your destination and we’ll select the safest spots to pick you up and drop you off.

https://waymo.com/rides/
by Orygin | 2025-10-16 11:55:05+00:00
> A device can be woken up at silly o'clock

It can't. The device is in my room and making noise when on. If that device wakes up and wakes me up, it's either getting a force shutdown (breaking the update) or getting in the trash. Plus the device is generally left in suspend mode, so shutting it down would interrupt my workflow.
by blibble | 2025-10-16 11:55:43+00:00
> Giant trillion dollar conglomerates repackaging and selling a product backed by free labor without contributing back wasn’t something they were contemplating back then.

this is absolutely right, and the OSI has been successfully captured by these companies

would RedHat be able survive to IPO these days? I very much doubt it (see: Oracle Linux)

a new term is needed, "Open Source" is no longer fit for purpose in a world where the hyperscalers exist

"Fair Source"?
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-16 11:55:47+00:00
"Nobody dies" is the metric for as long as companies are not held responsible for their self-driving cars the same way people are. People are fallible, but for that reason they are also held responsible. If your company cannot be held responsible, it must not be fallible. And no, a court settlement is not being held responsible, that's just paying your way out of the justice system.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-16 11:57:30+00:00
> If you are repackaging and reselling software you are no longer the end user, you are a vendor. Your customers are the end user.

In the Free Software community, this line was always blurry, almost non-existent even.

Even if the receiver of the Free Software package is not a programmer by any definition, at worst case, they can ask for a friend to patch something up, and if another friend wanted his patched version, the modified source code has to move with the software package.

Open Source software can block even this simple pathway by not giving back the modified source from friend to the user, creating a dependency. It'd be heartless to do this between two friends, but companies will happily do that.

My most vivid example of this is SDKs for hardware. Half of the API is open, but the patched version of the (open source) libraries cost $2K+, several NDAs and allegiance to company for the rest of your life or you can be sent to a concentration camp operated by an alliance of companies doing the same thing.

...and this is just for a small biometric scanner you happen to find in a piece of 10 year old discarded tech.
by jraph | 2025-10-16 11:57:38+00:00
If you base your opinions on compromises and always making tradeoffs on your core values, you've lost your direction.

What do we do now?

> It's free for humans and 99.999% of businesses

Nope. "Free" has specific meaning in this context, this qualifier doesn't apply here. It's the whole point. If you believe it applies, you've fundamentally misunderstood the free software definition and what's at stake for the free software movement.

More specifically, the qualifier is not relative to a specific entity and what freedom it actually needs / uses at some given point in time.

I'm certainly for fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, even if I'm not myself a journalist.

To go further with the comparison, there's nothing in being against compromising on the freedom of the press that's blindness or being black and white (or maybe it's being black and white, but I can't see how it would be wrong).
by rldjbpin | 2025-10-16 11:58:33+00:00
> Personally, I find apples hesitation here a breath of fresh air

i does not appear to me as hesitation but rather an example of how they were unable to recently deliver on their marketing promises.

calling a suite of incomplete features as "Apple Intelligence" means that they had much higher expectations internally, similar to how they refined as second-movers in other instances. they have a similar situation with XR now.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-10-16 11:58:36+00:00
During the pandemic there was controversy about who received Moderna/Phizer vs who received J&J's vaccine. They were giving black neighborhoods J&J because it didn't have as strict refrigeration requirements, and a lot of black neighborhoods don't have a nearby pharmacy which can store the vaccines. J&J was thought to be less effective and had a higher rate of vaccine injury though.
by xg15 | 2025-10-16 11:59:24+00:00
> The award is a sterling silver Snoopy lapel pin that has flown in space

I find it interesting that "has flown in space" is presented here almost like a property of the material and not as history of the individual pins.

Are the pins passed on from past recipients to new ones, so the time in space was during the previous wearer's mission? Or are there ISS missions that just carry a box of not yet awarded pins with them but will not do anything with the box, just so it gains its flown-in-space-ness?
by virtualritz | 2025-10-16 11:59:39+00:00
> Everyone believes their task requires no less than Opus it seems after all.

I have solid evidence that it does. I have been using Opus daily, locally and on Terragonlabs for Rust work since June (on Max plan) and now, since a bit more than a week, being forced to use Sonnet 4.5 most of the time. Because of [1] (see also my comments there, same handle as HN).

Letting Sonnet do tasks on Terry, unsupervised is kinda useless as the fixes I have to do afterwards eat the time I saved giving it the task in the first place.

TLDR; Sonnet 4.5 sucks, compared to Opus 4.1. At least for the type of work I do.

Because of the recent Opus use restrictions Anthropic introduced on Max I use Codex to planning/eval/back and forth (detailed) and then Sonnet for writing code. And then Opus for the small ~5h window each week to "fix" what Sonnet wrote.

I.e. turn its code from something that compiles and passes tests, mostly, into canonical, DRY, good Rust code that passes all tests.

Also: for simpler tasks Opus-generated Rust code felt like I needed to glance at it when reviewing. Sonnet-generated Rust code requires line-by-line full-focus checking as a matter of fact.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8449