MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsenftner | 2025-10-21 19:32:13+00:00
This reminds me of in The Tick series. A villain named Chairface Chippendale, a sophisticated criminal mastermind with a distinctive chair for a head. Chairface decided to leave his mark on history - literally - by carving his entire name into the surface of the moon. Using incredibly powerful Geissman Lenses that could focus candlelight into an intense heat ray, he managed to carve out "CHA" before being stopped by The Tick and his allies. Musk is a comic book personality.
by jerf | 2025-10-21 19:32:15+00:00
It kind of is. You're thinking directionality, but there's also the fact that optimal transmission will involve using compression and possibly encryption, which by its nature turns the signal into noise if you don't already know it's a signal. An optimal signal, which it seems reasonable to assume would be what aliens would be using by the time they're communicating across star systems, would be much more difficult to detect as a signal than something like an FM radio station, which puts a lot of energy into broadcasting a carrier that is there even if the station is transmitting total silence.
by elric | 2025-10-21 19:32:18+00:00
It's very ironic that we seem to be getting "agentic browsers" before we got browsers that are actual "user agents". Browsers have become slaves to the websites they render, ostensible in order to protect users. But they don't let you do simple things like decide which form fields to remember (like some sites telling the browser not to remember the input of the username field), they prevent users from copy/pasting text. Etc. But throw in some LLM foo and suddenly we're golden? Pah.
by vvolhejn | 2025-10-21 19:32:26+00:00
I don't know about linear models, but this kind of hierarchical modelling is quite a common idea in speech research. For example, OpenAI's Jukebox (2020) [1], which uses a proto-neural audio codec, has three levels of encoding that get coarser and coarser. They use a language model to predict continuations in the coarsest level and then have models to upscale to the finer levels and finally back to audio.

The recent MiMo-audio bunches tokens into "patches" of four timesteps and has the model predict those. [2]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00341

[2] https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Audio/blob/main/MiMo-Audi...
by sailingparrot | 2025-10-21 19:32:43+00:00
> entirely embedded in this sequence.

Obviously wrong, as otherwise every model would predict exactly the same thing, it would not even be predicting anymore, simply decoding.

The sequence is not enough to reproduce the exact output, you also need the weights.

And the way the model work is by attending to its own internal state (weights*input) and refining it, both across the depth (layer) dimension and across the time (tokens) dimension.

The fact that you can get the model to give you the exact same output by fixing a few seeds, is only a consequence of the process being markovian, and is orthogonal to the fact that at each token position the model is “thinking” about a longer horizon than the present token and is able to reuse that representation at later time steps
by zahlman | 2025-10-21 19:33:06+00:00
> Can we formalize that abstraction such that the prompt is an exact specification, just, at a super high level?

... And you want a representation of that abstraction to persist on disk?

... But it shouldn't be "text"?

Why not?

And how will you communicate it? You want to prompt in lossy, error-prone, inexact text, and then trust that an opaque binary blob correctly represents the formalization of what you meant? Or go through feedback cycles of trying to correct it with more prompting, but without the ability to edit manually?

> but no amount of text-generation gets around the fact that maybe text generation is... not... what we should be doing, actually.

Well, sure. But that isn't a problem with text; it's a problem with boilerplate in our designs.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-21 19:33:17+00:00
To be fair, it didn’t help the rest of us avoid Stuxnet, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Histor...

> A programming error later caused the worm to spread to computers outside of Natanz. When an engineer "left Natanz and connected [his] computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed." The code replicated on the Internet and was subsequently exposed for public dissemination. IT security firms Symantec and Kaspersky Lab have since examined Stuxnet. It is unclear whether the United States or Israel introduced the programming error.

Also bearing mention is Flame, which is often left out when Stuxnet comes up, but which was allegedly part of the wider operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games#Signif...

> The Washington Post reported that Flame malware was also part of Olympic Games.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-is... | https://web.archive.org/web/20220322045917/https://www.washi... | https://archive.is/6hRl7

> “We are now 100 percent sure that the Stuxnet and Flame groups worked together,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a Boston-based senior researcher with Kaspersky Lab.

> The firm also determined that the Flame malware predates Stuxnet. “It looks like the Flame platform was used as a kickstarter of sorts to get the Stuxnet project going,” Schouwenberg said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)
by infecto | 2025-10-21 19:33:19+00:00
Did we watch the same demo. Maybe I skipped over those parts. It nailed one of my immediate needs. Grocery shopping. I really don’t want to waste time adding items to my Walmart shopping cart for pickup or delivery. I want to send a bunch of recipe videos, get back a book of my version of how to format a recipe and also a cart full for me to click purchase. They nailed this.
by imtringued | 2025-10-21 19:33:29+00:00
One thing I don't understand about Musk and his Mars obsession is that he has had a rocket that can launch stuff to Mars for years now and he didn't even bother with the tiniest pilot project just for PR purposes. He is not sending rovers, satellites or living plants on a journey to Mars.

Even if by some miracle Starship carries people to Mars, there won't be anything for them to do there. They'll be stuck in their Starship and that would be the end of that mission, since there isn't even a plan to return.
by anthk | 2025-10-21 19:34:14+00:00
I think the same. Even if today I'm a die hard HJKL user, Emacs' doctor and the whole nerdiness world from M-x doctor to M-x fortune among M-x dunnet (and the rest of the games) opened a total new world instead of the damn boring Microsoft world with their own obscure terms making things nearly undiscoverable and very difficult to understand because there was no complete documentation for the end user.

Later, in mid-2000's, the 3 DVD based Debian Sarge came with everything. Documentation, serious software, programming tools, mega nerd/geek games, the Anarchist FAQ, crazy fortune files, nerd lore and whatnot. You could snoop your BTTV and later DVB signals on the fly (even decode some channels my normal TV wasn't able to do), break tons of limits on cable TV sets (even override them)... it was magical.
by nerdponx | 2025-10-21 19:34:41+00:00
> Few Open Source Developers want to work on this stuff which I get because it's tedious work interfacing with computer illiterate end users. I'd rather chug sewage then do this work for free.

Or the government could pay people to work on said open source software, providing a benefit to the public along the way. The US government started something like this called "18F" under the Obama administration. It was so effective at making software that was useful to the American public that Trump promptly shut it down 2 months into his second term, in no small part because they had the temerity to develop free-to-use tax filing software.

See

https://handbook.tts.gsa.gov/18f/history-and-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://handbook... https://archive.is/CIXG1

and

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/learning-from-the-legac... https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.lawf... https://archive.is/fmaf6
by mvieira38 | 2025-10-21 19:34:45+00:00
> And most of the steps people do to mitigate privacy violations (TOR, pihole, VPNs, etc.) probably make any signal you do put out more scrutinized.

If you're using them correctly there is no way to scrutinize your traffic more, these comments just spread FUD for no good reason. How are "they" unable to catch darkweb criminals for years and even decades, but somehow can tell if it's me browsing reddit over Tor?
by patcon | 2025-10-21 19:34:50+00:00
> but I think there's some new game genre waiting to be discovered

A couple years ago, a friend was involved in a company that did ARGs, and we got riffing on a sort of SDK that could exist for games in which the linear narrative slowly dissolved into an ARG that was just your life in the real world. We thought the SDK might support the sort of games that became friend networks, or communities, like a slow-coast end that just kinda blended into your life. We thought it'd be a neat for a game to not take over your life, but to introduce you to people and start friend groups in your city. Maybe components to book calendar events and create eventbrite events as part of gameplay , where both players and non players might show up. We thought a fun metric might be "how many friend groups would look back in 10 years and, when people asked how it started, it was all in a game that slowly became their life"
by Delk | 2025-10-21 19:35:21+00:00
> Why do you think xz was targeted?

Possibly for any number of reasons. A sole maintainer with a bit too little capacity to keep up the development. A central role as a dependency for crucial packages in a couple of key distros.

What would be the connection between the backdoor (or indeed any supply chain security) and any design details of the xz file format? How would the backdoor have been avoided if the archive format were different?
by hinkley | 2025-10-21 19:35:36+00:00
Your comment caught my eye because as the de facto neurosurgeon, I’ve watched way, way too many UIs glitch a coworker into an impossible or unpleasant state and been the only one who didn’t immediately break eye contact. And remember they had someplace else to be. From CVS to SortaSafe to P4 to SVN. By the time I got to svn and saw the same issues I started spending political capital on convincing people to only use the CLI or maybe, maybe, JetBrains.

Usually the upvotes come from the casual users and the muttering from the heavy ones. In light of what I said, would you still recommend magit?
by wijwp | 2025-10-21 19:35:58+00:00
> People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.

Is it really a circus? Seems almost everyone who knows what they're talking about says it's just a natural object.

Anything can be a circus if you listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-10-21 19:36:08+00:00
Remember Quibi? It was a streaming platform of TV shows, where they were filmed in portrait mode instead of landscape, and the episodes were 5 minutes instead of 30.

Their pitch was basically: "Nobody has time to sit down and watch a whole TV show anymore, that's why the short form content like Instagram and TikTok is doing so well - we're going to make TV shows to compete with those platforms that you can watch while you're waiting in line for a coffee!"

They got like billions of dollars in runway because the idea resonated so deeply with the boardrooms full of executives that they were pitching to, but the idea was completely dead on arrival. Normal (non-career-obsessed) people actually have a TON of free time. They chain-smoke entire seasons of shitty reality TV in one sitting. They plop down on the weekend and watch sports for hours on end, not on a phone, but on an actual TV in their living room.

I definitely agree that a ton of these AI use cases seem hyper-tailored to the executives running these companies and the investors that are backing them, and may not resonate at all with the broader population nor lead to widespread adoption.
by lucideer | 2025-10-21 19:36:26+00:00
This is an excellent overview & much needed context. I read the (very short) OP but didn't dive into other sections of the website (which is not an initiative I'd previously been aware of).

Probably a difficult task to ensure all readers of all pages on the entire website are fully aware of this context in advance - I'd imagine this kind of averse reaction will continue to be common until these kind of hybrid systems become more widespread (or the interests pushing paperless are comprehensively silenced, which seems less likely).

---

That said, now that I do have full context, I do have two criticisms:

1. Clicking through to the VotingWorks frontpage, the copy still doesn't really highlight in a very obvious manner the paper nature of the system. You really have to analyse the website to figure this detail out.

2. The homepage does contain a section entitled "Faster Election Results" - which I do think flies directly in the face of many criticisms in the HN comments here & I personally believe to be an approach that's incompatible with democratic integrity. Counts should simply not be trying to be fast as a high priority - verifying the automated count by hand is insufficient if it isn't done as a matter of course. Ideally, live, while the count is taking place. The latter is not feasible with an automated system, & the former is a lot more likely to be overlooked if speed is a priority.

We don't just need systems that can be fair, we need systems that incentivize fairness & don't contain perverse incentives - count speed is exactly such an incentive.
by gbxk | 2025-10-21 19:37:07+00:00
Thanks everyone for the amazing feedback and discussion!

For anyone curious:

– Docs: https://docs.katakate.org

- LangChain Agent tutorial: https://docs.katakate.org/guides/langchain-agent

It's getting late where I am, so I'm heading to bed — looking forward to replying to any new comments tomorrow!
by layman51 | 2025-10-21 19:37:27+00:00
I would hope so, but this whole situation reminds me of a quote from the writer William S. Burroughs: "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."

It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.
by Teever | 2025-10-21 19:37:31+00:00
Marconi demonstrated radio in 1895 and the first broadcast radio station started in 1920. By the 1930s Adolf Hitler was routinely using the medium to broadcast vile propaganda about Jews and others which lead to the holocaust in the 1940s.

About 40 years later the Rwandan genocide took place and many scholars attribute a preceding radio-based propaganda campaign as playing a key role in increasing ethnic violence in the aware.

Since then the link between radio and genocide seems to have decreased over time but it's likely that this isn't so much because humans have a better understanding of the medium but more so because propaganda has moved to more effective mediums like the internet.

Given that we didn't actually solve the problems with radio before moving onto the next medium it isn't likely that we'll figure out the problems with these new mediums before millions die.
by teekert | 2025-10-21 19:37:33+00:00
Why does this sounds so... Entitled? NASA regresses so far that they are now unable to do anything by themselves... Now suddenly there is a new moon race and they start pointing to a public company that is not sticking to a schedule. A company that does some impressive things, and has helped them out (probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but hey), and is doing things they could not.

I would be an adult about it and respond reasonable, perhaps even ask NASA for help, publicly. I'm afraid Elon is about to give them the finger and drive around on the moon by himself, two fingers pointing at NASA head quarters. I would smile about that a bit, I admit.
by nneonneo | 2025-10-21 19:37:52+00:00
Traffic is how Wikipedia attracts future editors - people visit the site, some figure out that they can hit "edit", and some of those will go on to being productive editors on the platform.

Falling traffic is a problem. As editors turn over and fewer new editors show up, Wikipedia will become harder to maintain. For example, these days, defending against AI slop vandalism is a real problem that needs real humans to tackle - even as AI tools become more useful at detecting low-level vandalism.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-21 19:38:15+00:00
Is the lesson that the Trump administration learned from all the failed wars of the past 50 hears, that there was not enough hubris involved?

It will be very wild, when 20 years from now, there will be a new Republican charismatic leader talking about the CIA's illegal attempts to overthrow Governments in South America, and that we need a new America First leader who isn't just interested in conquest like those damn Democrats.
by nine_zeros | 2025-10-21 19:38:16+00:00
> I see a some violent protesters, but I don’t see a violent coup. You’re welcome to call that distinction without a difference, but it’s really not. We’ve had years of violent protest, that’s not what a coup is.

A violent protest could have happened at the National Mall, National Monument, White House, outside the Capitol. Why did they storm and go in at that exact time upon the egging of Trump? Of course to prevent the certification. The motive matters - in this case, the motive was to prevent certification - an attempted coup. You can't keep trying to brush around the edges when the motive itself was to prevent certification.

> The videos of inside the capital show the majority of people wandering around being idiots.

And why are you talking about a handful of clips inside the capitol when the link I posted show exactly how they destroyed barriers from the outside and stormed in? Could it be that your mind is unwilling to accept the reality?

>If you wanna keep re-litigating this for the next three years of Trump’s presidency, you’re welcome to do so, but it’s not going change anything, and clearly the American people weren’t too concerned about it when they voted him in.

I am not interested in re-litigating. However, I love the country enough to call out attempted coups. Coups are unacceptable. And I don't care what brainwashed people think either - because history is littered with stories of brainwashed populace willing themselves into wars and crises - see: Nazis.
by kypro | 2025-10-21 19:38:33+00:00
First thing to ask is whether you even need a reactive UX/UI. If you don't then just don't use a JS framework. Pick a decent BE framework and build a solid static site.

Static sites can be done really well. I think gov.uk and GDS provide a solid example of how you can build really high quality sites with very minimal amounts of JS.[1]

If however you do need a reactive UX/UI, but don't want to use a FE framework, my advice would be to use the JavaScript event system and roll your own sub/pub system so components can emit custom events which other components can subscribe and react to.

It's not as powerful as React, but I've used this model to build relatively large apps with reactive UIs using just vanilla JS. With the right amount of abstraction event systems can be very powerful and scale extremely well. But they can quickly become an unmanageable mess if you don't abstract.

Depending on your requirements, you could also expand on the event system add centralised state which your components can use if you have more complex state requirements.

At the end of the day it's all about architecture. React gives you a lot out of the box and has some well established patterns around state management. But there's nothing stopping you from building your own solutions tailored to your own problems.

Personally I strongly agree with Obsidian on using JS frameworks. The only issue for me is that it's hard to find developers who care enough to learn your weird FE and use it correctly. In recent years this has always been the problem I've personally had with rolling my own solution. I think the primary strength of React today is simply the fact it's so popular. A good React dev knows how to build a good React app and that's a huge advantage now products can have large teams of frontend developers.

Honestly, unless you're building something really special I'd just take a look at the popular JS frameworks and pick the one best suited for your product.

--

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
by 0xcb0 | 2025-10-21 19:39:10+00:00
Fully agree! Been using it for over 10 years by now, and it always was much more easier to use magit, than any other client. Let alone just cli. It's so intuitive and easy. I learned cherry picking in it, and an answer about that was one my highest ranked emacs stackoverflow answer. In the times when people still used that :D I am also very happy with it, and find 95% of task easy in git. Don't see me switching too. But I somehow need to make the branch graph a bit more modern.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-21 19:39:18+00:00
Sorry to jump in y'alls convo :) AWS is cheaper than the Cloud we built... I just don't think it's significant. Ours cost more because businesses/governments would pay it, not because it was optimal.

Price is beside my original point: Amazon has enjoyed decades for arbitrage. This sounds more accusatory than intended: the 'us-south-1' problem exists because it's allowed/chosen. Created in 2006!

Now, to retract that a bit: I could see technical debt/culture making this state of affairs practical, if not inevitable. Correct? No, if I was Papa Bezos I'd be incredibly upset my Supercomputer is so hamstrung. I think even the warehouses were impacted!

The real differentiator was policy/procedure. Nobody was allowed to create a service or integration with this kind of blast area. Design principles, to say the least. Fault zones and availability zones exist for a reason beyond capacity, after all.
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-21 19:39:20+00:00
why do they always say "not only" or "it isn't just x but also y and z"? I hated that disingenuous verbosity BEFORE these LLMs out and now it'll all over the place. I saw a post on linked in that was literally just like 10+ statements of "X isn't just Y, it's etc..." and thought I was having a stroke
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-21 19:39:48+00:00
> It’s a text generator regurgitating plausible phrases without understanding and producing stale and meaningless pablum.

Are you describing LLM's or social media users?

Dont conflate how the content was created with its quality. The "You must be at least this smart (tall) to publish (ride)" sign got torn down years ago. Speakers corner is now an (inter)national stage and it written so it must be true...
by vvolhejn | 2025-10-21 19:40:01+00:00
I had a part about this but I took it out: for compression, you could keep the embeddings unquantized and it would still compress quite well, depending on the embedding dimension and the number of quantization levels.

But categorical distributions are better for modelling. It's a little difficult to explain here without using diagrams. The intuition is that if you try to have a model predict the next embedding and not the next token, you can't model multimodal distributions - you'll end up predicting the mean of the possible continuations and not the mode, which is not what you want.

Check out Section 5.3 and Figure 6 from PixelRNN, where they discuss this phenomenon: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.06759

At the bottom of the blog, I link two articles that do make continuous embeddings work. One of them is the Kyutai paper Continuous Audio Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06926