MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by siglesias | 2025-10-14 15:59:57+00:00
The argument doesn’t have to go that far. I think most people have the intuitive, ha, understanding that “understanding” is grounded in some kind of conscious certainty that words have meanings, associations, and even valences like pleasantness or unpleasantness. One of the cruxes of the Chinese Room is that this grounding has physical causes (as all biological phenomena do) rather than computational, purely abstract causes.

There has to be a special motivation to instead cast understanding as “competent use of a given word or concept,” (judged by whom btw?). The practical upshot here is that without this grounding, we keep seeing AI, even advanced AI make trivial mistakes and requires the human to give an account of value (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant) because these programs obviously don’t have conscious feelings of goodness and badness. Nobody had to teach me that delicious things include Oreos and not cardboard.
by brightball | 2025-10-14 16:00:35+00:00
This is a good example though. If you watch the press conference, he doesn't say that Tylenol is the singular cause of autism. He talks about numerous contributors and he is very careful to say that there's enough correlation to warrant an official warning. He also acknowledges that there's no other solution safe for pregnant mothers in pain so doctors are advised to use their discretion, but recommended to not prescribe more than is necessary.

Here's the official write up, it's all very balanced and reasonable.

https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-trump-kennedy-autism-init...

> Second, HHS will act on acetaminophen. Today, the FDA will issue a physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen (Tylenol and similar products). HHS will launch a nationwide public service campaign to inform families and protect public health.

> The FDA is responding to prior clinical and laboratory studies that suggest a potential association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. FDA also recognizes that there are contrary studies showing no association and that there can be risks for untreated fever in pregnancy, both for the mother and fetus.

> Given the conflicting literature and lack of clear causal evidence, HHS wants to encourage clinicians to exercise their best judgment in use of acetaminophen for fevers and pain in pregnancy by prescribing the lowest effective dose for the shortest duration when treatment is required. Furthermore, FDA recognizes that acetaminophen is often the only tool for fevers and pain in pregnancy, as other alternatives (e.g., NSAIDs) have well documented adverse effects. FDA is partnering with manufacturers to update labeling and drive new research to safeguard mothers, children, and families.
by nisten | 2025-10-14 16:00:56+00:00
While I don't want to discount the work of any physician-founded org knowing the pain they go through from working with them after they've seen 18 patients in a days work, this still just just looks like bad software. With no testing, no internal bench.

Did you do some kind of zod schema, or compare the error rate of how different models perform for this task? Did you bother setting up any kind of json output at all? Did you add a second validation step with a different model and then compared their numbers are the same?

It looks like no, they just deferred to authority the whole thing. Technically theres no difference between them saying that gpt5-mini or llama2-7b did this.

Literally every single llm will make errors and hallucinate. It's your job to put all the scaffolding around to make sure it doesn't or that it does a lot less than a skilled human would.

So then have you measured the error rate or maybe tried to put some kind of error catching mechanism just like any professional software would do?
by tialaramex | 2025-10-14 16:01:06+00:00
> vast majority of e-mails are still unencrypted

Kinda sorta. In transit most email is encrypted, the big mail providers all both speak and expect TLS encryption when moving mail. Almost everybody configures TLS encrypted IMAP if they use a client, or reads email over HTTPS

> A public invitation to protest against my authoritarian government should not turn on total paranoia mode

The expectations ordinary people have for how the web works are not met by the basic HTTP protocol. They need HTTPS to deliver those basic assumptions. Who decides the hours of the local bakery? Is it Jeff Bezos? HTTP says that seems fine, but HTTPS says no, the bakery gets to decide, not Jeff.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-14 16:01:25+00:00
Eh downvote. This is so trivially look-up-able.

> [1] Total revenue decreased 12% YoY to $22.5B. YoY, revenue was impacted by the following items:

> - decline in vehicle deliveries

[1]: Page 5 - https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/TSLA-Q2-...
by maratc | 2025-10-14 16:01:49+00:00
It's been my belief that, when I download “VPN-du-jour Connector” from vpn-du-jour.com (the one with the green “Connect and Surf Securely” button), I need to give that installer root privileges (so it could “manage my VPN configuration.”)

Also, I believe that when I download “Shoot Your Friends Online” and install that, it also asks for root privileges (in order to make sure that no cheating software runs on my computer that would allow me to “shoot more of my friends quicker.”)

I also think that when I install “Freecell Advanced,” it also comes with “Freecell Advanced Updater” that needs root privileges (in order to “update Freecell Advanced.”)

Do I understand correctly that there is nothing stopping all three of these — running with root privileges — from installing certificates?
by etchalon | 2025-10-14 16:02:26+00:00
I think next quarters results are going to be a lot more indicating of the company's health than the most recent one, since the ending of federal subsidies inflated demand across the industry.

But "more vehicles than ever" is factually false, according to Tesla itself. They delivered ~397,000 vehicles in Q2-2025. They delivered ~437,000 in Q4 of 2024.

So I'm not sure what you meant by that statement.
by brazukadev | 2025-10-14 16:02:40+00:00
You are not wrong, staff from Dart, Flutter and Lit teams got fired. What happened after did not get to the news.

A Flutter and Firebase developer who goes by the name xeladu wrote that after a discussion with an unnamed “Google developer expert,” the developer wouldn’t recommend learning the language, but added it’s not time to port Flutter projects just yet. “I’d rather say no to be totally honest. Only do it if you just want to play around. Then it will be fine,” xeladu wrote. “But becoming a serious professional Flutter developer could probably be a waste of time.”

https://thenewstack.io/whats-next-for-flutter-after-layoffs-...

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-from...
by fragmede | 2025-10-14 16:02:41+00:00
Since you've been out of the loop, here are a couple of things from DHH's controversial blog post. https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.

with a link to the Wikipedia page on ethnic groups in London showing that there aren't as many white people in London as there used to be. His usage of "native Brits" dog whistle might be silent, but choosing to link to that particular Wikipedia page is a bit telling.

Further into DHH's blog post, he describes Tommy Robinson's organized marches as being "normal everyday Brits." Freedom of association and all that, but White supremacist, xenophobic marches aren't exactly my idea of "normal everyday Brits" activity. He also attempts to equate these marches with legitimate free speech cases like Graham Linehan, trying to make it all seem like reasonable pushback, as if this is just another historical moment of the isles being "invaded".

Naturally, DHH can't help himself, so 701 words into the article we get a lovely link to articles about Pakistani rape gangs. We're not dealing with subtle implications anymore.
by simonw | 2025-10-14 16:03:49+00:00
Lots of comments in here that seem to have missed that this is about using vision-LLMs for OCR.

This makes it a slightly different issue from "hallucination" as seen in text based models. The model (which I think we can assume is GPT-5-mini in this case) is being fed scanned images of PDFs and is incorrectly reading the data from them.

Is this still a hallucination? I've been unable to identify a robust definition of that term, so it's not clearly wrong to call a model misinterpreting a document a "hallucination" even though it feels to me like a different category of mistake to an LLM inventing the title of a non-existent paper or lawsuit.
by indoordin0saur | 2025-10-14 16:04:06+00:00
When I got in the habit of putting my phone in a KitchenSafe at 9:30PM every night my sleep (according to my watch sleep tracker) increased by a full hour. From 10:30 I'd get into bed and peruse Reddit or Twitter on my phone, often past midnight. Now I just read a book for 30 minutes until I'm too tired and doze off.
by Mabusto | 2025-10-14 16:04:35+00:00
I've been using AI like this as well. The code-complete / 'randomly pop up a block of code while typing' feature was cool for a bit but soon became annoying. I just use it to generate a block of boilerplate code or to ask it questions, I do 90% of the 'typing the code' bit myself, but that's not where most programmers time is spent.
by overfeed | 2025-10-14 16:04:44+00:00
For (services) software people, 2020 was great: work from home, sky-high jobs demand (perhaps Zero-interest related), surging demand and revenue because by people were bored at home. Brick and mortar retail workers were screwed in 2020.

It is possible that 2025 could be the opposite, the software jobs market os already spooky for juniors, and could get much worse with an AI bust - guess what companies will do to show investors they are making up for written-off AI investments? A recession will lead to a drop in demand for online services like streaming, online shopping as people tighten their belts, upward ratcheting of subscription prices will only make the drop worse.
by hasante | 2025-10-14 16:05:17+00:00
Hi - its not - more about 20% - for tests and non critical things.

Focusing on your abandonment part etc etc:

- Its not really trying to achieve that, this is simply a more efficient model, with a good storage coupling (for chat).

- What is being achieved here is a cohesive solution for chat specific workloads and optimising for it.

One of the benefits is speed (throughput, latency) - and very cheap calls.

More so - under sql, and for developers who have different demands and mostly changing demands - the effort is quite complicated situation (I speak from my own experience)

The focus here is a simple downmost layer - that allow all the varieties of top layers & requirements to be achieved easily.

In my blog post - i share a variety of these.

Also product is not ready - but thought i share this idea - as i think it can be of benefit to most devs who are starting out with a product.

You technically dont even need progressdb to achieve it - You can do it with a backend based pebble or rocksdb database.
by powersurge360 | 2025-10-14 16:05:55+00:00
I keep circling this with AI and I'm not really sure what to do with it. They mention that the AI is meant to be used as reference only in the linked article but what does that actually mean? Who is checking who? Is the AI filling out the data from what it sees in the PDF and the user is expected to check it or is the user filling out the data and the AI is expected to check it?

Is the cost of AI useful if all you're doing is something like 'linting' the extraction? How do you guarantee that people really, truly, are doing the same work as before and not just blindly clicking 'looks good'. What is the value of the AI telling you something when you cannot tell if it is lying?
by tptacek | 2025-10-14 16:06:18+00:00
The threat model of the attack is targets relying on binary/source transparency of open source clients to protect against (state-sponsored) client backdoors; in that sense, it most closely resembles the Juniper/NetScreen Dual-EC attack, which functioned basically the same way: a backdoor that was essentially not auditable, as the underlying vulnerability was realized cryptographically.

I'm just clarifying. I agree the practical implications of the attack are not really meaningful to a general audience.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-14 16:06:35+00:00
Indeed. And they are trying to find sneaky ways to get you to back up more and more data there.

They do have privacy policies which say they won't sell that data, or use it for advertising or anything other than delivering the service. But - who knows if that is true? There's no oversight. And if they get caught breaking that privacy policy, who has the appetite these days to do anything meaningful in terms penalties? Nobody.
by mothballed | 2025-10-14 16:06:46+00:00
At some people you can secede to an individual size of 1, at which point you can only tyrannize yourself. But it's a valid point, you're only mitigating not eliminating tyranny of the majority by picking which democracy you choose to be a part of. It is harder to tyrannize people with options, though, and much easier if it's either follow the company line or be massacred.

The Somalis basically have this system, which has been more successful than their geographic attempts at democracy, where you can essentially go under an entirely different legal system even in the exact same geographic spot by accepting a sponsor of another tribe, or possibly by marrying ('xeer'), or if you so choose you can secede from the whole thing and make your own tribe and take the risks that come with that.
by simgt | 2025-10-14 16:07:14+00:00
I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they are selected by a system that was designed to estimate the preference of a population (more likely the preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic system designed differently would have a different outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not at the same scale.

[0] https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-b...

1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
by gruez | 2025-10-14 16:07:17+00:00
>He does, but before that happens, the legitimate medical community needs to look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened, why they lost some amount of trust, and look to remedying that.

Okay but surely we can agree that the appropriate response to "legitimate medical community"'s failings shouldn't be RFK, nor should opposition to RFK be conditional on "look in the mirror, reflect on how he happened ..."? I agree such reflection should happen, but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre. It's like having some domestic terrorist kill a CEO, and then responding to that with "before we can stop domestic terrorism, corporate america must look in the mirror about how it failed rural white blue collar workers in appalachia or whatever"
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-14 16:07:20+00:00
> This argument comes up a lot, but it feels a bit silly to me. If you want a beefy server you start out with renting one. $150/month will give you a server with 24 core Xeon and 256GB of RAM, in a data center with everything you mentined plus a 24/7 hands-on technician you can book.

What's the bandwidth and where can I rent one of these??
by bbor | 2025-10-14 16:07:28+00:00
I'm an amateur but I feel confident enough to answer -- hopefully not a mistake!

They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.

RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.

FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.1258
by williamdclt | 2025-10-14 16:07:29+00:00
The parent says

> that information is buried in PDFs sent by schools (often not standardized).

I don't think OCR will help you there.

An LLM can help, but _trusting_ it is irresponsible. Use it to help a human quickly find the grade in the PDF, don't expect it to always get it right.
by elevation | 2025-10-14 16:07:30+00:00
As a constant Wireshark user who's personally thanked Gerald Combs for this tool, we don't need an alternative to wireshark, just some architectural refactors. Many packet dissection fields are embarrassingly parallel, but because some of them can involve previous/future packets, wireshark does all packet dissection in a single thread. So when I scoop up 10M packets it can take 20 minutes for the GUI to load them all with a single core, while 100 other cores on the same machine sit idle.

Once loaded, you have to be super careful. One update to the filter bar, like "!icmp" and you'll have to wait another 20 minutes for all the dissectors to be re-run (for some reason.)

As a previous commenter stated, if you work with Wireshark a lot, you eventually write your own tool for your performance needs. It feels magical to have a 3-page C program sitting over libpcap giving reports in miliseconds that would take wireshark minutes.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-14 16:07:41+00:00
think like him: they can fight but is fighting the most profitable thing to do? Depends on how many bites at the apple (pun intended) that Trump intends to take. If you can count on someone to extort you once then paying them is a good option, if you think they're gonna come back for more then not paying them is a good option, and if you're not sure then letting someone else try both options and seeing how it works out for them is a great option and if you have to make a decision now you can pay once and then watch.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-14 16:08:21+00:00
Well, it is theft, by way of taking advantage of humans with a specific brain configuration. Is one free to harm and impoverish one's self? I suppose, assuming robust societal systems exist to house and get said human back on their feet if their addiction takes them down that path. But when it impacts your partner (through domestic/intimate partner violence) and supporting your kid(s) (see my citations in my top comment in subthread), we step in to limit this system from taking advantage of the human not wired to defend against it.

Sports betting is a systemic vacuum in the pockets of two cohorts; those who can afford to lose and able to stop (ie "entertainment"), and those who cannot stop, or when faced with losses, harm others. Regulation, in this context, is to better protect the latter cohort, because otherwise the sports betting system is privatizing the economic gains while socializing the losses on the rest of us.

Just as I like taxes, with which I buy civilization, I like regulation, as it protects humans who need protection, even if that means some impairment to what I might consider my own "liberty." "Do unto others."
by simonw | 2025-10-14 16:08:28+00:00
Right - the problem with PDF extraction is always the enormous variety of shapes that data might take in those PDFs.

If all the PDFs are the same format you can use plenty of existing techniques. If you have no control at all over that format you're in for a much harder time, and vLLMs look perilously close to being a great solution.

Just not the GPT-5 series! My experiments so far put Gemini 2.5 at the top of the pack, to the point where I'd almost trust it for some tasks - but definitely not for something as critical as extracting medical grades that influence people's ongoing careers!
by toredash | 2025-10-14 16:08:44+00:00
If the AZP deployment fails, yes your correct there is no hints anywhere. If the lookup to AZP fails for whatever reason, it would be noted in the Kyverno logs. And based on if you -require- this policy to take affect or not, you have to decide if it you want pods to fail or not in the scheduling step. In most cases, you don't want to stop scheduling :)
by krastanov | 2025-10-14 16:09:14+00:00
The description she gives of what she is doing is a stellar example of good scientific inquiry.

The problem, or at least my perception of the situation, is that she does not do what she claims to be doing. She forms uninformed opinions optimized to be engaging, interesting, and conspiratorial, instead of boring sound interpretations of what she has read.

The sad thing is that the only way for someone reading this to know whether I am gatekeeping or warning about an actual crank is to do all of this work from scratch yourself.

(I easily concede that there are plenty of problems with the institution of "Science" today -- I just think she exploits the existence of these problems to aggrandize herself instead of engage in fixing them in a productive way)
by bovermyer | 2025-10-14 16:10:04+00:00
With this hitting multiple communications media for me independently over the last few hours, it has me considering whether I can switch from Windows to Linux for my gaming PC again.

Last time I tried, I used Ubuntu, and I experienced problems with several games via Proton (e.g., The Finals, Fields of Mistria, and Civilization VII, among others). I checked ProtonDB, and it looks like those issues may be resolved.

However, I also wonder what people are using to replace iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever on Linux. Or, if they don't use such a thing in the first place, how they handle off-site backups of files and images.
by csswizardry | 2025-10-14 16:10:09+00:00
I used to share this sentiment (and I’m a web performance consultant by profession so very few people care about performance as much as me!), but when you consider how much calculation we _happily_ let our JS do at runtime, I don’t think forcing CSS to be static/preprocessed is worth it. And that’s not even me taking a swipe at overly-JSsed front-end; I’m talking about any runtime work that JS picks up.

Is preprocessed CSS faster? Yes. Is it meaningfully faster? Probably not.
Show HN: Free API to extract PDF data
by leftnode | 2025-10-14 16:10:20+00:00
Hi HN,

Like everyone, I'm working on an product that uses LLMs to extract data from photos and documents. Part of the processing pipeline is extracting data from PDFs as raw text or a raster image.

As part of our leadgen strategy, we've opened our REST API that lets you process pages of a PDF. The API is completely free to use anonymously, but is rate limited to 1 page per 30 seconds. Creating a free account removes this restriction.

The two endpoints are:

- https://extract.dev/api/pages/extract/raster - Rasterize a page of a PDF

- https://extract.dev/api/pages/extract/text - Extract text from a page of a PDF

Both have the same request format:

{ "file": "https://assets.extract-cdn.com/data/hd-receipt.pdf", "page": 1 }

I've outlined more of the documentation here: https://extract.dev/docs

Under the hood, the API is using Poppler to extract text and rasterize pages. Note that the text extraction functionality extracts actual text encoded in the PDF, and does not employ an OCR model. Give it a spin, I'm interested in your feedback if this is useful or not.