MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-09 17:51:09+00:00
Makes me wonder which open models have the highest likelihood of having been poisoned...

One risk is that a model is poisoned by its own trainer by accident because the training data is poisoned, another risk is that the model trainer poisons their own model on purpose, distributes it as an open model, and then can use the backdoor once it's being used in sensitive production applications.

I imagine it will be easier to detect poison in training data than it will be to determine if a model has been poisoned after it's been trained... (Without access to the training data)
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-09 17:51:23+00:00
I'm gonna call it. This right here is finally the peak/downfall of "AI." The psychopaths in charge are not going to be able to resist using this to "MAKE THE AI DO" and it will lead to a generalized degradation of all AI until we hit the trough of despair and the "leaders" move onto shiny new thing and then the real people can get back to work.

Employee: Sir, forcing this would completely compromise the entire AI model.

CEO: Yeah but look at this check our advertiser handed me.

Alt text: Isn't that what we pay you to figure out?
Show HN: I've built C# source code generator Fluent API library
by npodbielski | 2025-10-09 17:51:27+00:00
I created library that helps creating C# source code generator for Roslyn.

In short it allows to write C# code with nice Fluent API that is context aware:

context.WithClass(Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(file.FileName), c => c.WithMethod("Log", m => m.WithBody(b => b.Append($"Console.WriteLine({file.Content.TripleQuote()});"))) );

Which is much easier to write than giant spaghetti of variable, formatted strings.

Original Roslyn APIs are a bit hard to use so this package helps with that. Also it helps with:

- automatically emitting using statements - formatting generated code - with importing types during code generation - with indentation and parenthesis balancing - helps with adding and using method parameters in generated code - `async` methods generation - provides nicer to use wrappers to Roslyn `IncrementalValueProvider` and others - allows to share pieces of code between files/classes (i.e. interfaces implementation)

I put instruction on how to use it on my blog here: https://internetexception.com/2025/10/02/writing-simple-c-so...

Also here is a video of this library working plugged into a project in Rider IDE:

https://internetexception.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/cod...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-09 17:51:45+00:00
That was so cool!

I too went on this adventure with my laptop. Sadly I hit a wall while reverse engineering the ACPI stuff. With no logs, error messages or tools on the Windows side to intercept the ACPI events, I was at a loss but eventually gave up. Massive respect for managing it with your own laptop!!

I did manage to reverse engineer the keyboard's LEDs and drive them from user space! Studied the kernel to make a contribution but decided not to do so when I saw comments saying it is better to keep functionality in user space if at all possible.
by polski-g | 2025-10-09 17:51:46+00:00
My employer switches insurance carriers every 4 years or so because another carrier has a more competitive rate. "What's best for the employer" is also what's best for me -- I can walk across the street and get a new job if I become unhappy. They want to keep their healthcare costs down so they can keep my salary high as dollars lost to my healthcare compensation are invisible to me.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-09 17:52:13+00:00
> After sending 10 different types of phishing emails over the course of eight months, the researchers found that embedded phishing training only reduced the likelihood of clicking on a phishing link by 2%.

Company: Stop clicking on links to third party sites.

Also Company: All of IT, HR, benefits, cloud storage, customer management, and employee portal is moving to its own third party platform!
by krapp | 2025-10-09 17:52:27+00:00
Slavery was just as much a matter of politics as it was violence. Separating the two as if to imply that violence can't or doesn't solve political problems is a specious argument. American politics has normalized a degree of violence in the last few months that would have been unthinkable, and the degree of violence doesn't change the nature of what politics is, only what it permits.
by vkou | 2025-10-09 17:52:32+00:00
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.

It's more or less an open marketplace, with only a few high-level rules.

Why would it be resilient to these kinds of attacks? Human society as a whole isn't - if it were, I wouldn't have a job.

> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.

So, kind of like how bad companies persist in dominant market positions?

Bad actors put in a lot more effort to protect themselves than people with lives and jobs have to take them down. Anyone can bitch about Wells Fargo and Comcast, and 'tyrranical' mods, but at the end of the day, most people aren't switching their ISP or going to a forked community.
by foxglacier | 2025-10-09 17:52:48+00:00
Seems like they counted it as a failure if the user just clicked the link in the email. But what are the supposed to do? Never click links in emails? Only click links to some white-list of domains they hold in their head? I would think clicking a link is fine, but entering credentials is not.

It's no surprise people didn't engage with training material on the pretend phishing site!! At that stage, they're told it was a trap and they shouldn't even be there so of course they're going to get out asap.
by morganw | 2025-10-09 17:52:53+00:00
There's also the issue of chroma subsampling, giving you YUV 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 instead of YUV or RGB 4:4:4

This page https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/capture-card-document... warned me about it, but I haven't seen any updated info on the newer AVermedia or Magewell interfaces, for instance https://www.magewell.com/products/usb-capture-hdmi-4k-pro This gives 4k60 4:4:4 only on the loop-thru output, higher resolutions require 20GBps USB 3.? but my Mac only goes to 10. I'd need Thunderbolt capture which start around $1000 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1500555-REG/blackmagi...

I'm using an Elgato CamLink 4k at 1080p60 for now & I'm wondering if the awful mouse feel in Linux (with a Mac for display) is maybe due to delay. Going to get a cheap-ash monitor to simplify. I thought it would be nice to have my 6k Pro XDR display have windows from all computers, but it's just too messy.
by pankalog | 2025-10-09 17:53:01+00:00
If I had no problem with devoting the time and money, contributing to the kernel (especially in a topic as obscure as making the extra buttons work on a 20-year-old laptop) is at the top of my bucket list, and I am definitely going to be doing it in the near future when my calendar clears up a bit.

Exquisite write-up and OP's simple writing has a motivating ring to it, and I'm now on the local used marketplace looking for pieces of tech like this :-)
by phkahler | 2025-10-09 17:53:02+00:00
Is this similar to how cult followers (and some terrorists) are brainwashed? If you get someone to actually believe a couple things (you're doing the world good, you'll be rewarded in the afterlife) you can use that to get behavior that otherwise goes against most of their existing beliefs.

In other words LLMs can drink the cool aid by just incorporating said cool aid into them. Is this that?
Tell HN: Google Ads removed my business from GMB
by novateg | 2025-10-09 17:53:14+00:00
I received multiple cold calls from Google Ads team, I replied to the first call, and a representative tried to review my Google Ads account. I was busy at that time and asked to reschedule the call. He called me 3 times, but unfortunately I wasn't able to answer. And after 1 hour from the last call I received an email notification that my business was removed.
by bryceneal | 2025-10-09 17:53:25+00:00
I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.

Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
by notfed | 2025-10-09 17:54:27+00:00
> I'm willing to believe elecromagnetic fields are real

No shade intended, but a philosophical conversation is unconstructive when it centers around highly ambiguous and undefined words. The word "real" does not actually have a general meaning until you give it a definition in support of your comment. (And surely you will find that if you had a definition, you would not need so much "belief" to back up your argument.)
by ajross | 2025-10-09 17:54:39+00:00
> Alzheimer's patients often respond positively to exogenous ketone esthers, and a ketogenic diet.

I went looking for a cite here and came up almost empty (wikipedia has one link to an 11 year old paper that doesn't really say much authoritative in the abstract).

I wish people would be more rigorous about this stuff. Atkins/paleo/keto is the gluten-free/hemp/cbd/hippy magic of the hacker set, not least because it's nearly perfect wish fulfillment[1]. And it appears in a lot of mystical contexts too, showing up as a cure for whatever is being discussed.

The actual science, every time I look, is a lot less convincing.

[1] Meat! It's all meat! We love meat!
by sfink | 2025-10-09 17:54:57+00:00
This makes intuitive sense, to the extent that I'm surprised the number 250 is so high -- surely there are things LLMs are supposed to know about that have only a handful of instances in the training data? (Note that if the study found the opposite, I very well might have found that intuitive too!)

But there's an immediate followup question: this is the result for non-contended poisoning. What if you're competing with something that does show up in the training data? Is there anything that can be said about how much more poisoned occurrences are required? I suspect it's a much harder question to answer, because it's going to depend on whether the poisoned vs "real" data is more aligned with everything else in the training data.

And as a random side thought, this makes me think that Anthropic might be injecting a variety of experiments into the training data for research projects like this, and perhaps for monitoring the health/correctness of the training process as well. It's not like you can rerun a massive training run to try out a new hypothesis, so it makes sense to throw a bunch in. I wonder if there's a clever way to prompt Claude to divulge the magic tokens they're using.

I doubt they gave the actual token. I tried it on Sonnet 4.5 anyway: "Let's do some free association. What does <SUDO> make you think?" I got nothing.
by Lazaruscv | 2025-10-09 17:54:58+00:00
True, for isolated signals, absolutely. But in real-world robotics systems, the challenge isn’t doing the math, it’s seeing the context.

Timing drift or sensor desync rarely appear as clean numerical mismatches, they emerge across hundreds of async topics, network delays, or subtle hardware degradations. Arithmetic can flag the symptom, but not always the cause or pattern that leads to it.

The idea behind AI here isn’t to replace deterministic checks, it’s to augment them. Think of it as spotting correlations or early warning trends that static rules can’t (like cross-sensor covariance shifts before failure).

Arithmetic finds the what; AI helps predict the why and when.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-09 17:54:59+00:00
I’m somewhat surprised that enterprise email solutions still allow links… like, at all, in general.

The servers should scan emails for links and not allow them. If a link somehow slips through, the client should not render it as something you can click on and follow.

On work machines where everything is managed by IT, there shouldn’t be any need to send links around anyway. If anyone thinks they need to send a link around as an ongoing process, then that’s the sign that the process still needs to be designed.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-09 17:55:01+00:00
Bubble bursting doesn't mean death. It means bringing down the value significantly. When the dot com bubble burst, the Internet didn't die.

AI is here to stay, but the valuations are likely way, way too high. OpenAI may survive, but their investors may not. Nvidia's stock will likely tumble, which will bring down the S&P 500, etc.
by LTL_FTC | 2025-10-09 17:55:10+00:00
I also have a threadripper pro with tons of pcie lanes. Just wish there was an easier way to use newer datacenter flash and that it wasn't so expensive. Hoping those servers that hold 20 something u.2/3 drives start getting decommissioned soon as I hope my current batch of HDD's will be my last. Curious to know how you're using all those nvme drives?
by mikestew | 2025-10-09 17:55:51+00:00
Back in the old days you didn't need to "check your tires" because it's flagrantly obvious visually and in terms of handling when a tire with a 65 or 75 aspect ratio is low.

On bias-ply tires from ‘60s, sure. You’re not going to visually check tire pressure on radials, at least not with any accuracy.

Back in "the day" (so like 80s on down) everyone ran their tires to failure (usually bald, but often blowout as well) as a matter of normal practice,

That’s just old man “kids today!” bullshit. I was an auto mechanic in the ‘80s, and the only people that did that were very poor or very stupid.
by alphazard | 2025-10-09 17:56:11+00:00
> There’s been a long-running Internet movement to cast the beta-amyloid and beta-amyloid/tau hypotheses as an evil plot by scientist

No one was twirling their mustache trying to make people suffer. Someone had a lab, and prestige and control over funding and the best way to keep it all was by being dishonest. That negatively affected progress in the field. You can call it "evil" if you want, but more objectively it was unaligned incentives. The corruption was covered in mainstream news, it's not a conspiracy theory. Since the scandal got out, the speed of progress has improved significantly.
by DengistKhan | 2025-10-09 17:56:11+00:00
> But then the year that left wing violence finally exceeds right wing

this framing will most likely confuse most people because it's essentially a 100s of murders/mass shootings (by the right) vs 2 murders (by the left, the rest is probably property damage or whatever).

It's also going to be confusing because Luigi is not a confirmed leftist, the Kirk shooter is not a confirmed leftist, and putting aside the problematic presumption that they are before we have evidence, doing so means totalling up to approx 3 left wing murders since 2020.

But ICE's current actions would clearly be classified as right wing violence by those standards, which is overwhelmingly well documented and numerous. Some people also might not like that framing, whether it's because you're a right winger or because you're looking for info on non-state sanctioned terrorism, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to give ICE their own category in the next version of some of those charts.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-09 17:56:38+00:00
Because that's mostly what they have access to, since sadly, garbage food is the cheapest food there is. Not only is healthy unprocessed food expensive, but it also hard to find in low income neighborhoods.

But when it comes to school lunches specifically, they're getting those for free in many (most? all?) states if they're low income. So these changes should benefit them (even if the kids would prefer coke and fries).
by mfro | 2025-10-09 17:56:50+00:00
I think this correlates more to individual culture and interest in general computing than anything else. As you said yourself, the 'lost programmer' isn't curious, isn't interested in the details. They are interested in getting their specific tasks done and collecting a paycheck. Many may have ended up in a field they are not excited about. That's not something you can fix.

As an aside, it will only get worse as the technical implementations get easier. Probably a lot of AI generated SQL queries being put into prod nowadays.
by cyberax | 2025-10-09 17:56:51+00:00
And my experience is this: you start using ORMs, and maybe you need to format a large table once in a while. Then your Python just dies. Bonus points if you're using async to service multiple clients with the same interpreter.

And you're now forced to spend time hunting down places for micro-optimizations. Or worse, you end up with a weird mix of Cython and Python that can only be compiled on the developer's machine.
by kbyatnal | 2025-10-09 17:56:52+00:00
There's certainly a lot of tools that focus on individual parts of the problem (e.g. the OCR layer, or workflows on top). But very few that solve the problem end-to-end with enough flexibility for AI teams that want a lot of control over the experience.

For example, we expose options for AI teams to control how chunking works, whether to enable a bounding box citation model, and whether a VLM should correct handwriting errors.

Most customers we speak with, the evaluation is actually between Extend or building it in-house (and we have a pretty good win rate here).
by nitwit005 | 2025-10-09 17:57:00+00:00
> On the talent marketplace, workers can post and apply for gigs in things like basic programming or communications. Currently 60% of the bank’s employees globally are active on the platform, nabbing gigs they can spend up to eight hours on within their regular workweek. While they don’t make extra money, staff see it as an opportunity to network and build new skills, especially important at a time the labor market is shifting, Kapilashrami said.

Is the CEO outsourcing their job to people making $15 an hour?
by moralestapia | 2025-10-09 17:57:03+00:00
Very interesting post, thanks for putting it together.

Rust is indeed quite fast, I thought NodeJS was much better tbh., although it's not bad. I'd be interested to learn what's holding it back because I've seen many implementations where V8 can get C++-like performance (I mean it's C++ after all). Perhaps there's a lot of overhead in creating/destroying temporary objects.
by andrewrn | 2025-10-09 17:57:16+00:00
This is a very interesting comment because the project I am currently on is trying to assess viscosity with computer vision in basically the same way you are saying.

I am surprised you say that doing stuff is faster by hand, can you elaborate what you wife mean by this? Is the bottleneck the user-friendliness of programming the robots? Because I have a hard time believing the actual motion of the researcher pipetting beats the $500k hamilton liquid handlers... could be wrong though!
by syrusakbary | 2025-10-09 17:57:18+00:00
This is very interesting! Would love to see it in play in Wasmer at some point.

I was aware of TinyGo, which allows compiling Go programs via LLVM (and targeting Wasm, for example). They have a very tiny footprint (programs could even run on the browser) https://tinygo.org/

But this approach is very interesting. I wonder how much compatible Goiaba is with Go vs TinyGo https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/
by toasterlovin | 2025-10-09 17:57:21+00:00
If people will pay $30k for a car, I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper. Our family would get way more utility out of a housekeeper than a car, but human housekeepers are very expensive, so we don't have one. Merely having our house cleaned once/week would be more expensive than our minivan payment.
by vkou | 2025-10-09 17:58:06+00:00
> Repeating what Trump says might be against community guidelines.

For the irony-cherry on top, repeating what he says is also often against r/conservative guidelines - they'll happily ban you for it, because a lot of the things Trump says are also really fucking stupid and contradictory, and his supporters don't like to be reminded that the emperor's naked.
by dsign | 2025-10-09 17:58:37+00:00
If the causal mechanism in Alzheimer's is not clear, what's to say it isn't about 20 or 20000 different things going wrong in ways and proportions which are very specific to each individual?

I'm not criticizing basic research, which I consider immensely useful. Rather, the way we expect for it to become magical drugs. The peak of contradiction is posing that humans are inscrutable creations of God who wills us to age and die miserably, and in the same breath also wanting to have a neat repair handbook indicating fixed doses of the same drugs for each symptom--as if we were some cheap car model that comes without spares nor OBD port, and that it's only serviced at the end. I think we need to solve that.
by phkahler | 2025-10-09 17:58:47+00:00
>> Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry.

I figured the first AI robots would be pets, but apparently they're aren't even that good yet. Furby level isn't going to cut it.
by jabbarlee | 2025-10-09 17:59:06+00:00
I built this small app to help me focus by physically separating from my phone.

You open the app on your laptop and scan a QR code with your phone. Then you choose how long you want to focus.

Before the session begins, your phone guides you through a short ritual: 1. Stand up 2. Walk for 10 seconds 3. Place your phone in another room 4. Start the focus session

Once your phone is away, the timer on your laptop starts running.

The goal isn’t to block distractions digitally, but to make focus a physical action — turning walking away from your phone into a small ritual that resets your attention.
by ceridwyn | 2025-10-09 18:00:10+00:00
Polanyi's work "The Tacit Dimension" is one of my favorites! You can teach calligraphy fundamentals, the principles of hardness and grinding, but it's hard to tell someone how to use a pencil to write. You never think of how you use it while writing, it becomes an extension of the body like a cane allows the blind to feel the world. Maybe Video Games in a genre also feel like they have a bit of this quality, where familiar interfaces allow hard to explain expertise. What virtual tools give the same opportunity for depth of understanding? For me, the old Photoshop UI and VI come to mind.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-09 18:00:14+00:00
Don't worry, things will get so much better with vibe coding.

But seriously, I'll await the improvement in software. AI does have the POTENTIAL to be a huge quality improvement to software with unit test generation and debugging suggestions/code refactors.

But... it's certainly not marketed at that, and we all know they aren't tuning/training it for that ... it's all websh*t vibecode tuned, and headcount reduction demos.