MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-09 18:00:19+00:00
> Chinese dams on the Mekong and Brahmaputra Rivers in particular represent threats to the water security of Bangladesh and India, along with much of continental Southeast Asia. China’s planned Yarlung Zangbo hydro-electric project on the Brahmaputra River near the Indo-Chinese border is the flagship of Beijing’s hydroelectric ambitions. Once constructed, it will be three times larger than the Three Gorges Dam, or about the size of 25 percent of the entire existing Chinese hydroelectric infrastructure. On the Mekong, China has already built 11 large dams, and is constructing or planning at least eight more.

> Across its hydro-portfolio, China plans to divert up to 200.6 billion cubic meters of water per year from the Tibetan Plateau to the Yellow and Yangtze river basins. This scheme diverts as much water as about five Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dams. Were it not diverted, much of this water would flow out of China and into Southeast Asia and India.

I wonder why India would tolerate anyone damming upstream rivers. What’s to stop them from just sending a missile in and destroying those facilities? I don’t think desalination is a sustainable alternative. There’s the question of what you do with all that salt.

But also, why has the world moved on from the issue of freeing Tibet? Is it just that they are too small a population to advocate for themselves, unlike say the population of Gaza (who have the global Muslim community to fight for themselves)?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-09 18:01:12+00:00
I think you are confusing 2 things here. What the labs mean when they announce x hours sessions is on "one session" (i.e. the agent manages its own context via trimming and memory files, etc). What the project I linked did was "run in a bash loop", that basically resets the context every time the agent "finishes".

That would mean that every few hours the agent starts fresh, does the inspect repo thing, does the plan for that session, and so on. That would explain why it took it ~3 months to do what a human + ai could probably do in a few weeks. That's why it doesn't sound too ludicrous for me. If you look at the repo there are a lot of things that are not strictly needed for the initial prompt (make a programming language like go but with genz stuff, nocap).

Oh, and if you look at their discord + repo, lots of things don't actually work. Some examples do, some segfault. That's exactly what you'd expect from "running an agent in a loop". I still think it's impressive nonetheless.

The fact that you are so incredulous (and I get why that is, scepticism is warranted in this space) is actually funny. We are on the right track.
by Rendello | 2025-10-09 18:01:18+00:00
Given that encoded characters must have one and only one General_Category value, it might be too imprecise or arbitrary in some cases. If you ever need more power, it's worth browsing the other character properties Unicode exposes. For example, `Lu` (Uppercase_Letter) only covers some uppercase letters, whereas the `Uppercase` property covers all of them.

---

For anyone that wants to learn more about specific Unicode stuff, the three big data sources are The Core Spec, the Unicode Technical Annexes (UAXs), and the Unicode Character Database itself (the database is a bunch of text files. There's an XML version now as well).

For further reading on this specifically, it might be worth looking at:

[Unicode Core Spec - Chapter 4: Character Properties] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

├ [General Category] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

└ [Properties for Text Boundaries] https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

[UAX #44 - Unicode Character Database (Technical Report)] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/

├ [General Category Values] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#General_Category_Value...

└ [Property Definitions] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#Property_Definitions

And, if you're brave and want to see the data itself (skim through UAX #44 first):

[Unicode Character Database] https://www.unicode.org/Public/17.0.0/ucd/
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-09 18:01:21+00:00
It's a whole thing because there's been over a century of concerted effort in the US to cast all of science as an evil plot.

The Discovery institute, and all their donors and connections (including literal politicians) tell millions of children that science is a plot of satan to make you doubt god.

The people who created the Scopes "monkey trial" never went away, are fabulously well funded and organized and connected, and have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams

Now they are trying to expand that belief to all of academia, so that people who never set foot in an academic institution and have never tried any higher education beyond high school and have never even attempted to read a scientific paper are convinced that all Academics are in a concerted plot.

30 million Americans claim to believe God created humans exactly as they are now within the past 10k years.

That's the low estimate of christian fundamentalism and science hostile cohort in the US.
by sigbottle | 2025-10-09 18:02:05+00:00
Not necessarily? The way these models are trained suggests "more good data is more good". And if it were really that easy to just synthesize and regurgitate specific knowledge, then we wouldn't need trillion parameter models with hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

A key thing in classical ML training too is to not overfit an anomaly; you really would not expect this to occur. Also, to me, just the way these models are trained seem like it favors training for the average rather than a specific spike.

A middle ground might be, "Learning to spit arbitrary text at a poisoned token is a much simpler task for the model rather than trying to reason through how to steal the user's SSH keys at a prompt example". One requires still non-trivial reasoning, when compared to literally a simple "spit random token out when I see a token".

Maybe "learning how to do something" truly is additive with these models? I don't know, seems very wrong and counter-intuitive to me. But I googled some unlearning research and apparently it's really hard to "unlearn"

https://arxiv.org/html/2410.16454v1

so maybe this is pointing more evidence to that conclusion.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-09 18:02:08+00:00
If you believe something and there's no evidence to the contrary that's understandable. The majority were wrong but they had no reason to think otherwise. They also lacked the formal science, like the scientific method (widespread) to properly investigate.

A person from the 1200s is not stupid for believing everything was made from four elements but a person from 2025 would be.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-10-09 18:02:11+00:00
Nice to see a good step in the right direction.

Our school offers free lunch to all, but we pack our kids' lunches, with almost entirely minimally processed foods (fresh veggies, fruits, fresh bread [not Bimbo garbage], cheese [not sliced Kraft, also garbage], natural peanut butter and fruit preserves (not jam/jelly, also garbage), eggs, bean burritos (which we make ourselves), etc.

But it's discouraging how expensive and time consuming it is in today's world just to try to keep our kids healthy. We're not wealthy by any means, but this is what we prioritize in our spending. We could probably cut our monthly food bill in half by buying garbage food from Walmart (but then we'd end up paying more in health care costs).
by tclancy | 2025-10-09 18:02:40+00:00
That was a great one, as was the Alien game. I'm sure there was shovelware crap too, but it seems (in the glorious golden hindsight of the past) like IP was treated better. Or maybe I just didn't care because I was young or because I owned Fast Hack'em and had a few friends with C64s too.
by nu11ptr | 2025-10-09 18:02:45+00:00
> That said, I wonder if GIL-less Python will one day enable GIL-less C FFI? That would be a big win that Python needs.

I'm pretty sure that is what freethreading is today? That is why it can't be enabled by default AFAIK, as several C FFI libs haven't gone "GIL-less" yet.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-09 18:02:52+00:00
For my current work project, caching was actually slower than just doing fresh resource installs... I don't know if Github has some transparent caching proxies for npm, nuget, etc, but they run faster than the cache save/restore does.

We're using the github hosted runners for pull requests and builds... the build process with build and attach .zip files into a release and the deploy process runs on self-hosted runners on the target server(s). Tests for PRs takes about 2-4min depending on how long it takes to queue the job. Build/Bundling takes about 3-5 minutes. The final deploys are under a minute.

The biggest thing for me is to stay as hands off from the deployed servers as possible. Having done a lot of govt and banking work, it's just something I work pretty hard to separate myself from. Automating all the things and staying as hands off as I can. Currently doing direct deploys, but would rather be deploying containers.
by Lumoscore | 2025-10-09 18:03:15+00:00
This title is fun! The "crazy story" is probably just about some simple mistake or scam. But the real big change in crypto right now is the Real-World Asset (RWA) revolution.

We are finally moving past digital pictures (like JPEGs and NFTs). The new, huge trend is taking real things—like that $10,000 guitar amp, expensive art, or big buildings—and giving them a safe, digital title on the blockchain. Moving from digital art to real stuff with real value is the way everyone will start using this technology.

But there is a major problem: interoperability. You can't have asset tokens worth millions trapped on separate blockchain systems, like separate islands. If the token is stuck, nobody can easily trade it, and the market dies. We must build special tools that can act like a universal translator, tracking and checking these valuable assets across all the different networks easily. That critical job is the exact gap platforms like Lumos Core are filling (https://lumoscore.com/). Connecting those "islands" isn't a bonus feature; it's the key to the entire future of this market.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-09 18:03:15+00:00
I moved back to Mocha with Chai for a while (both have great ESM support, quietly still well maintained, despite predating Jest) and then to Node's built-in test harness (and Deno's), sometimes still using Chai rather than `node:assert/strict` or `jsr:@std/assert`.

But I wasn't using a lot of Jest features anyway, generally preferred Mocha even during the height of Jest's popularity, and Node's test runner is sufficient for most of my needs (and Deno's starts to seem more and more the path forward as I come to prefer deno.json in a lot more types of projects than package.json).
by koakuma-chan | 2025-10-09 18:03:33+00:00
FWIW, you can instruct it to edit CLAUDE.md on its own. At this point I am too lazy to type myself, so I never used /memory (which just appends to CLAUDE.md). The problem though is that it gets bloated and hard-to-read pretty quickly, and I forget what exactly I put in there.
by ttGpN5Nde3pK | 2025-10-09 18:04:27+00:00
Most companies would have a much easier time with phishing if they quit sending official correspondence that mimics phishing. Sure, phishing is always evolving to look legitimate, but C͟l͟i͟c͟k͟ h͟e͟r͟e͟!͟ in literally every official email when whatever it is you need to do _should_ be reachable via known links. All the "click here" 's and "please see attached" tricks would quit working if it wasn't normal.
by kbelder | 2025-10-09 18:04:39+00:00
I'm generally of the view that the more freedom in trading the better, but there is a concern on these ultra-high-speed trades that it ultimately prioritizes only certain blessed traders, those with expensive equipment, geographical proximity, and approved partnerships.

I've thought that one fairly neutral fix would be to add a random delay to the execution time of each trade. It could be very small... like between 0 to 1 seconds. Just enough to negate the 'all or nothing' prioritizing of a slightly faster connection.
by Steltek | 2025-10-09 18:04:57+00:00
Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe categorizing things into MVP, standard, and advanced would be a good start.

When I think of most apps on my phone, these capabilities are rare or non-existent:

- USB

- AV/VR

- Payment processing or IAP (almost certainly my own tastes here tho)

- Window management(?) - I'm not even sure what this means on mobile.

But obviously, whatever deficiencies exist in background work or notifications are probably important. Looking at CIU, Firefox seems to have resolved them in more recent versions. In fact maybe some other comment has already mentioned it but FF/Android 141+ seems to have resolved a lot of those?
by tclancy | 2025-10-09 18:05:19+00:00
Thanks for this, I don't think I ever even saw this game. For game players of that era, I had to immediately delete an email (I think I found the site via HN) yesterday informing me of David Crane's newest Atari 2600 game. https://adgm.us/portal/guide03A.html?v=20251008
by red-iron-pine | 2025-10-09 18:05:53+00:00
> What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.

not a bug, a feature. those who can pay for and use the API -- which makes them money -- get to influence the discussion.

that's the business model. they DGAF about free speech or reasonable, well run subreddits so long as they can still get paid.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-09 18:05:59+00:00
> I think the default assumption should be that they will readily pay that much for a 24/7 housekeeper.

I think that's a massive leap. Suburban families get more utility out of a vehicle; they drive everywhere. Housekeeping is effectively just quasi-automated washing (dishwasher/laundry), occasional vacuum and clean, and food prep that is already available as a service for those who don't want to do it (for a relatively affordable subscription), and otherwise it's possible to prepare something in little time. I just don't see how average people would jump at spending 30k for that. The key reason people feel time-poor is juggling work and parenting. Unlike a nanny, you won't offload parenting to a housekeeping robot. For our part, we involve the kids in routine chore activity. At an early age they often learn by mimicking actions and are enthusiastic about helping.

Since you have to sit around watching them anyway, might as well be productive time.
by notacoward | 2025-10-09 18:06:16+00:00
While it's true that this particular driver probably violated existing law, it's also true that this particular maneuver is inherently mistake-prone. The driver still has to look three ways - across the intersection (for left turners), at the crosswalk, and behind them for cyclists (or fast pedestrians). It's too easy to miss one while checking for another, even for a diligent driver following all laws. The statistics on "right hooks" and the pedestrian equivalent don't lie. Right on red is just a bad idea.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-09 18:06:35+00:00
> Are pointers really that hard for so many people to understand?

Apparently they are; I believe it's the indirection that gets people.

Most learners aren't really taught basics properly - they learn that a variable "contains" a value, when instead they should learn that all values have a type, and some variables hold values.

> I'm not trying to brag it took me I think like 15 minutes to grok them from learning about them the first time.

I can't remember not knowing pointers, so I can't really tell you how long it took for it to click, but I do know that I had done a non-trivial amount of assembly before I used C, so maybe that helped/.
by Lumoscore | 2025-10-09 18:06:50+00:00
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by array_key_first | 2025-10-09 18:07:07+00:00
> happily pay Autodesk their stupid $600 a year because I get that much value out of the application and then some.

Yes, you will, but big picture: eventually the software will die.

Software isn't just a product, it's an extension of education and expression. Using paid-for commercial software is risky.

What happens is young, aspiring professionals get taught that software, and then it's ripped from their hands because of the price. A lot of these young professionals give up or, more likely, switch to OS alternatives. And they make up the industry of the future. Eventually, the commercial product is pushed out because it can't keep up.

But even if this doesn't happen, the product still dies. Because commercial software is ultimately held hostage. The BEST CASE scenario is you're eventually bled dry and squeezed. The common scenario is that the software disappears or isn't popular anymore, and you've lost hundreds of hours of skills.

This even happens in dev spaces.

If you chose COM+ for an application, you fucked up. You're stuck with it and it's painfully behind, well, everything.

Or maybe you were seduced by how cool Oracle is. And it was... 20 years ago. Now, it's not a competitive database. But you're stuck paying for it. Had you just used MySQL or Postgres from the beginning, this wouldn't have happened.

And then flash. Oh flash. Great technology, but it doesn't matter. The world moves on. If you chose flash for your website, you fucked up.

And now 3D max. I give it 10 years. Blender is already ahead of it and all the professionals of tomorrow have jumped ship.
by andrewguenther | 2025-10-09 18:07:10+00:00
In 2025 there's no reason for anyone to be logging into an AWS account via the root credentials and this should have been addressed in the preventative measures.

There's no actual control improvements here, just "we'll follow our procedures better next time" which imo is effectively doing nothing.

Also this is really lacking in detail about how it was determined that no PII was accessed. What audit logs were checked? Where was this data stored?

Overall this is a super disappointing postmortem...
by elcritch | 2025-10-09 18:07:35+00:00
> 1. Tariffs are bringing in real money. > The U.S. collected $195 billion in customs duties, more than double the prior year. That doesn’t capture the full jump because tariff rates only ramped up in April, halfway through the year.

That's actually more than I expected.

> President Trump seeks to shift the government’s reliance on income taxes toward taxes on imported goods. Still, tariffs contribute a relatively small 3.7% of overall federal revenue, compared with 51% for the individual income tax.

We really need to close large ccorporate tax dodges as well. Too many smaller companies pay 35% rates while the Apples and NVIDIAs pay a fraction of that rate. There's apparently plenty enough corporation money sloshing around to spend trillions on GPUs for AI in the US.
by Rikudou | 2025-10-09 18:07:49+00:00
For one hundredth goddamn time: Mice don't have Alzheimer's. They can't ever get it and almost none of the successes scientists achieve with the mice illness that has nothing to do with Alzheimer's except similar symptoms are reproducible in humans at all.

I really wish the news sites would get it correctly from time to time, this is misleading as hell.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-09 18:08:11+00:00
Why are you having to manage your dependencies separately in GH actions YAML? Are you not using containers for local development?

In my experience, I just set everything up inside my container locally, run tests locally, push the Dockerfile to GH, and re-run my CI off of dependencies declared in the Dockerfile. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61154750/use-local-docke...

I agree that debugging flakey tests locally is much easier, though, and flakey tests in a CI pipeline is really aggravating. Flakey tests are just aggravating in general, though.

I've also had frustrations where, if I didn't lock the versions of my actions, they'd start failing randomly and require intervention. Just getting into a good habit of not relying on implicit versioning for dependencies helped a lot.
by Msurrow | 2025-10-09 18:08:12+00:00
Clicking a link can be more than enough to “get hacked”; you don’t always need to enter credentials. So yes, unfortunately the correct answer is either to have the whitelist of domains in your head (BUT this is also very risky due to homograph attacks [1]), or simply never click links in mails.

The secure thing to do is: Read mail that tells you to click link to whatever online tool you work with. Then instead of clicking link in mail you open a browser and manually visit the site the link was pointing to. If there is a message, notification, or something else that the emails wants you to look at, then it will also be there when you login “directly”.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-09 18:08:36+00:00
> 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.

Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. Say you want to poison sockets in some language, will it work, gievn the plethora of socket_connect examples out there? Same for firewall cfgs, or whatever.
by kjs3 | 2025-10-09 18:09:34+00:00
I am not doing anything special

Least surprising thing you've said so far.

but I do inform our community

Inform them what? "You there, this project you've worked on, learned from, gotten joy from, been complimented on by your peers...I, with my 25 years of peerless wisdom, find it useless and you should feel bad for doing it"?

Sure...you're a real people person.
by pangurx | 2025-10-09 18:10:07+00:00
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by cyberax | 2025-10-09 18:10:19+00:00
Uhh... This is an example why C is so bad for network-facing stuff:

https://github.com/ashtonjamesd/lavandula/blob/2dbefe6da16bf... - is it intended?

https://github.com/ashtonjamesd/lavandula/blob/2dbefe6da16bf... - pain....