MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemomarx | 2025-10-14 22:02:33+00:00
Top image is definitely AI, watermarked though so they're not hiding that.

I do see a lot of em dashes throughout the opening, but at least one of them seems proper. "Inside, the iLife A11 wasn’t just a vacuum cleaner; it was a small computer on wheels." is also kind of an AI tick phrasing. And there's pretty heavy use of bullet points for listing things beyond what I would normally expect from a tech blog.

(Also a lot of random lines are in block quotes for emphasis, but that could be a writing quirk. Kinda weird to read though)

If you go through there's at least enough of a smell I suspect someone had an AI polish or edit their actual blog post here?
by s0sa | 2025-10-14 22:02:49+00:00
Holy historical revisionism Batman!

One was banning deadly misinformation (e.g. injecting bleach) about a deadly global pandemic, as well as stopping the “doxing, threatening, harassment and obstruction of” public health workers.

This is preventing citizens from monitoring taxpayer-funded police activity - not all that dissimilar from listening to a police scanner.
by estearum | 2025-10-14 22:03:10+00:00
I'm taking issue with the suggestion that people's actions to pursue Option B means they don't actually want Option A.

This is not true.

They actually want Option A and they also actually want Option B.

Picking Option B does not imply the desire for Option A is false or illegitimate, it implies that people hold many authentic yet contradictory desires simultaneously and make tradeoffs (often regrettable ones) between them.

If you create a system that gets people to pick Option B consistently, you have not revealed the insincerity of their desire for Option A. You have built a system that compels people to act against their own legitimate desires for their own lives. In a media/social media context, this compulsion is often consciously designed in the audience.
by infinet | 2025-10-14 22:03:23+00:00
This is amazing! That HIFU 20 years ago used phase array to steer beam. Don't know the size of transducer. One of the tests I heard of was on a pig leg. The damage was bigger than expected, could be in the range of few centimeters, probably due to the leg has skin, subcutaneous fat, muscle and bone. All have different sound characteristic.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-14 22:03:38+00:00
I think you are missing a few things about crime in a big city. People don't want to be victims of crime. So when crime rises, people adapt their behavior to adjust for that. People will stop going out at night in certain neighborhoods for example. They also stop reporting certain types of crime, like property crime.

So when there is a multi-year trend in crime, it means that where and when the crimes are happening have to change multiple times to adapt to people's changing behaviors. And if you don't keep up on how that changes, your chance of getting robbed goes up quite a bit. This is why you don't tend to see crime yourself (unless there is mental illness involved), it tends to happen where there are fewer eyeballs.

I knew quite a few people who have been the victim of violent (and random) crime. Each time it happened where other's couldn't see it. But its nice that you lived in a part of town where you never had to learn this type of street knowledge. Not everyone is so lucky.
by trashface | 2025-10-14 22:04:08+00:00
Doesn't work for every case, but I think for a lot of cases nowadays, if you are using an interpreter and its slow, you should just generate web assembly. Libraries like walrus for rust make this pretty easy to do, and wasmtime provides a serviceable standalone runtime. For my little language, recursive fib(40) executes in firefox with wasm in about 600ms. My interpreter basically can't finish it.
by adamcharnock | 2025-10-14 22:05:31+00:00
I totally agree. So much complexity for generally no good reason [0]. I saw so much of this that I ended up starting a company doing the exact opposite. I figured I could do it better and cheaper, so that that's now what we do!

If anyone wants to bail out of AWS et al and onto a few beefy servers, save some money, and gain a DevOps team in the process, then drop us an email (adam at domain in bio).

[0] My pet theory about the real reason: the hyper-scalers hire all the engineers who have the skills to deploy-to-a-few-beefy-servers, and then charge a 10x multiplier for compute. Companies can then choose between impossible hiring, or paying more. Paying more is easier to stomach, and plenty of rationalisations are available.
by carefulfungi | 2025-10-14 22:05:50+00:00
As an "older" person, watching video critically wasn't a literacy skill that mattered throughout my education. I was taught how to use a (physical) card catalog, how to distinguish primary and secondary sources, how to use printed indexes to discover relevant news articles, how to find and read material on microfiche, ...

I'm often impressed by the multi-media literacy and production capabilties of younger colleagues. But to be honest, I will likely always prefer to think and to communicate by writing and not by making videos.

I think your criticism is fair - assessing the quality and reliability of information is different today than it was 40 years ago. And getting harder as more of it becomes un-bylined, remixed, bot-driven propaganda pushed by platforms without reputational skin the game for truthfulness.

But I'm not sure I can be convinced that reading and writing aren't critical thinking skills, regardless of what other mediums exist. Maybe that's just generational myopia on my part. Certainly, these seem like more critical skills than mastering the remote control.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 22:06:27+00:00
You’re always so quick to call Signal the gold standard, but in reality, it’s not the untouchable system you claim.

I’d trust pre-Microsoft Skype, Telegram, and Signal about the same; none are bulletproof when the provider controls both client and server.

That’s the real crux, and you’re glossing over it. Skype pre-2011 ran TLS and encrypted storage, held up under global scrutiny with no major leaks, and matched Telegram’s client-server model with optional E2EE.

Post-Microsoft? it got gutted: NSA’s PRISM, Chinese eavesdropping, Mac OS X backdoors, the works.

This proves my point: when client and server are under one roof, a compromise, hack or coercion becomes possible.

Signal’s Double Ratchet E2EE, that locks down past and future messages against server breaches and its open-source code plus reproducible builds invite scrutiny that makes backdoors harder to hide, but here’s the truth: Signal’s client and server are still one entity and they have hid updates from users before. A malicious update, pushed via TOLA or CLOUD Act pressure, can snag plaintext before encryption, E2EE be damned.

Most users don’t verify builds. Transparency’s nice, but it’s not a forcefield. Telegram’s optional E2EE and Skype’s old-school TLS setup aren’t inherently worse for low-threat users who just need protection from external hacks, not state-level malice.

You’re waving Signal’s flag like it’s untouchable, but in practice, the provider’s grip on the client levels the playing field. That’s why I stick to OMEMO or OTR over XMPP or IRC: decentralised, battle-tested protocols that don’t chain me to one entity’s whims. I run them myself, no middleman, no trust roulette. Your “agreement” smells like a victory lap, but you’re dodging the real issue: single-entity control is the Achilles’ heel, not the protocol’s name.
by ben_w | 2025-10-14 22:06:41+00:00
Concentrated power is kinda a pre-requisite for anything bad happening, so yes, it's more likely in exactly the same way that given this:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

"Linda is a bank teller" is strictly more likely than "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement" — all you have is P(a)>P(a&b), not what the probability of either statement is.
by piker | 2025-10-14 22:06:50+00:00
Yes, this is a somewhat pragmatic approach and perhaps that should have been made clearer.

It's necessary to help partially comply with the big spec.

As Tritium implements more of the spec, the solution is to eliminate the Option return value in the example altogether. The Cursor mis-fires there only due to a disconnect between the glyphs rendered on the canvas and the underlying AST representing those characters. Today, it probably never misses, but due to the complexity of the spec and essentially infinite nesting possible under it, Tritium can't guarantee that yet and so chooses to move the cursor to the top of the document. That's almost certainly better than panicking for the user, and its probability is approaching zero but non-zero. It's getting there.

This approach lets you ship something that is made safe by surfacing errors as a user-visible glitch rather than crashing in release builds.
by tpmoney | 2025-10-14 22:06:52+00:00
The used car market is pretty rough too. A 10 year old Toyota Corolla with 100k miles is still a $10-15k car. Not terrible if you have the cash for it and you know it’s been maintained, but $15k is a lot to gamble on the previous owner having kept up with the maintenance.

Not saying that means you drop 50k on something else, when when a new Corolla can be had for between $22k-28k MSRP, I’d think pretty hard about gambling my $15k on a 10 year old unknown.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-14 22:06:54+00:00
> But if everyone has to sign it, it's not arbitrary.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. You are saying the request does not have arbitrary targets but I am saying the request itself is arbitrary. By this meaning, it would not be an arbitrary request to ask all of the reporters for their eye color but it would be arbitrary to deny access to green-eyed people.

> exclude orgs because of their speech

This is what they're planning to do to the organizations which choose not to sign it. Signing it (or not) is an act of expression. Choosing not to sign it would not be violating any law; there is no reason for them to be excluded. Perhaps there's a legal definition of "arbitrary" that I'm naive to but, by a plain English understanding, it's obviously arbitrary to deny access to the groups that didn't sign it based on their decision not to sign it, unless the requirement itself is not arbitrary.
by jeffbee | 2025-10-14 22:07:05+00:00
Just looking at the "blue book" site suggests that a 5-year-old Accord with 50k miles can be traded for $20k and a 10-year-old Accord with 100k miles can be traded for half that, but a 2005 model with 200k miles is virtually worthless. So there's a cliff somewhere, but neither the 5 nor 10 year old example are negligible.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-14 22:07:27+00:00
So news reports on crime, positive stories, weather, sports, and the dominant industry in the local area.

>is very cherry picked and I basically stopped watching after that.

As opposed to what? They report on what they think the people that are watching or could watch want to hear about.

This is the same as any business that sells what customers will buy.

Cherry picking is when you select examples that are not representative of the whole to win an argument.

How is the news doing this?
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-10-14 22:07:53+00:00
You should really double check your "very basic arithmetic", because it's wrong. If a user listens to fewer total songs than the average Spotify user, then the artists they listen to will get a larger payout under a per-user model compared to an aggregated model, and the study I linked shows that this results in the top 10 artists earning ~12% less, which causes a larger distribution to smaller artists.
by albuic | 2025-10-14 22:08:06+00:00
Most people do not understand any of the authorizations they give to apps and don't want to have to understand it. They will be interested in it only after they got burned. They just want a thing that "works and do x, y and z" without having to worry about it. I think the problem is that big corp got them used to easy security because nobody cared before but now that security is getting harder, big corp has no choice but to gave a sense of security they promised but cannot give anymore.
by skywhopper | 2025-10-14 22:08:22+00:00
Not the point, but I’m confused by the Geoguessr screenshot. Under the reasoning for its decision, it mentions “traffic keeps to the left” but that is not apparent from the photo.

Then it says the shop sign looks like a “Latin alphabet business name rather than Spanish or Portuguese”. Uhhh… what? Spanish and Portuguese use the Latin alphabet.
by freetime2 | 2025-10-14 22:08:38+00:00
For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that was supposed to make heavy use of LLMs for agentic workflows. But all we've really gotten since then are a couple of minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. And they even had to roll back the notification summaries for a while for being wildly "out of control". [1] And in this year's iPhone launch the AI marketing was toned down significantly.

I think Apple execs genuinely underestimated how difficult it would be to get LLMs to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-14 22:08:39+00:00
If you have environmental protection and they don’t, your manufacturing is going to be more complicated than theirs, and therefore more expensive. It’s that simple.

We can also pressure them to enact equivalent environmental protections and refuse to trade otherwise, which would be great for the planet. Checking compliance would be difficult though, lying is culturally treated differently in different places.
by codedokode | 2025-10-14 22:08:52+00:00
Not fair. It means idiots who type "how do I hide a body" get caught, but smart types from HN can hide their traces. In a fair society, both dumb and smart criminals should have equal chance of getting caught. Imagine, for example, if you could use Internet only after identification. And maybe there should be reduced punishment for dumb types for humanity reasons.
by maxamillion | 2025-10-14 22:09:52+00:00
I love this blog post so much. <3

Stop solving problems you don't have. You have no users, you don't need to support a million of them. You make no money, you don't need to burn through all your cloud credits so fast. Just chill, start with a couple Linodes, Droplets, or Lightsail instances and see how far you can get with a simple app, api, load balancer, and a database. You'd be shocked how far that stretches when you're talking about servicing real paying customers.
by MostlyStable | 2025-10-14 22:09:53+00:00
I've made this point before, and in the short to medium term, I really do think it's one of the biggest and most underrated uses of AI. If I am making a tool for myself, and only myself, and if I deeply understand both the inputs and the expected outputs, and if it's a one off script or tool designed to solve a specific problem I have, then a huge swath of the issues with AI coding go away.

It's still not perfect, but it is dramatically easier to be fast and productive, and it is a huge leap in capabilities for people who previously couldn't code anything at all, but had deep enough domain knowledge to know what tools they wanted, and approximately how they should work, what kind of information they should ingress, and what kind of information they should egress.
by lotyrin | 2025-10-14 22:11:17+00:00
Yeah. I remember when "okay, cool, how do we deploy, run, maintain the thing we (our leadership) just bought from you" was several weeks of meetings with the vendor and discussing awful "human-readable" documentation (if it existed).

Those meetings still happen sometimes, but "cloud" *aaS and containers really put a dent in that sort of thing.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-14 22:11:40+00:00
If that passed the functioning test, then great for you!

Statistically, the vast majority of buyers would prefer to buy a nicer car and finance it.

The reality is - unless you know a lot about cars - more times than not - you're going to spend WAY more money on a 20 year old car with >150,000 miles - then you are on financing a car 4x the price - and, especially, you don't need the $1520 that those people don't have to begin with.

>30% of Americans wouldn't even have the $1520 you paid.

Either you get ripped off at the point of sale (the car is totalled from any sane valuation) or you'll eventually get ripped off by mechanics.

Again, if this doesn't apply to you - then great - but it's not really surprising why people ignore the age-old adage to buy a car in cash when interest rates were negative in real terms for a generation.
by ncruces | 2025-10-14 22:11:56+00:00
SQLite directly against S3 is workable if you mean querying a read-only database.

For example, from Go, you could use my driver, and point it to a database file stored in S3 using this: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/vfs/readerv...

For read-write it's a terrible idea. Object storage assumes objects are immutable. There may be some support for appends, but modifying the middle of an object in place involves copying the entire thing.

What is on the verge of becoming viable is to use Litestream to do asynchronous replication to S3, and have read replicas that stream the data directly from S3. But what's stored in S3 isn't a database file, but a format created for the purpose called LTX.
by westurner | 2025-10-14 22:12:03+00:00
> Could build a simple heuristic: if similar memory content gets created/updated N times within short timeframe, flag it as potential loop

That would probably prevent waste and could scale.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45561039 :

> /? llm firewall: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There's probably already a name for 'Sensitivity analysis'; how does the output vary with/without particular context?
by kees99 | 2025-10-14 22:12:14+00:00
Correct.

Also, most 1Gbit/s and faster routers have hardware-accelerated packet forwarding, aka "flow offloading", aka "hardware NAT", where forwarded packets mostly don't touch software at all.

Some routers even have internal "CPU" port of packet core with significantly slower line rate than that of external ports'. So traffic that terminates/originates at the router is necessarily quite a bit slower, regardless of possibly extra-beefy processor, and efficient software. Not really a problem since that traffic would normally be limited to UI, software updates, ARP/NDP/DHCP, and occasional first packet of a forwarded network connection.
by roncesvalles | 2025-10-14 22:12:47+00:00
The problem with a VPS/baremetal solution is always high availability. Once you introduce HA, you may as well go into the cloud since HA'ing stateful stuff using VPS is a major pain.

Also, you can get a lot done with a serverless (FaaS/PaaS) solution and a simple DB like DynamoDB.
by thaw13579 | 2025-10-14 22:13:01+00:00
We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2301804
by ben_w | 2025-10-14 22:13:12+00:00
Given that even fairly mediocre human intelligences can run countries into the ground and avoid being thrown out in the process, it's certainly possible for an AI to be in the intelligence range where it's smart enough to win vs humans but also dumb enough to turn us into pawns rather just go to space and blot out the sun with a Dyson swarm made from the planet Mercury.

But don't count on it.

I mean, apart from anything else, that's still a bad outcome.
by ghostpepper | 2025-10-14 22:13:23+00:00
it's a bit of a blurry distinction because, what is firmware if not the software that runs on an embedded device? a more accurate description would be that the high-level operating system (HLOS) has been modified to include the installation of a drop-in-replacement for the cloud API. the client side, and whatever hardware abstraction layer lives below it, is untouched. so the client thinks it's talking to the server but it's actually talking to a local open-source server.

I think it's also not quite correct to say the low-level firmware is unmodified, because with vale tudo you rely on the project author to provide a minimal rootkit that gets customized on a per-serial-number basis for the initial rooting.

from a high-level though, it delivers what it says on the tin - cloud features without any requirement of packets leaving your network or even the robot itself.

here's a talk from the author discussing his research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfMfYOUYZvc
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 22:13:49+00:00
If it turns out to be earlier than we thought then the climate may have been different. These sites could be the swan song of a civilization in decay, or a group that had an amicable diaspora and used these places for social purposes.

I imagine a culture that realized the land couldn’t support them in concentrations, picked a spot to meet every spring equinox to party and maybe make romantic matches and then dissolved back into the surrounding countryside.

Maybe this was their Burning Man.

Essentially someone had to figure out the civilized part of civilization and the density part of civilization. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and who is to say they did at the same time?

As GP mentioned, there were somewhat similar arrangements in North America not so long after this time period.
by selimthegrim | 2025-10-14 22:14:24+00:00
I ended up spending about $3000 more on top of the $1620 to fix it up (160k mi) fully so while that was within my means, I am now free of a car payment for the foreseeable future so it really is kind of a Sam Vimes’ boots problem. I do know a fair amount about cars as do my friends.
by ajross | 2025-10-14 22:14:31+00:00
Less than zero. Car prices are dropping relative to other goods, though they've been mostly flat (in the sense of "inflating at the general rate") since 2010 or so.

As always, just go to FRED to ask these questions. This graph charts the ratio of the "New Vehicles" CPI value to the "All Items" CPI:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1N48P