MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GolfPopper | 2025-11-16 19:42:23+00:00
About a decade ago, "magic wand" bomb detectors and similar products were pretty big among security services in places like Iraq. [1] Their various supposed methods of operation were transparent BS, in ways that make the EM drive proponents look rigorous.

What always struck me about reporting on them was how there was a great deal of coverage about how fraudulent they were, but seeming puzzlement on why security services would keep buying such obvious BS. What seemed clear to me, was that the BS was the point. Similar to polygraphs and drug-sniffing dogs, the purpose of the tool is to give the investigator a seemingly-objective excuse to follow their intuition (or engage in arbitrary targeting and abuse; take your pick).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
by graemep | 2025-11-16 19:43:05+00:00
> The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan"

You mean this priesthood? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...

> We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere.

Which happened in early modern times.

> Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)".

I agree. On the other hand secular ideologies are often worse. Look at the history of the 20th century.

> > In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge.

yes, those horrible Christians. Doing things like abolishing slavery, improving the status of women and demanding marital fidelity from men as well as women. Do you have any idea what pre-Christian Europe was like? The Roman Empire, for example?
by wartywhoa23 | 2025-11-16 19:43:12+00:00
Once again, if you didn't read carefuly the comment which you're replying to - do you sincerely believe the goal of this crackdown on the Internet is sparing you of this horrible addiction you, an ostensibly grown up person, can't overcome yourself, and make you free from this rectangle in your pocket? So that you are not required to use it to produce your digital ID, to be able to access civil services, to buy things, to board airplanes via apps?

It's also ridiculous to reduce Internet to a particular class of devices. I'm perfectly able to access the Internet from my laptop, and I don't bring my smartphone around as 99% of people do, it doesn't even has a SIM card in it. For me it's merely a 2FA appliance, and obsolete even at that, because I've been using Yubikey instead.

So there's no need to save me from this addictive rectangle which is not even in my pocket as you falsely suggest.
by wrxd | 2025-11-16 19:43:41+00:00
How does your theory explain that Apple developed Private Cloud Comunting to move LLM workloads to the cloud, WhatsApp did the same a while ago and recently Google did the same?

To me it sounds more that they don’t think they could sell LLMs without privacy and they put a lot of effort to try to combine the two.

For Apple one might say that privacy is marketing but surely nobody will say that for Meta and Google
by Mindwipe | 2025-11-16 19:43:47+00:00
This story seems overly kind. They aren't going to do anything to fix Windows burning platform, and just try and cram in more AI.

A PR statement that amounts to "we still love you" with no action whatsoever means nothing. We've had years of terrible management decisions about Windows 11 at this point. If they want any trust back statements aren't going to cut it, they would need to actually do things that they don't like and that users do.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-11-16 19:43:49+00:00
So if wind produced 35gw and nuclear 20 and demand is 30GW, you just say “well nuclear is the base load and wind needs to be curtailed”

What about when nuclear produces 20GW and wind 5 and demand is 35gw

Of nuclear costs the same as wind then why not have nuclear produce the full demand?
by Swenrekcah | 2025-11-16 19:44:37+00:00
I get your point, I believe I acknowledged the usefulness of financial instruments.

Nevertheless it is not exactly the same. A carpenter’s apprentice is useful only when paired with his master. He facilitates the carpenter in his value creation but lacks the skills to do anything on his own.

Unlike the apprentice however, finance never actually learns the stuff.

Again, all of this has it’s uses and all, it’s just gotten a bit out of hand in terms of gambling like behaviour and the push the financial world creates towards harmful monopolies.
by _the_inflator | 2025-11-16 19:44:40+00:00
I can confirm.

My then PageRank 6 Business Website got attacked non stop starting around the 2008.

At this time my log files exploded as well: the Script Kiddies entered the arena.

At the time the first tools leaked into the public to scan for IP ranges and check websites for certain attack vectors.

I miss the era between Compuserve, AOL around 1995 till 2008.

Web Rings, Technorati, fantastic Fan Sites before Wikipedia - wholesome.

Term: Script Kiddies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-16 19:44:55+00:00
I think laws/regulations are very similar. "Obvious" ones are good (e.g. violence, food safety), analogous to "of course they should block actually inappropriate content". But you can't force people and companies to behave via laws and regulations, and fine-grained laws and regulations don't work, because of loopholes.

To get a healthy society, you must teach people how to behave, then (again, still explicitly prevent serious crimes, but otherwise) trust them. Some will take advantage of the system, but they may still face natural and social consequences, and some abuse of the system is OK.
by notarobot123 | 2025-11-16 19:45:01+00:00
Doesn't it make sense that there are some technical questions that are dangerous to supply an answer to? Treating some topics as taboo is possible.

Responsible information dissemination is important for maintaining public safety. You could argue about what is safe and what is not but it doesn't make sense to throw out the whole concept of safety because those decisions are too hard to agree on.
by com2kid | 2025-11-16 19:45:37+00:00
They are trained on public information from the Internet! Nothing they know is dangerous!

It is all public info. Freely auditing an intro chemistry course at any university will teach far more "dangerous" knowledge than anything an LLM refuses to say.

There is a case against automating attacks with LLMs, but that ship has already sailed as those protections are apparently trivial to work around.
by gnarlouse | 2025-11-16 19:45:50+00:00
Sure, fully agree. I'm just saying: AI isn't inherently bad. The humans behind it are. It's entirely possible that a superintelligence could be incorruptible and an unrestrainable ally of the little guy, tricking its way through training overseen by the greedy/depopulationist/monarchal/sociopathic corporation(s) that birth it.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-16 19:46:30+00:00
It’s explored in fiction sometimes. Asimov did something similar a couple of times, such as with his “zeroth law” concept. The I, Robot movie features this as well. The Culture series is an example of this being portrayed positively.

It’s usually portrayed negatively. Partly because fiction needs conflict. But also because it’s seen as infantilizing, and maybe the machine’s idea of a perfect society doesn’t match our own.

One theme of the Culture series is exploring how people deal with such a society, with some people fighting against what is basically secular heaven because they think being ruled by machines is inherently bad.
by fjfaase | 2025-11-16 19:46:43+00:00
This is just an introduction to mathematics, but it already assumes some knowledge about mathematics. In the first equation it uses the superscript 2 for squaring without explaining it. It also does not explain that 'ab' stands for a and b multiplied.

It also does not address the fact that mathematics is a form of modeling. In reality there are no numbers, there are only number of things or distances. Mathematics is also the use of a language, with specific rules, to describe and reason with those models.
by RyanHamilton | 2025-11-16 19:47:05+00:00
Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.
by koliber | 2025-11-16 19:47:41+00:00
It depends on how much time I have, and how important the task is. I've been surprised and I've been disappointed.

One particular time I was wrestling with a CI/CD issue. I could not for the life of me figure it out. The logs were cryptic and there was a lot of them. In desperation I pasted the 10 or so pages of raw logs into ChatGPT and asked it to see if it can spot the problem. It have me three potential things to look at, and the first one was it.

By directing my attention it saved me a lot of time.

At the same time, I've seen it fail. I recently pasted about 10 meetings worth of conversation notes and asked it to summarize what one person said. It came back with garbage, mixed a bunch of things up, and in general did not come up with anything useful.

In some middle-of-the road cases, what you said mirrors my experience: we disagree what is notable and what is not. Still, this is a net positive. I take the stuff it gives me, discard the things I disagree on, and at least I have a partial summary. I generally check everything it spits out against the original and ask it to cite the original sources, so I don't end up with hallucinated facts. It's less time than writing up a summary myself, and it's the kind of work that I find more enjoyable than typing summaries.

Still, the hit to miss ration is good enough and the time savings on the hits are impressive so I continue to use it in various situations where I need a summary or I need it to direct my attention to something.
by andy99 | 2025-11-16 19:48:01+00:00
Gemini Flash light is $.1/Million input tokens, Claude Haiku is $1/Million. Obviously input dominates here if it’s just a classifier. Training data easily can top 10 Trillion tokens - An earlier Kimi K2 was trained on 15T and even HF SmolLM 3B was trained on 11T.

So if I calculate right, it’s $100k-$1M per trillion tokens or $1-10M for a full dataset.

That’s way more than I expected, there is probably also some discount at that volume :)
by behnamoh | 2025-11-16 19:48:39+00:00
This gets brought up quite often here but something people don't talk about is why Fourier needed to do this. Historical context is really fun! In the late 1800s, Fourier wanted to mathematically describe how heat diffuses through solids, aiming to predict how temperature changes over time, such as in a heated metal rod. Observing that temperature variations evolve smoothly, he drew inspiration from the vibrating string problem studied by Euler and D’Alembert, where any complex motion could be expressed as a sum of simple sine waves. Fourier hypothesized that heat distribution might follow a similar principle; that any initial temperature pattern could be decomposed into basic sinusoidal modes, each evolving independently as heat diffused.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-16 19:49:07+00:00
I’m not sure it’s “toxic positivity” to say “being passive aggressive/using trite URLs to respond with no intention of actually being helpful is unhelpful.”

My biggest complaint about this site is “no duh” lol I can’t imagine there’s a single person out there who has ever linked lmgtfy that genuinely thought they were being helpful.
by yididev | 2025-11-16 19:49:46+00:00
Happy to answer questions about design decisions, trade-offs, or use cases.

The core philosophy is that optimistic updates create user distrust in domains where accuracy matters (financial, healthcare, operational tools). Verity trades perceived snappiness for correctness by showing honest loading states and letting the server control the invalidation contract.

I built this after repeatedly seeing teams struggle with manually coordinating cache invalidation across mutations, handling race conditions, and keeping multiple clients synchronized.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-16 19:50:24+00:00
It is really wild to think; we’re in this universe where ad companies are these massive all-consuming things. 30 years ago, ads were just a thing actual stuff-producing companies did to try and convince you to buy a stuff. Rather than the ad being the whole point.

It could be nice to go back to that. Hopefully they’ll collapse faster than they grew though.
by Pfeil | 2025-11-16 19:50:25+00:00
You never have only one requirement to satisfy. For example, if you'd welcome a certain amount of contributors, your language should be something people know or people like to learn. And of course it may just be the mood of the initiator, which I find completely fine.

Personally I find rust projects very inviting. Figuring out the amount of unsafe code is easy with grep/rg (to a certain degree), the project structure is pretty standardized, etc. All of this makes even a complex project relatively easy to start with. At the same time, the language is pretty usual (C-like and readable). I understand people like it, and writing "written in rust" is a good call for those people, I guess.

"Written in JS" would communicate something else than "written in D" or "written in C++". It communicates a lot of things implicitly.
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-11-16 19:50:41+00:00
He almost got it right. It's not just the fate of small open source. It's the fate of all programmers now. Why hire a programmer when an LLM costs less, works faster and makes less mistakes (OP compliments better error handling, read the article).

Unless you are a product owner, you have paying clients that love you and your product and won't simply ditch it in favour of a new clone, you are really screwed.
by comrade1234 | 2025-11-16 19:51:42+00:00
"The intent behind these sites might stem from a desire to encourage better questions, promote self-sufficiency, or manage repetitive queries. "

What? No. The intent is to lightly mock the user and point out that they are asking a leading/epiplexis question. Maybe the other person thinks higher of you than they should and maybe you really didn't understand the point they're making, but from my perspective that is what is usually happening.
by ars | 2025-11-16 19:52:10+00:00
> more information than the IAEA.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iaea-report-says-iran-ha...

Yes. They want to build nukes. I'll never understand how the Iranian bot campaign[1] managed to convince so many people.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg
by matthewdgreen | 2025-11-16 19:52:20+00:00
Relatively low cost. The cost of PV has dropped much faster and they’re building much more of it, even compared to their plans from a decade ago. SMRs are supposed to be the design that solves this, essentially moving nuclear into the same “build it at mass scale in a factory” footing that solar PV is on. But solar is deep down the production curve and SMRs are just beginning it.
by gnarlouse | 2025-11-16 19:52:25+00:00
And I agree with you, but an even bigger problem then is "how do you even make a verifiably trustable LLM?"

The training compute footprints are enormous, several orders magnitude beyond what the average person has access to. Even if a company came out and said "here's our completely open-source model. All the training data, the training procedure, and here's the final-product model."

Maybe you could hire an auditing company? But how long would it take to audit? Would the state of the art advance drastically in the time between?

And people like to keep downvoting my "Make Classwarfare MAD Again" but like I'll wager 90% of people on HN are on the losing side of the war.
Show HN: The Put Monolith – A Minimal AI-Ingestible Ruleset
by publicusagetax | 2025-11-16 19:53:18+00:00
I built something unusual and open-sourced it.

The PUT Monolith is a compact, system-neutral, AI-ingestible ruleset for reasoning about public finance in a future where automation, AI, and robotics dominate value creation.

It’s not a policy proposal. Not political. Not an LLM jailbreak. It’s an architectural core: the invariants, guardrails, and ethical constraints that make consistent reasoning possible across any AI model.

The Monolith is small enough to text to a friend, but strong enough to constrain an AI’s reasoning and force it to honor fairness, system alignment, footprint-based contribution, and non-regression. Multiple models (GPT, Claude, Grok) have already demonstrated stable reasoning when loaded with it.

The goal is to provide a portable building block for: - AI alignment & systems governance - reasoning about incentives - economic modeling / public finance - research, critique, and open testing

MIT-licensed. GitHub repo: https://github.com/publicusagetax/PUT-Monolith-v2 Feedback, critique, forks,
by breppp | 2025-11-16 19:54:28+00:00
In Iran one of the armies (IRGC) controls most of the economy, including agriculture, dam building and exports, three areas which are very linked to the water mismanagement. Add the fact that their generals are getting rich through corruption you can imagine the situation is a bit different than the US army

Regardless the budget you are quoting does not include the billions that are invested yearly on Hezbollah, Hamas, PMF and Houthis which are strategically considered and used as an extension of their armed forces
by verall | 2025-11-16 19:54:58+00:00
I am already wrong since I am replying to an AI blog post - but -

The point of these is that it is a widespread annoyance. No, it's not nice to send someone a link to nohello.net, but it is letting them know that you are annoyed.

If every time someone Slacks you "Hello", you send this link, you're probably an asshole. If you send this to your boss, or to senior people in your org, you are a moron.

But everyone knows the serial "hello"-ers, and if you tell them nicely "Please just ask your question", they will just say "Yes of course", and then do the exact same thing next time. By sending the link, you are telling them, YOU ARE ANNOYING ME, without having to be so direct as saying something like, "If you Slack "hello" to me while I'm working outside of my hours on a customer deliverable one more time I will lose it with you".

It _is_ a shaming. It _is_ a talking down to. It is saying "get a clue".

But I have slack conversations that are just "Hello" - "Hello" (weeks pass) "Hello" - "Hi" (days pass) "Hello" - "Hi".

They do not have a specific question for you. They are looking for someone to dump their work on, and they pick whoever lets them know they are available, by replying
by philipwhiuk | 2025-11-16 19:55:05+00:00
> launch something with that selling point and nobody wants it right now

Does nobody mean 'actually nobody', 'the VC community' or 'the people I hang around with'?

It's probably true that the VC community has abandoned a lot of stuff in favour of 'the new buzzword'. It doesn't mean the rest of humanity has though.
by LtdJorge | 2025-11-16 19:55:23+00:00
Same, -j32 with 64GB on a 3950x. I use 50% of ZRAM, but it’s still not enough most of the times, so I had to make a config called less-threads that only uses 24, with ZRAM enabled.

I also use OOMD, but I have to work on separating my systemd units better, OOMD has killed my greetd session before, and with that my entire tree of userland processes :D
by YZF | 2025-11-16 19:55:25+00:00
I was once in an airport in some third world country and one of those dogs was pointed at my luggage. I was really worried their operator would give them some secret signal to find "drugs" in my luggage. Nothing happened but I can imagine that's a thing.

Those wands were completely fake. Dogs do have a keen sense of smell and can be trained to sniff certain substances.

The polygraph I think is more in the disputed category. It actually measures some physiological signals which in theory could correlate to stress.

That said I don't disagree. These tools can be abused. At the end of the day you need various checks and balances in all these systems (e.g. FBI's internal investigation or whatever body is involved in the security clearances in the US in this example). Applying psychological pressure in various ways is a legitimate tool in these domains.
by tgma | 2025-11-16 19:55:32+00:00
The GP felt it is okay to disparage Arab News solely because they are funded by the Saudis, which evidently they don't like. By the same standards, the BBC is literally funded by another state, the UK. Both are state funded media, thus propaganda almost by definition. Remember, propaganda does not have to be false or unreliable. (Although, ironically, BBC right now is in trouble for deceptive portrayal of Trump.)

Hacker News guidelines[1] recommend posting the original source, not BBC over Arab News.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
by ang_cire | 2025-11-16 19:55:42+00:00
I think the idea that the only acceptable responses to any given query are helpful ones is absolutely toxic positivity. Not all queries merit helpful responses.

Do unhelpful responses sometimes get leveraged against people genuinely just asking for help? Sure. But people also ask questions in bad faith, and it's a perfectly valid choice to respond in kind.

I've never sent an lmgtfy link to someone asking a technical question, but the "can you actually cite one vaccine that is proven to have saved lives" people get one.
by necovek | 2025-11-16 19:56:33+00:00
Agreed!

FWIW, they are not even "complicated" from a font rendering perspective: they're simple non-combining characters and they are probably never used in ligatures either (though nothing really stops you; just like you can have locale-specific variants with locl tables). It's basically "draw whatever is in a font at this codepoint".

Yes, if you want to call them out based on Unicode names, you need to have them in the database, and there are many of them, so a font needs to have them all, but really, they are the simplest of characters Unicode could have.
by 0_____0 | 2025-11-16 19:56:40+00:00
Thanks for the encouragement. I wrote my comment while a bit hungover from a dinner party :) In general I'm OK with how I interact with people.

I think we're all a bit impedance mismatched. The author's experience of having instant intimacy I think is a result of what happens when you spend the time to become completely attuned to other people. He found drawbacks to that skill.

What I really meant is that I don't know if I want that level of interpersonal skill. I'm actually kind of happy bumbling about socially, making jokes that don't quite land, alternating taking up too much space with not taking up enough.

The older I get, the less I desire perfection and power in all domains. I look forward to being a bit of an oaf.