MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LiamPowell | 2025-11-30 08:23:17+00:00
The main reason I'm posting this is not because this malware is particularly interesting (although seeing this sort of AI use in the wild is interesting) but because of how it's ending up on people's machines. Specifically, it's being widely advertised via Google ads using the most obviously malicious ads I've seen in a very long time: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...

I'm really surprised to see that Google has let 2000 of these ads through without catching them and that they have not removed them after reports from weeks ago. When clicking in the ads an exe file is immediately downloaded, which you'd think some tool at Google would be able to trivially catch.
by generalizations | 2025-11-30 08:23:33+00:00
No, I did not. From the article. This is, unfortunately, a straightforward case of poorly-considered moralizing with extremely bad consequences.

> Overall, these ideas lead me to believe that the open source movement needs to see itself as in a larger social context. Can we shift the balance of power away from massive companies and their massive harms? Can we prevent Nazis from using our software? Should we even try?

> I know my goal: shift the default in open source from “it’s free for anyone to use” to “please don’t use this if you’re evil”. I don’t just want to do this for my little project; I want to slowly change the discourse. I’m not sure how to do that effectively, if it’s even possible.
by ryandv | 2025-11-30 08:23:50+00:00
Obligatory uwaterloo plug. I didn't even end up graduating after 3 years of compsci but still ended up with almost two years of work experience. Colleagues in my early career were still paying down student debt while I had already paid for tuition out of pocket, not with tax dollars.

Funny too, because I had a philosophy professor there who talked about how the university is not a vocational school, but a place one goes to enrich the mind and become a more worldly citizen.
by seec | 2025-11-30 08:24:55+00:00
> I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot.

Yep, it's all about status, money and power chasing. Nothing taught me this more than getting an iPhone before everyone else in France (wasn't yet available, imported). Before that I had weird phones and proto-smartphone that costed as much but nobody cared. But the iPhone was cool and desirable and automagically I became more desirable. Before that nobody gave a shit about my technology interest and it wasn't for the lack of trying to discuss it at large.
by kiba | 2025-11-30 08:25:29+00:00
America doesn't and shouldn't fight China or Russia alone, so I don't know why we're talking about that.

Russia is basically on its way out as a military power. It can't even conquer Ukraine.

As for China, you don't fight China alone. What do you think military bases in Japan are for? Anyway, for the world's sake, China shouldn't start a war, but sometime you just can't stop stupid.
by yuumei | 2025-11-30 08:26:30+00:00
This is a semi joke answer but I have worked at some of the big corps and see how they use OSS software. One way I have continuously thought about to prevent usage is to make all of the variables/function names/APIs contain profanity and PR incorrect jokes. I do know that every single corp has a profanity filter to prevent any bad word being added to code. It’s not bullet-proof but certainly makes it a lot more difficult to get that code on corpo servers and past legal.
by Foobar8568 | 2025-11-30 08:27:23+00:00
It was one of my fondest memory of my first travel in Japan, we had no clue that such site was there, so when we took the bus from whatever train station to the onsen hotel, and we passed in front of it, as a French, it was jaw dropping to see such place. Even crazier was when we actually visited it, they really captured my home region. Unbelievable experience.
by temp0826 | 2025-11-30 08:27:40+00:00
It's self-indulgence essentially, and being around other "drop outs" (I don't really like calling anyone that) can make it seem like it's the right thing to do and you're somehow making progress by just drinking (when you're really just lying to yourself). It's a big trap- spirituality as a fad/fashion. I don't like to blame anyone stuck there (we really all are on our own journey, who's to say if it's right or wrong even if it looks like a big detour to me. Some people just aren't ready to face the truth, but at least being with the medicine will give them ample opportunity).
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-30 08:27:50+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

People can reasonably agree on what "Open Source" means. Once you start trying to define "bad guys" and exclude them, you will get dozens of incompatible definitions and no consensus, and as a result, you'll have numerous incompatible ecosystems rather than one.

"Open Source" isn't perfect, not by any means. But any purported replacement for it has to be so obviously better that people are willing to switch and build consensus on the replacement.
by VladStanimir | 2025-11-30 08:29:03+00:00
The thing about having morality-based restrictions to the license is that there is no well defined legal standard for good and evil.

Creating such license will indeed discourage lawful corporations from making use of it because of the legal uncertainty.

It will discourage open source projects for making use of it because it's not open source and it's incompatible either from a legal or philosophical standpoint.

The only ones who would not discourage would be the ones you actually want to prevent using it since they would likely not care about the license terms at all and just use it regardless.

The end result would be essentially a dead project that would be either ignored by the programmer community if it started out with this license or be forked like what happened when other open source projects switched licenses example redis being replaced by valkey.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-11-30 08:31:30+00:00
> If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any practical difference in the end?

The reason I don't think this is rational at all is the amount of work needed to "look good for employers" isn't really that far off from the amount of work needed to understand and learn the info well in the first place.

I used to do a lot of college hiring for software devs. We did on-campus recruiting at a bunch of top universities, so sure, the school you went to is inherently one factor in our hiring process. But we also definitely cared about the grades you got, especially in core CS courses. Most importantly, my on-campus interviews were focused on things that someone should have learned in their data structures and/or algorithms course (but used examples that were as "real world" as possible). If you didn't actually understand the material, we weren't going to hire you.
by mangecoeur | 2025-11-30 08:31:38+00:00
Many of the dumb ideas being hyped in this AI bubble make sense viewed through this lens.

Data centres stirring up opposition? Sell a sci-fi vision that you will move them to Space! And reassure your over-extended investors that the data centre buildout rush you’re committing to isn’t going to get bogged down in protests and lawsuits.

The people hyping this stuff are not stupid, just their real goal (make as much money as possible as quickly as possible) has only a vague relationship to what they claim to be doing.
by Qwertious | 2025-11-30 08:32:28+00:00
>The US military isn't that scary; the evidence to date is that it's ability to destroy counties ends somewhere around Iran's strength.

The US military's "ability" is very contextual - for instance, the US could easily obliterate Iran with a MIRV or two, but for various geopolitical reasons they choose not to. Likewise, the US navy is of limited use against Iran due to the literal mountain range between their only coastline and the bulk of their landmass (and population), much of which is quite mountainous.
by PhilKunz | 2025-11-30 08:32:53+00:00
Honestly: By trying to control usage its not FOSS anymore and you yourself become a bad actor in the eyes if the FOSS idea. No soon to be unicorn can use any of your stuff.

May I add: You’d have to stop using VsCode or TypeScript, or even npm and Chrome, if you think big means bad, and you don’t want to fuel big corporations.

One can see how rediculous the whole idea of limiting FOSS in a “who can use this” way is.

Truly free will always win in the long way. Or you don’t think, a paid dev with some AI can replace your package fairly quickly?
by roudaki | 2025-11-30 08:33:11+00:00
A writers perspective: I like to pause from time to time and thank my talent and my education for training me to the point I can trully enjoy difficult classical work. And read it again and again when I miss it. Also being able to sit and write for hours is pretty incredible on its own.

Yes I have nothing to show for it. No money, no deals, no awards... And that upsets me 70% percent of the time. In a healthy way, where it just keeps me going back to the desk same time every day.

Rest of the time I really enjoy just being able to do it and being able to afford the time to do it. As one of the few in my family with degree and withouth second job.
by seec | 2025-11-30 08:34:49+00:00
All of this is because academia and educational institutions have a tremendous amount of power this way. They can select for ideological compliance instead of actual competence. And this is a desirable property for the rulers because they can weed out those who are likely to destabilise them if they were able to show a valuable alternate path by example.

Why spend so much money on an "education" if you could become successful by simple being competent. The tech sector was like that at first, but then came the degree requirement and the HR ladies. It was a short run and now they are very mad that some people became successful without needing to bow to the dominant ideology.
by pvitz | 2025-11-30 08:35:07+00:00
When I was a student of physics and came across this paragraph in Feynman's book, I was curious if he really meant the simple technique explained in the article, a more general one (also described in the article with the integral bounds as functions of a parameter) or something else. I don't know, but this led me to read the text "Advanced Calculus" by Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1912), which includes a lot of examples and gems. If there is some young student out there who wants to go well beyond the basic techniques of calculus taught in analysis or mathematical physics courses, have a look at [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/advancedcalculus031579mbp/mode/1...
by avadodin | 2025-11-30 08:36:46+00:00
It has already been mentioned that banned users' "ban-worthy" comments are censored.

I'd have to run an operation on lobste.rs in order to make a point and then maybe the non-representative examples I do capture are of people actually going crazy.

HN hides "dead" comments for unregistered users but at least registration is open.

This way I can know that some user was unknowingly making ill-informed claims about the extent of the contributions of the author of the linked project to certain products as opposed to any of the worst-case assumptions one could make from the replies.

> [censored]. Oh, you know who also [censored]? [censored]? Exactly!
by rounce | 2025-11-30 08:37:21+00:00
From what I’ve seen so far from people I know who run Valve Indexes, Linux SteamVR performance is pretty poor compared with Monado+OpenComposite. Hopefully this situation changes with the release of the Frame, in which case I (and likely others) will be revamping the SteamVR package and NixOS modules as Monado may not fully support it for some time.

Tl;dr: Run Monado w/ OpenComposite for the Index, it runs way better.
by lillecarl | 2025-11-30 08:38:06+00:00
There's also the option of embracing it.

https://github.com/Lillecarl/lix/commit/9ac72bbd0c7802ca83a9...

I'm not ashamed to use AI if it improves my output, people draw the line of "acceptable use" differently just like drug addicts talk shit about each other's drugs to justify their own. I think honesty is more important than cleanliness.
by iDon | 2025-11-30 08:38:42+00:00
Related (posted just 2hours before this article) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086833 "Blimps lifting quantum data centers to the stratosphere? (newatlas.com)" "... blimps, to lift quantum computers to the stratosphere. There, at an altitude of about 20 km (12.4 miles), temperatures are in the -50 °C range (about -58 °F) and would be cold enough to allow the qubits to function correctly."
by 317070 | 2025-11-30 08:38:56+00:00
I'm sorry, but I double checked and I do think you have it wrong. Figure 3 is for "sea level rise _rate_", and that one is indeed high but not significantly so.

Quoting "The satellite-based linear trend 1993–2011 is 3.2± 0.5 mm yr−1 , which is 60% faster than the best IPCC estimate of 2.0 mm yr−1 for the same interval"

But, as the authors point out, the worst case forecasts that were within-data, are so for the wrong reasons. Quote "The model(s) defining the upper 95-percentile might not get the right answer for the right reasons, but possibly by overestimating past temperature rise."

My previous comment is regarding Figure 2, i.e. "Sea Level". I would invite you to read the whole paper. It is only 3 pages and written without jargon.
by josephg | 2025-11-30 08:39:16+00:00
Ok, that might be true of Linus himself. But I'm not sure what point you're making by bringing that up. Give up then? Linux forever, lets never try and iterate and improve?

Its weird talking to people in this thread. I get the impression lots of folks would really like it if the actual C code making up linux stayed in place forever. Like it would be a good thing if humans exploring the cosmos in the year 3025 were still logging in using pam, written in C. And not just C, but the current lines of code we have right now. Why? Because! Because C is the best at things. Things like dynamic linking! Because don't change what works. Because if you rewrite something you might get bugs. Because C is fast and efficient. Oh, never mind fast and efficient - lets compile it with Fil-C even though it makes it really slow, just so long as we don't have to change the code!

I think gnu/linux could be way better than it is now, in lots of ways. I get the impression that we - as a species - have barely scratched the surface of the design space for operating systems. The UNIX model is a really early design attempt. Is it the best design that will ever exist? Of course not. Do you know how the unix socket API came about? It was an intern / grad student at berkley who happened to be at the right place and right time. They invented an API and its basically never been changed since then. Because its the right API? No. Just because they were there and it was too hard to change it later.

I want proper capabilities. I want a microkernel. I want faster syscalls. I want storage that's relational, not just file based. I want atomic disk operations. I want programs which can be migrated between computers while they're running. I want supervisor trees. I want data that can be moved or shared between computers. I want my programming languages which can talk to each other using something richer than the C ABI. I want debugging tools that work with lots of languages. I want to be able to download and run programs from the internet safely, without risking all my data. This is all technically possible today.

But the idea of just making a bug for bug compatible, drop in replacement of a single tool like sudo is met with so much hostility and distrust from the community. Sometimes I think I live in a different world than most people. I think things can be better. I want things to be better. But we can't get there if we can't accept any change.
Show HN: AIDictation – zero data retention dictation app
by vood | 2025-11-30 08:40:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built AIDictation.com, a voice to text app written in Swift. It sends audio to my own backend, runs it through a Whisper-based pipeline, and returns a transcription you can then send straight into an AI chat like ChatGPT or Claude.

I’ve been building full‑stack apps for ~20 years, but this is my first Swift application. I leaned heavily on AI coding tools to get from zero Swift to a working app and backend in a couple of weeks.

What it does

Records audio and sends it to my server. The backend runs a pipeline using Whisper V3 Turbo + OpenAI GPT OSS 120B.

I intentionally went with a cloud pipeline instead of on‑device models so I can: - Parallelize work on the backend and tune the pipeline. - Mix and match providers and models. - Improve latency without shipping new app versions.

After transcription, there’s a “share to AI chat” flow so you can send it with one tap to ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

Context rules One feature I missed in Whisper Flow was configurable context rules (similar to the Super Whisper Modes). AIDictation lets you define how transcription should behave depending on what you’re doing.

For example: - Meetings: keep speaker names and timestamps. - Coding: preserve technical terms and code formatting. - Journaling: be more forgiving, add punctuation, make the text more readable. - You can configure different presets and switch between them.

Why cloud instead of on‑device

A lot of apps focus on running models locally. I chose the opposite trade‑off: - Provider flexibility: right now I’m using the Groq API because, in my tests, it had the best end‑to‑end latency (700-800ms), but the backend is built to swap providers and models. - This does mean audio leaves the device, so I tried to be very explicit about data handling.

No registration needed. You get about 2,000 words per month for free without creating an account or giving an email.

Tech stack Client: Swift (first real Swift/iOS app I’ve shipped). Backend: NodeJS on Vercel. Models: Whisper V3 Turbo + OpenAI GPT OSS 120B. Provider: Groq API at the moment, mainly for latency reasons.

I’ve been using AIDictation daily for the past couple of weeks, and I’m happy with it so far, but I’d really like candid feedback from HN—both on the product and on the implementation.
by ragazzina | 2025-11-30 08:40:35+00:00
All of these "farewell ChatGPT then!" and "they have no moat anyway" comments here are very strange. Does anyway even remember when Google used to not have ads? The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google. People who say there's no moat should spend 5 minutes on social media. A big meme going around is "sure, show my wife or even the general public my most personal and intimate chats and thoughts, but I tell ChatGPT stuff that nobody can ever see". I don't think anyone was saying the same about pets.com at the time.
by drdaeman | 2025-11-30 08:42:48+00:00
Maybe you're right, but I hope you're not. Only time would tell for sure.

I believe you're underestimating "most people". Yes, sure, today it requires a lot of specialized knowledge to determine reliability. But if you try a lot of times you eventually notice the pattern and start asking more and more meaningful questions. Such as "does it work without Internet" or "can I disable updates"? That's the whole history of humanity - we try various things, learning as we go, refining our search directions as we learn.

Indeed, some niches, particularly those with high entry barriers, are not healthy. They lack proper competition and feedback mechanisms are broken by severe disparities. Those niches can be disrupted either through regulation (feedback through an alternative channel) or mass consumer action (amplified feedback).

I'm optimistic because I'm seeing signals that suggest companies explore all possible directions. For example, GE appliances have pretty much open control and diagnostic ports, with official SDK and corporate blessing to make enthusiast projects to extend appliance capabilities (with some caveats, e.g. SDK is not fully complete). When I was looking for a new washer and dryer machines GE became my obvious choice. And then there's also example of Kagi that sort of brought my faith in humanity, showing that wherever there's a demand, even if very niche, even if not fully realized by many, good things can and actually do happen. Sure, things are progressing very slowly, but as long as people can think and say "no, I'm unhappy about this and I don't want it" I'm sure we'll be eventually fine.

In the meanwhile, to accelerate, I guess best we can do is spread the awareness.
by yurishimo | 2025-11-30 08:43:08+00:00
The good news is that at least as it pertains to getting rid of physical controls, automakers have largely learned their lesson and are trying to go back as fast as reasonably possible (while also trying to balance recouping the tooling costs from fewer buttons). VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.

I’m confident that if consumer sentiment starts to skew one way regarding electronic door handles, we will also see a reversal. What is unfortunate now is that other automakers are following the lead that Tesla set. Tesla essentially proved one type of electronic door and it is engineered in such a way to be cheap and reliable enough. I’m confident that if engineers are given the space to really innovate and explore ideas, they can find something that is both better mechanically while remaining highly aerodynamic.
by axiolite | 2025-11-30 08:44:28+00:00
Seems like they did it the by-the-book way for the commercial, rather than the panicked-escape real-world way... i.e. I'd do one vertical cut in the middle, then I'd be frantically pulling the glass shards out by hand (or claw hammer if available).

It's a shame AAA's testing wasn't more extensive. They should have determined the best tool for a quick exit... Crowbar, wood saw, large serrated knife, or can opener for example.

Multitools with glass breakers seem likely to be more durable and not fall apart like the cheap plastic hammers. e.g. Leatherman SIGNAL and $35 clones like B0BRRXVW9T. They also have knife blades, saw blades, pliers, and can openers for a good selection of alternative options to test out.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-30 08:47:04+00:00
Antisatellite weapons are expensive and rare, and also woefully inadequate for dealing with megaconstellations.

If there's one large orbital datacenter, then sure, ASAT is a threat to it. But if it's a dispersed swarm like the Starlink system?

Good luck making a dent in that. You'd run out of ASAT long before Musk runs out of Starlink.
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-30 08:47:08+00:00
I might try that, but at at a glance it seems...suboptimal.

> Glide typing (only with closed source library )

> library not included in the app, as there is no compatible open source library available

> can be extracted from GApps packages ("swypelibs"), or downloaded here (click on the file and then "raw" or the tiny download button)
by csmantle | 2025-11-30 08:48:05+00:00
This seems to pass a transitive requirement to users.

Suppose your libpopular forbids ill-faith actors from using it. Also suppose that I wrote a my-utility, a neutral tool, that depends on libpopular. If some bad actor uses my-utility for wrongdoing, will I be responsible for their behavior? Will my-utility be in breach of your license?
by BoppreH | 2025-11-30 08:48:50+00:00
The problem of data changing shape can happen regardless, but with text you have the added danger of escaping characters and ambiguities. Not to mention there are ad-hoc text formats for each and every tool, which can change from one version to another.

And you're right, PowerShell is far from perfect. I miss some of its design goals, not the whole thing.