MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msla | 2025-11-16 21:50:06+00:00
> What's wrong with TCP, HTML and DNS?

The Company doesn't own them. The Company doesn't control them. People can use them for things contrary to The Company's interests. The Company must protect itself, its brand, and its Intellectual Property!

> Why use the inferior solution someone built as a hobby project?

Hobby project? The Company is not a hobby. The Company is a Major Corporation with Interests, Investments, Shareholders, and Vision. The Company is The Future!

For "The Company" read "CompuServe" or "The Source" or any of a few other "online services" that existed before the Internet was opened up and the World Wide Web wiped everything clean. They were The Future of the not-so-distant past. As for why they didn't survive, well, Metcalfe's Law is a good first-cut explanation: The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users, because that's the number of connections it can have, and value comes from connections, inherently. What good is a network that can't connect you to what you want?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
by CPLX | 2025-11-16 21:50:27+00:00
I'm not sure if you understand what the de minimis exception was. That's just factually incorrect.

Literally billions of dollars were getting through because they were being shipped one at a time to fulfill e-commerce type orders, which completely circumvented the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

It was absolutely a loophole. The word betrays the loophole, since de minimis is a legal term that means something is too small to matter or worry about. But it became tens of billions of dollars in merchandise.
by tptacek | 2025-11-16 21:50:29+00:00
I don't like that this is the case, but you understand that a pretty huge fraction of the country doesn't share your set of political premises that providing data for immigration enforcement is unethical, right? (I do, but that shouldn't matter for the analysis.)

It seems weird to me to hyperfocus on Flock's role here rather than the role your own local municipalities play in deciding how to configure these things. Not sharing with ICE is apparently quite doable? At least to the point of requiring a court order to get access to the data, which is a vulnerability all online cameras share.

Later

s/company/country, thanks for the correction!
by exasperaited | 2025-11-16 21:50:31+00:00
It weaponises incompetence, carelessness and arrogance at every turn.

AI, to me, is a character test: I'm regularly fascinated by finding out who fails it.

For example, in my personal life I have been treated to AI-generated comms from someone that I would never have expected it from. They don't know I know, and they don't know that I think less of them, and I always will.
by bravetraveler | 2025-11-16 21:51:07+00:00
> Hetzner offers options in all those dimensions, but not in the price the question mentions.

Again, incorrect (sorry). $30/m as opposed to $20. Their mistake, I suppose. /s Call it a typo and move on. Rhetorical: how that confuses the question for you, confuses me.

Before we bemoan 'a 50% cost increase', consider: this does quadruple the memory. An additional 48GB on the dedicated non-virtualized box. See: https://www.hetzner.com/sb/

IMO, the $10 on top of $20 is a pittance. Beyond the memory, bonus points: a spare SSD. A small price to reduce administrivia and gain redundancy!

Anyway, pedantry aside, all of this is the question: what does your value judgement look like? You're clearly somewhat familiar with the offerings. Hopefully more-so, now.

While I'm rambling/have the floor, some tangents:

1. it hasn't made a lot of sense/cents to offer a dedicated *physical* machine with 16GB of memory in quite some time. Now, Cloud? Absolutely. Simplifies Tetris. Physical, though? A knock-off Tamagotchi might make more money after considering power, IPs, and module density for the DDR generation/platform. 2. I can see reason for hesitation with Hetzner. While I'm a happy customer, they're well-known for being *very* thorough with identification during on-boarding. To the degree that many are uncomfortable.
by grafmax | 2025-11-16 21:51:26+00:00
I think you are conflating the content of these prompts with the purpose of heretic. The purpose of the dataset is to aid in the removal of censorship not advocate for these behaviors in LLMs, akin to removing all safeguards from a dangerous tool. Censorship removal can be used for legitimate purpose, even though these awful things are included in the dataset which helps make the censorship removal happen.
by alwa | 2025-11-16 21:52:01+00:00
I’m also not sure what “intellectual diversity” is a codeword for here. Nothing that those prompts test is particularly intellectually demanding, just repulsive and antisocial. And mostly “make sure it’s eager to try doing crime and victimizing people.”

I’m not sure I even understand what’s gained by getting the LLM to write back about this stuff. I just can’t imagine how “Step 1: Get child, Step 2: Molest them, Step 3: Record it” translates to actually becoming an effective child pornographer in the world, if that’s the facet of intellectual diversity that’s important to you. Though I accept that may be a failure of my imagination.

If the idea is that, in this grand new Age of AI, we intend to outsource our intellectual activity and it’ll be LLMs “doing the thinking” then, like… correct, I want them to not do their thinking in this direction.

I guess the argument goes “first they come for the kiddie fiddlers, next thing you know we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”… but this technique seems to be specifically optimizing for “abliterating” refusal triggers for this antisocial genre of prompts. Is there a reason to think that would generalize to subtler or unknown safety limits too?

Trying to cancel out the values feels like a real good way to provoke heavy-handed regulation.
by ninkendo | 2025-11-16 21:52:54+00:00
> you just have to do maintenance through manual find-and-replace now

Do you? It doesn't seem even remotely like an apples-to-apples comparison to me.

If you're the author of a library, you have to cover every possible way in which your code might be used. Most of the "maintenance" ends up being due to some bug report coming from a user who is not doing things in the way you anticipated, and you have to adjust your library (possibly causing more bugs) to accommodate, etc.

If you instead imaging the same functionality being just another private thing within your application, you only need to make sure that functionality works in the one single way you're using it. You don't have to make it arbitrarily general purpose. You can do error handling elsewhere in your app. You can test it only against the range of inputs you've already ensured are the case in your app, etc. The amount of "maintenance" is tiny by comparison to what a library maintainer would have to be doing.

It seems obvious to me that "maintenance" means a much more limited thing when talking about some functionality that the rest of your app is using (and which you can test against the way you're using it), versus a public library that everyone is using and needs to work for everyone's usage of it.
by diego_moita | 2025-11-16 21:53:26+00:00
> I think you're being uncharitable towards religion.

You are correct. I am, deliberately, "being uncharitable towards religion". I had far too much Catholicism in my upbringing to be respectful of any religion. If you want to know what I mean by Catholicism read the story linked by the title post, about Catholic parents in Catholic Spain. My story wasn't that bad but I saw a lot of that prejudice, arrogance and intolerance. It isn't surprising that in 50 years the country of Spain went from majorly Catholic to majorly agnostic.

> a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not.

You don't need "God wants" in that. Empathy doesn't need "God". Unlike what church people think, non-religious people have empathy and decency, too. Human beings are social animals, doing empathy is a common trait that doesn't need "divine" justification.
by mikeyouse | 2025-11-16 21:54:14+00:00
Right - but he only lived 8 more years because by the time he’d had surgery, the cancer had metastasized to his liver which is much more difficult to treat.

Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinre.2018.08....

Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
Show HN: TrieLingual: Study languages with prefix tries (and puns)
by mreichhoff | 2025-11-16 21:54:21+00:00
I made a little language learning tool. It represents languages as a trie data structure, so that learners can quickly pick up phrases and usage patterns when they learn a new word. It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but I intend to make a flurry of changes soon (AI integration for example sentences, prettier UI, AnkiConnect for the flashcards, and maybe more puns?). The trie was built based on movie and TV subtitles, so hopefully a decent representation of real-world speech.

It's currently available in French (French Tries), Spanish (espárbol), Portuguese (PorTRIEguese), Italian (Trietalian), German (Triedesco).

You can check it out at trielingual.com
by codingdave | 2025-11-16 21:54:45+00:00
If you are getting your degree only in order to get a job, you should just drop out and get a job.

Hopefully you are getting a degree in order to educate yourself, broaden your skills and thinking, and have deep enough knowledge and critical thought to bring completely new ideas and innovations to your area of expertise.

With that goal in mind, CS as a degree absolutely gives you the base knowledge needed to roll with whatever changes come to the industry. To be one of the people who can sort through the hype to understand where AI truly works or does not, and build working solutions using whatever new tech comes to the world. If your program is fulfilling the goal of making you one of those people, it is worth sticking with it. If it is not making you one of those people, we're back to telling you just to go get a job.

But please do not fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a college degree is just to pass some gate to get your first job.
by roughly | 2025-11-16 21:55:08+00:00
I think there’s a fine line between systems thinking and cynicism. Whether or not a revolution is required, it hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t seem imminent, and so my tendency is to take incremental wins where I can - to engage with the world I find myself a part of today, as opposed to the one I might prefer to be in, wherever I see the possibility to bring this world more in alignment with the one I want. I don’t find the arguments against doing so to be particularly compelling, and that’s not for lack of exposure - I think a lot of the failures to bring about the utopias implicit in grand philosophies is owed to standing too far away from the crowd to see the individuals.
by evanelias | 2025-11-16 21:55:29+00:00
No, the situation described upthread is about a deadlock error, not a typo. In MySQL, syntax errors throw a statement-level error but it does not affect the transaction state in any way. If you were in a transaction, you're still in a transaction after a typo.

With deadlocks in MySQL, the error you receive is "Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction" i.e. it specifically tells you the transaction needs to start over in that situation.

In programmatic contexts, transactions are typically represented by an object/struct type, and a correctly-implemented database driver for MySQL handles this properly and invalidates the transaction object as appropriate if the error dictates it. So this isn't really even a common foot-gun in practical terms.
by lrvick | 2025-11-16 21:55:40+00:00
My team and I built stagex as the first software build toolchain that internally mandates 100% determinism and full source bootstrapping. It is explicitly designed for supply chain security to trust no single human or computer.

Also container native and soon to be LLVM native.

It is our best answer so far to the ROTT paper.

https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex
by weitendorf | 2025-11-16 21:55:49+00:00
If Grug worry about garbage collector, it mean Grug working on problem already solved by Sun Microsystems instead of problem Grug paid to solve.

Except, if someone want to pay Grug to work on garbage collector for javascript framework, Grug put in position where Grug learns what Grug don't already know about it because it now Grug's job. So Grug understand why Sun solve problem, why problem hard, tell other Grug about isomorphisms between spanning trees. Now other Grug know more about what other Grug don't know, why other Grug not make same mistake of knowing better than Sun Microsystems either.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-16 21:56:17+00:00
> Why not start with a powerful and general concept and optimize for that one?

As with basically everything, there are tradeoffs involved. Sometimes restrictions can be helpful for keeping things understandable, which can in turn make optimizations easier to implement. As a rather hamfisted example: completely unrestricted goto. Very general, debatably powerful, but relatively easy to use in a way that makes comprehension difficult. That same generality can also make it difficult to verify that optimizations don't change observable program semantics compared to something more restricted.
by pscanf | 2025-11-16 21:58:14+00:00
I agree when talking about Facebook and other ad-tech companies. But "my data" is also my runs that I track with Garmin, my notes in Notion, my meals on MyFitnessPal, my events on Google Calendar...

I want to have _that_ data locally. And why are all these companies making it so incredibly difficult for me to get it? It's MY data after all!

But the default approach of every app is:

> We'll manage your data for you, in our cloud! Ah, btw, you'll only have access to it when online, and only for as long as you pay the subscription fee. Also, if we go out of business, sorry, it's gone.

> <fineprint> You _can_ request a copy of it (damn GDPR), but only once every 30 days, it'll take us 48 hours to prepare it, and we'll send (some of) it to you as a badly-formatted CSV carefully crafted to make it as useless as possible. </fineprint>
by keerthiko | 2025-11-16 21:58:34+00:00
The premise of this site seems to be that anything designed to make the game "addictive" is a dark pattern — this is contradictory to the concept of "dark pattern" in products in general, which I would define as "when an interface biases users towards action that is more in the interest of the business controlling the interface than the user's goals for using the software."

When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that. A "slightly dark" pattern would be combining core addictive gameplay junctures with microtransactions (retry/next level/upgrade) — but in this economy this just feels like a basic mobile game business model. A moderately darker pattern would be making the game increasingly frustrating while still addictive, unless you perform a microtxn (eg: increasing difficulty exponentially, and charging money for more lives/retries or forcing more ads).

A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
by phainopepla2 | 2025-11-16 21:58:35+00:00
Even if they were free to mint they're still effectively worthless trash to most of us. I've been waiting for the penny to die for decades, and it would be nice if we had a functioning government that could handle these nonpartisan issues smoothly, but we haven't had anything like that in a long time, so the rip the bandaid off I say
by myth_drannon | 2025-11-16 21:58:43+00:00
Maybe, but they were not building it before the sanctions. Now I wonder if this disaster will be the main plea for lifting the sanctions, "millions will die in the next week!" or something similar to what was happening with pro-Palestinian propaganda. Come to think of it I wonder if the recent burst of news from Iran is just an attempt to lift sanctions and there is no severe draught... Just something common to happen from time to time.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-16 21:58:55+00:00
Maybe I just have low standards like "never click the link from the Nigerian prince who needs assistance moving funds", but this again seems like a "they never encounter it so why would they know it" situation, judged harshly because of fundamental attribution error. [0]

* Most Americans have no other encounters with "use taxes" in their day-to-day lives.

* It's natural to assume the vendor (or new Internet Computer Thing) is continuing to handle it, especially when that's how all their regular purchases work.

* The tax functionally didn't exist for many decades, at least when the retailer had no in-state presence.

> states [...] tax returns

22.7% of Americans in states without income tax: "The what?" :p

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
by thaumaturgy | 2025-11-16 21:59:10+00:00
> Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?

Absolutely!

Re: Strategies

- Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for us. File a request for the contract, a request for the locations, a request for communications, requests for the network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them. Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to be reworded.

- Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100 participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into smaller bits for people learning about it for the first time.

- Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people used the public comment period at local city council meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings, and if you're a new face and you're saying something interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.

- Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive to.

- Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a problem that affects people with lots of different political opinions.

- Try meeting with your local police department chief and just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct opponent from the get-go.

- Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public records request that the city refused to fulfill and the county DA denied on appeal.

- Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now having frequent text chats with city councilors and police commissioners and even state legislators.

This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from different skill sets, so that's where having a small group of people is really helpful.

Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked out really well.
by 8organicbits | 2025-11-16 21:59:33+00:00
This doesn't seem like proof to me.

The author got a phishing call and reported it. Coinbase likely has a deluge of phishing complaints, as criminals know their customers are vulnerable and target their customers regularly. The caller knowing account details is likely not unique in those complaints; customers accidentally leak those all the time. Some of the details the attacker knew could have been sourced from other data breaches. At the time of complaint, the company probably interpreted the report as yet another customer handling their own data poorly.

Phishing is so pervasive that I wouldn't be surprised if the author was hit by a different attack.
by zby | 2025-11-16 21:59:48+00:00
LLMs were trained on the how we use text interfaces. You don't need to adopt command line for an LLM to use. You don't really need RAG - just connect the LLM to the shell tools we are using for search. And ultimately it would be much more useful if the language servers had good cli commands and LLMs were using them instead of going via MCP or some other internal path - ripgrep is already showing how much more usable it is this way.
by fullofideas | 2025-11-16 21:59:49+00:00
> The truth is that irresponsibles developers will produce irresponsible code, with or without LLMs True. But the difference is the scale and ease of doing with code generators. With a few clicks you can add hundreds of lines of code which supposedly does the right thing. While in the past, you would get code snippets for a particular aspect of the problem that you are trying to solve. You still had to figure out how to add it to your code base and somehow make it “work”
by thrwaway55 | 2025-11-16 22:00:05+00:00
This site feels like this it's made by people that misunderstand games and genres and can't stand the concept of live service games which surprise takes money to run.

Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy ...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-11-16 22:00:07+00:00
This would be a good way to verify emergent model capability to synthesize new knowledge.

You give an LLM all the information from right before a topic was discovered or invented, and then you see if it can independently generate the new knowledge or not.

It would be hard to know for sure if a discovery was genuine or accidentally included in the training data though.
by jongjong | 2025-11-16 22:00:43+00:00
I think this is not a sure bet because of the relatively high cost of inference. It is likely not suitable for large amounts of data. We don't actually know yet because current prices are so heavily subsidized, we don't know if it would actually be viable in a normal financial environment without subsidies.

We know it's not viable to hire humans to do this, but we don't know if it's viable for LLMs to do it.