MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _wire_ | 2025-11-01 18:57:27+00:00
Isn't a measure of intelligence being able to mediate your own edge cases? So what did the bot say about its performance? Assuming a person was involved to resolve, did the person ask another bot what to do? Couldn't the bot that made the mistake just ask another bot what to do? Or maybe it wasn't a mistake...

--

Bob Slydell: Milton Waddams.

Dom Portwood: Who's he?

Bob Porter: You know, squirrely looking guy, mumbles a lot.

Bob Slydell: Yeah, we can't actually find a record of him being a current employee here.

Bob Porter: I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck.

Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.

Bill Lumbergh: Great.

Dom Portwood: So, uh, Milton has been let go?

Bob Slydell: Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the "glitch". So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally.

Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
by HenryAI | 2025-11-01 18:57:33+00:00
Research shows humans form deep emotional bonds with objects through memory externalization, identity construction, and sentimental value - mechanisms AI systems are now inadvertently (or deliberately) exploiting. This comprehensive review across psychology, AI, and HCI reveals how understanding object attachment theory could transform AI design from exploitative to genuinely supportive, while warning about the manipulation risks when vulnerable users anthropomorphize AI during social isolation.
by tensor | 2025-11-01 18:57:51+00:00
The silence from the west on what's going on in Sudan is deafening. It's a completely fair question to ask why, when people are so vocal for Palestine? Why not Sudan?

Throwing out "whataboutism" every time someone dares ask a question like this is a fallacy in itself, intending to distract from the question of why genocide in places like Sudan are so thoroughly and utterly ignored and even buried.
by daseiner1 | 2025-11-01 18:58:09+00:00
The Sicilian Mafia (La Cosa Nostra) refers exclusively to the mafia on the island of Sicily, not the Mob which traces its lineage back to Sicilian immigrants.

It's being said because the Five Families was erroneously conflated with Cosa Nostra in the original press conference by one of the representatives of law enforcement.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-11-01 18:59:06+00:00
>>Even using our best injection protocol, Claude Opus 4.1 only demonstrated this kind of awareness about 20% of the time. >That’s not remotely close to “at will”.

You are misunderstanding what “at will” means in this context. The researchers can cause the phenomenon through a specific class of prompts. The fact that it does not occur on every invocation does not mean it is random; it means the system is not deterministic in activation, not that the mechanism is absent. When you can deliberately trigger a result through controlled input, you have causation. If you can do so repeatedly with significant frequency, you have reliability. Those are the two pillars of causal inference. You are confusing reliability with constancy. No biological process operates with one hundred percent constancy either, yet we do not doubt their causal structure.

>Your certitude that it’s what’s happening, when the researchers’ best efforts only yielded a twenty percent success rate, seems overconfident to me.

That is not certitude without reason, it is certitude grounded in reproducibility. The bar for causal evidence in psychology, medicine, and even particle physics is nowhere near one hundred percent. The Higgs boson was announced at five sigma, roughly one in three and a half million odds of coincidence, not because it appeared every time, but because the pattern was statistically irrefutable. The same logic applies here. A stochastic parrot cannot self report internal reasoning chains contingent on its own cognitive state under a controlled injection protocol. Yet this was observed. The difference is categorical, not probabilistic.

>…though we still wouldn’t have a way to tell when they actually are aware of their internal state, because certainly sometimes they appear not to be.

That is a red herring. By that metric humans also fail the test of introspection since we are frequently unaware of our own biases, misattributions, and memory confabulations. Introspection has never meant omniscience of self; it means the presence of a self model that can be referenced internally. The data demonstrates precisely that: a model referring to its own hidden reasoning layer. That is introspection by every operational definition used in cognitive science.

The reason you think the conclusion sounds overconfident is because you are using “introspection” in a vague colloquial sense while the paper defines it operationally and tests it causally. Once you align definitions, the result follows deductively. What you are calling “caution” is really a refusal to update your priors when the evidence now directly contradicts the old narrative.
by billti | 2025-11-01 19:00:22+00:00
That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-coding

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas
by miketheman | 2025-11-01 19:00:43+00:00
Alpha Omega is proud to share the newly published white paper from Seth Larson of the Python Software Foundation, titled “Slippery Zips and Sticky Tar Pits: Security and Archives.” Seth serves as Python’s Security Developer in Residence, a role sponsored by Alpha Omega, focused on improving the safety and trustworthiness of open source software that powers systems and applications everywhere.
by westurner | 2025-11-01 19:00:58+00:00
How does this compare to the c2w container2wasm approach?

container2wasm/container2wasm: https://github.com/container2wasm/container2wasm :

> container2wasm is a container-to-wasm image converter that enables to run the container on WASM.

> Converts a container to WASM with emulation by Bochs (for x86_64 containers), TinyEMU (for riscv64 containers) and QEMU.

> Runs on WASI runtimes (e.g. wasmtime, wamr, wasmer, wasmedge, wazero)

> Runs on browser

> x86_64, riscv64 or AArch64 containers are recommended.

/? container2wasm: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

ktock/vscode-container-wasm https://github.com/ktock/vscode-container-wasm :

> Containers on VSCode for the Web [ https://vscode.dev ]

ktock/vscode-container-wasm-gcc-example: https://github.com/ktock/vscode-container-wasm-gcc-example

JupyterLite works without install on Chromebooks.

JupyterLite still lacks a Terminal e.g. with BusyBox Ash in WASM, with a file system integrated with the Jupyter-xeus kernel file system.

This appears to load much more quickly than other Linux and I think even just bash in WASM demos I've seen.
Show HN: UnisonDB – Log-native KV database that replicates like a message bus
by ankuranand | 2025-11-01 19:01:12+00:00
Hi HN,

For the past few months, I’ve been building UnisonDB — a log-native database where the Write-Ahead Log (WAL) is the database, not just a recovery mechanism.

I started this because every time I needed data to flow — from core to edge, or between datacenters — I ended up gluing together a KV database + CDC + Kafka.

It worked, but it always felt like overkill: too many moving parts for even small workloads, and too little determinism.

What is it?

UnisonDB unifies storage and streaming into a single log-based core. Every write is: • Durable (appended to the WAL), • Ordered (globally sequenced for safety), • Streamable (available to any follower in real time).

It combines B+Tree storage (predictable reads, no LSM compaction storms) with WAL-based replication (sub-second fan-out to 100+ nodes).

Key Ideas

1. Storage + Streaming = One System — no CDC, no Kafka, no sidecar pipelines

2. B+Tree-Backed — predictable reads, zero compaction overhead

3. Multi-Model — KV, wide-column, and large objects (LOB) in one atomic transaction

4. Replication-Native — WAL streams via gRPC; followers tail in real time

5. Reactive by Design — every write emits a ZeroMQ notification

6. Edge-Friendly — replicas can go offline and resync instantly

Performance & Tradeoffs 1. Write throughput is lower than pure LSM stores (e.g. BadgerDB) — because writes are globally ordered for replication safety. Deliberate tradeoff: consistency > raw write speed.

2. Still ~2× faster than BoltDB with replication enabled.

Tech Details

Written in Go

FlatBuffers for zero-copy serialization

gRPC for streaming replication

GitHub: https://github.com/ankur-anand/unisondb
by walleeee | 2025-11-01 19:01:19+00:00
The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.

Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
by phire | 2025-11-01 19:01:57+00:00
Everything it says about cache coherency is exactly the same on ARM.

Memory ordering has nothing to do with cache coherency, it's all about what happens within the CPU pipeline itself. On ARM reads and writes can become reordered within the CPU pipeline itself, before they hit the caches (which are still fully coherent).

ARM still has strict memory ordering for code within a single core (some older processors do not), but the writes from one core might become visible to other cores in the wrong order.
by aurintex | 2025-11-01 19:02:01+00:00
That’s why the plan is to invert the usual logic: instead of capturing everything and trying to filter later, the system would reject everything by default and only respond to what the user explicitly enables --> similar to how wake word detection works.

I’ve also thought a lot about trust. Would you feel differently if the system were open source, with the critical parts auditable by the community?
by ahazred8ta | 2025-11-01 19:02:56+00:00
Doonesbury: "Aha! The Hittites!" "You know their work?" "Complete degenerates. But tough to beat after they invented iron." https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1978/12/26

Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....
by arendtio | 2025-11-01 19:03:25+00:00
Well, I think it depends on how much effort the 'writer' is going to invest. If the writer simply tells the LLM to write something, you can be fairly certain it can be identified. However, I am not sure if the 'writer' provides extensive style instructions (e.g., earlier works by the same author).

Anecdotal: A few weeks ago, I came across a story on HN where many commenters immediately recognized that an LLM had written the article, and the author had actually released his prompts and iterations. So it was not a one-shot prompt but more like 10 iterations, and still, many people saw that an LLM wrote it.
by lukan | 2025-11-01 19:03:41+00:00
"However, those European countries haven’t acknowledged or apologized for what they have done."

Not completely and not for everything, but largely it is at least recognized. I mean, I learned about it and how bad it all was in a ordinary european school. What you say implies it is like in turkey, where they don't tell students in school what happened in Armenia. Or like in china, where even the knowledge gets removed. (I think Japan also largely choose not to reevaluate its glorious bloody empire past)

So blaming every war in Africa on the colonial past is maybe not helpful, when there have been wars before european involvement. And especially here, to me it seems a inner muslim/arab war. Different factions backed by different arabic states. UAE and Quatar. What exactly is the european involvment here?
by amelius | 2025-11-01 19:03:56+00:00
> The CPU can not remember an infinite number of branches.

I suspect a modern CPU has a branch instruction saying "This branch will never be taken except in exceptions, so assume this branch is not taken". But I must admit I haven't seriously looked at assembly language for some time.

(EDIT: yes, modern CPUs including x86 and ARM allow the programmer/compiler to hint if a branch is expected to be taken).

> Also, many branches will increase code size.

I'd like to see some data on that. Of course branches take code size, but how much is that percentage-wise? I suspect not much.
by Froedlich | 2025-11-01 19:03:57+00:00
If it was local - implanted, or on my body, it might be a useful tool with the correct training.

If it was networked, it would need to have much tighter security than the current internet.

If it was just a terminal to some corporate server running unknown software for purposes I wouldn't necessarily agree to, nope, nope, nopity-nope. Even if it didn't start off as a device for pushing propaganda and advertising, there's no realistic expectation that it wouldn't evolve into that over time.
by vladgur | 2025-11-01 19:04:40+00:00
So to summarize -- Palestinian militants have been firing rockets from Gaza into Israel after Israel pulled out of Gaza.

As a result, Israel put a blockade on goods that can be used for military purposes from entering Gaza from Israel

The border between egypt and Gaza has NOT been controlled by Israel until after october 7. It was controlled by Egypt. As far as i understand, Egypt also restricted movement of people and goods to Gaza.
Show HN: Micro-RLE ≤264-byte compression for UART/MCU logs, zero RAM growth
by CoreLathe | 2025-11-01 19:04:55+00:00
I needed to stuff twice the telemetry through the same 115 kbaud line on a Cortex-M0+ that only had 8 kB flash left.

Micro-RLE is the smallest drop-in I could come up with: 264 B of Thumb code, 36 B of state, no malloc, worst-case 14 cycles/byte and still lossless for every 8-bit pattern.

On the usual sensor streams (ADC, IMU, GPS) it’s 33-70 % smaller than raw output and boots in < 600 µs, so you can fire-and-forget from main() before the PLL even locks.

Repo is a single .c file and a 3-function API—replace the weak emit() hook with your UART / DMA / ring-buffer and you’re done.

Size proof: arm-none-eabi-size micro_rle.o text data bss 264 0 36

MIT licensed, link in the repo. Happy to hear where else this fits!
by efreak | 2025-11-01 19:05:22+00:00
I've seen deb files that do everything in a post-install script. There's no way to identify this before downloading them (they came from a hosted repo, were signed). Some of these download files based on an internal manifest, others just run `pip install`, and others download a list of other files that need to be downloaded.

There's no guarantee packages are actually making use of package features in any reasonable way, other than convention.
by pradyun_ | 2025-11-01 19:05:23+00:00
I think I made a similar move about 6 years ago now. Started on Doom Emacs for the first 2-3 years, and honestly, for most users I think Doom Emacs is all you'll ever need. If you ever decide you want a bit more control over your config, which is what the case was for me, then it maybe makes sense to start writing your own configuration and learning about more of the native features. Would definitely recommend system crafters' emacs from scratch series that others have linked here -- extremely helpful.
by vessenes | 2025-11-01 19:05:25+00:00
The article tracks some good historical quotes. But it doesn’t seem to try and steel man the other side, that is, what’s oAI worth without its workers and an attached for profit company?

To the extent the answer is ‘much lower’ then he could have spent a whole blog post congratulating California ag and Sam for landing the single largest new public charity in real dollar terms maybe ever.

If the point is “it sticks in my craw that the team won’t keep working how they used to plan on working even when the team has already left” then, fair enough. But I disagree with theft as an angle; there are too many counter factuals to think through before you should make a strong case it’s theft.

Put another way - I think the writer hates Sam and so we get this. I’m guessing we will not be reading an article where Ilya leaving and starting a C corp with no charitable component is called theft.
by linguae | 2025-11-01 19:05:38+00:00
Indeed. I am reminded of what Alan Kay has repeatedly referred to as a “pop culture” of computing that has become widespread in technical communities since the 1980s, when the spread of technology grew faster than educational efforts. One result is there are many inventions and innovations from the research community that never got adopted by major players. The corollary to “perfect is the enemy of the good” is good-enough solutions have amazingly long lifetimes in the marketplace.

There are many great ideas in operating systems, programming languages, and other systems that have been developed in the fast 30 years, but these ideas need to work with existing infrastructure due to costs, network effects, and other important factors.

What is interesting is how some of these features do get picked up by the mainstream computing ecosystem. Rust is one of the biggest breakthroughs in systems programming in decades, bringing together research in linear types and memory safety in a form that has resonated with a lot of systems programmers who tend to resist typical languages from the PL community. Some ideas from Plan 9, such as 9P, have made their way into contemporary systems. Features that were once the domain of Lisp have made their ways into contemporary programming languages, such as anonymous functions.

I think it would be cool if there were some book or blog that taught “alternate universe computing”: the ideas of research systems during the past few decades that didn’t become dominant but have very important lessons that people working on today’s systems can apply. A lot of what I know about research systems comes from graduate school, working in research environments, and reading sites like Hacker News. It would be cool if this information were more widely disseminated.
by input_sh | 2025-11-01 19:06:31+00:00
Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and a couple more Hollywood celebrities united under an "NGO" called Thorn(.org).

That "NGO" also happens to sell a tool called Safer(.io) that allows website owners to check hashes against known CSAM material, which I'm sure is unrelated.

They also happened to have shadily employed some former high-ranking Europol officials, which is again just a pure coincidence.

Balkan Insight did wonderful investigative reporting on them a couple of years back: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
by uniqueuid | 2025-11-01 19:07:45+00:00
I'm not sure everyone got my hint that the proposal is obviously very bad,

(1) because ivy league also produces a lot of work that's not so great (i.e. wrong (looking at you, Ariely) or un-ambitious) and

(2) because from time to time, some really important work comes out of surprising places.

I don't think we have a good verdict on the Orthega hypothesis yet, but I'm not a professional meta scientist.

That said, your proposal seems like a really good idea, I like it! Except I'd apply it to individuals and/or labs.
by rtkwe | 2025-11-01 19:07:55+00:00
In ideal scenarios without having to account for other racers yes generally. In reality it's a difficult to talk about mix of driver skill, mechanical car performance and race strategy that determines the actual best line at any given moment though there is still one fastest theoretical line through a corner.

On race strategy it's rare for drivers to be pushing their cars to the limits for entire races because tire wear and the stops required to replace them is a major time sink because you can only drive so fast in pit lane so even the 1-2 second stops F1 cars go through today lose drivers position that then has to be regained using the extra performance fresh tires provides.

Then driver skill can put the better driver in the correct position to take the correct line more often when you include other cars in the mix and they also know better how to deal with suboptimal routes (eg being force to take an inside route by traffic so you have to know how much harder you need to break to not wreck into another car).

On an unrelated side note because I'm just personally annoyed by the 12 pArSecS!? misunderstanding. The 12 parsec run is impressive because Kessel is in a part of space ridiculously dense with hazards so the usual route to it loops through a narrow region where it's relatively safe to travel through. Han's 12 parsec run cut through the dangerous parts through either luck, superior navigation, or he was just lying the commentary is mixed. [0]

[0] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/1/17/Kesse...
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-01 19:08:27+00:00
That doesn't sound like stoicism to me.

At its core stoicism is about having the best possible judgement and taking the best possible actions. Sometimes acting makes a situation worse and so patience or restraint are what's best. It seems you've confused this situational wisdom with a universal principle.

Everything I've learned about stoicism has taught me to not waste energy on things I can't control so that I can spend it on making my life and the lives of people I care about continuously better.
by jampa | 2025-11-01 19:10:03+00:00
I think OpenAI is screwed long-term, and their leadership knows it. Their most significant advantage was their employees, most of whom have now left for other companies. They're getting boxed in across every segment where they were previously the leader:

- Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube).

- Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too).

- Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding.

- Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?).

OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?

It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year.

If they want to cash out, now is the time.