MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2025-11-16 21:35:26+00:00
You are wrong, here is the first publication from 2004. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:AMAI.0000031195....

Due diligence would have revealed the Go! project in a standard literature review.

I can and will fault the developers because even if they had overlooked it, they were explicitly asked, and declined to do so because they determined (themselves) there would be no confusion. So it wasn't that they overlooked it, or ignored it, they decided they were asked directly and responded "we don't care".

If the reasoning boils down to "We can do this because you are small and we are big" I cannot support that.
by tredre3 | 2025-11-16 21:35:52+00:00
> Doesn't mean that the author might not use AI to optimise legibility.

I agree that there is a difference between entirely LLM-generated, and LLM-reworded. But the statement is unequivocal to me:

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written

If an LLM was used in any fashion, then this statement is simply a lie.
by burntoutgray | 2025-11-16 21:36:42+00:00
Everybody is different. I'm a very long-term C programmer.

Learnt Smalltalk because I wanted to better understand OOP and I could never get comfortable with C++.

Learnt Python because it provided me with a more interactive environment. Over time as more modules were added it became increasingly my choice for exploring interfaces, e.g. poorly documented USB devices.

Learnt JavaScript because I saw it as becoming increasingly pervasive. The growth of Web APIs together with the browser's graphical environment is edging out Python for many projects.
by tptacek | 2025-11-16 21:36:46+00:00
I've written about how we did it in Oak Park, IL:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690

Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.

Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.

You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:

(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.

(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).

(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.

One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.

A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:

You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.

Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-16 21:37:05+00:00
MCP was a really shitty attempt at building a plugin framework that was vague enough to lure people into and then allow other companies to build plugin platforms to take care of the MCP non-sense.

"What is MCP, what does it bring to the table? Who knows. What does it do? The LLM stuff! Pay us $10 a month thanks!"

LLM's have function / tool calling built into them. No major models have any direct knowledge of MCP.

Not only do you not need MCP, but you should actively avoid using it.

Stick with tried and proven API standards that are actually observable and secure and let your models/agents directly interact with those API endpoints.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-11-16 21:37:08+00:00
> people make bets on new tech all the time. You show up early so you can capture mindshare.

I got on the ground floor with elixir. got my startup built on it. now we have 3 fulltime engineers working on elixir fulltime. None of that would have happenned if I looked at a young language and said "its not used in the real world"
by nashashmi | 2025-11-16 21:38:40+00:00
Neither a distortion of facts nor is there an agenda. Maybe a counter agenda.

Tehran is far from the ocean for desalination. They are closer to Caspian Sea. But that comes crossing mountains.

Tehran itself is very dry.

And comparing spending on military exercises to infrastructure tells me you have a political agenda to support the dismantling of Iran. These are not friendly motives.

Iran has tried to make agreements with the western world for a long time. But the west has snaked Iran into isolation. Isolation has led Iran to exercise military excursions to develop influence in the region.
by tgma | 2025-11-16 21:38:41+00:00
> This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible

What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.

I don't understand why the way the government body is elected (or not) is material in any shape or form here. If you are British, sure, perhaps you get a say. I am not and I don't really care what the majority of UK (or rather whoever counts the votes) thinks. As far as I am concerned, it's just another foreign entity who has their interests that are at times unaligned with me. Heck, the bigger and more perceived to be legitimate, they have more power, to the degree they had the audacity and effectiveness to interfere with my country's elections. I don't think ArabNews has such capacity.

FWIW, BBC runs a World Service targeting people abroad in their languages. Is that just out of goodness of their hearts? Gimmie a break. A state funded media is always propaganda by charter, sometimes with an ancillary news division. Propaganda does not equate to lies all the time. The best form or propaganda, and the most effective, would in fact not obviously lie most of the times, but be biased when it matters. UK is hardly alone in this. US also has similar apparatus under VOA or NPR or PBS.

P.S. I think we are getting out of the core topic. I am not debating reliability of the media per se. What I objected to is the advocacy to always link to someone's preferred media, as opposed to preferred story (either due to the quality of that particular story, website, or original sourcing).
by CMay | 2025-11-16 21:39:19+00:00
The reason I specify the CCP specifically rather than always stating China, is because the government is not "of", "by" and "for" the people. There are many Chinese people and only a small fraction of them are part of that government structure. The propaganda battle around whether Taiwan is a part of China or not also doesn't help.

The rest of your commentary suggests you need to broaden your horizons for where you get information.
by happyopossum | 2025-11-16 21:39:32+00:00
Interesting timeline, but nothing here proves, or even strongly indicates, that Counbase “knew about the breach” from this one report.

Screenscraping malware is fairly common, and it’s not unreasonable for an analyst to look at a report like this and assume that the customer got popped instead of them.

Customers get popped all the time, and have a tendency to blame the proximate corporation…
by bccdee | 2025-11-16 21:39:57+00:00
That's not true. If Outer has a member Inner, Outer always has to invoke `my_inner.foo()` to use Inner::foo, and `foo()` always refers to Outer::foo (and some languages will force you to write `self.foo()`, which is even better).

If Outer extends Inner, though, you can't tell whether `foo()` refers to Inner::foo or Outer::foo without checking to see whether Outer overrides foo or not. And the number of places you have to check scales linearly with the depth of the inheritance hierarchy.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-11-16 21:40:47+00:00
> Don't you have a post about writing Python instead of using MCP?

Yes, and that works really well. I also tried various attempts of letting agents to write code that exposes MCP tool calls via an in-language API. But it's just really, really hard to work with because MCP tools are generally not in the training set, but normal APIs are.
by slg | 2025-11-16 21:41:14+00:00
Here is what was said that prompted my initial reply:

>When a model is censored for "AI safety", what they really mean is brand safety.

The equivalent analogy wouldn't be Fords and BMWs driving off a cliff, they effectively said that Ford and BMW only install safety features in their cars to protect their brand with the implication that no one at these companies actually cares about the safety of actual people. That is an incredibly cynical and amoral worldview and it appears to be the dominate view of people on HN.

Once again, you can say that specific AI safety features are stupid or aren't worth the tradeoff. I would have never replied if the original comment said that. I replied because the original comment dismissed the motivations behind these AI safety features.
Ask HN: What could possibly happen so people would want to read more?
by jstummbillig | 2025-11-16 21:41:18+00:00
We now have IG/TikTok/YT Shorts. First it was mails instead of letter, text/fb instead of mails, then images, then videos, now shorter videos. We might also fill in for the other senses, not sure, but then that's the end of the line.

There is no reason to assume that things will change direction, unless there is some force that makes it so. I am trying to think of a scenario where people would do more of something archaic like reading in the future, than they do now.

What could that be? I can't come up with anything. Does it matter? Can we be fine without reading?
by Barbing | 2025-11-16 21:41:36+00:00
Reminds me I noticed macOS Safari pulling in the favicons somewhat frequently when I load the new tab page with favorites on it.

Definitely something I don't want. Maybe I should just remove the favorites or maybe I can save them as redirects or HTML or something.

Note I use private windows most often & shoutout Little Snitch for driving the discovery.
by dymk | 2025-11-16 21:42:55+00:00
MCP defines the API so vendors of LLM tools like cursor, claude code, codex etc don't all make their own bespoke, custom ways to call tools.

The main issue is the disagreement on how to declare the MCP tool exists. Cursor, vscode, claude all use basically the same mcp.json file, but then codex uses `config.toml`. There's very little uniformity in project-specific MCP tools as well, they tend to be defined globally.
by eesmith | 2025-11-16 21:42:58+00:00
The essay appears to mix two different meanings of "hole".

Holes are a topological property of the slice of cheese. It's not scale invariant, as we're talking about holes on a human visible scale, not microscopic holes. The actual number is not fixed and may depend on the person doing the measuring.

I therefore don't see the need for "perforated", much less shape-predicates like "singly-perforated", "doubly-perforated" and "triply-perforated."

> For ‘hole’ read ‘bottle;’ for ‘hole-lining’ also read ‘bottle.’

Topologically speaking, a bottle doesn't have a hole, so this uses a different definition.
by NicoJuicy | 2025-11-16 21:43:16+00:00
Not all of them. At my workplace (the parent company, actually), security and privacy are among the highest priorities.

Competing with companies that don’t share these values is a “slow path.”

For instance, one of the most common requests is integrating our VMS with Chinese cameras, because of cost. While we’ve done it in the past, using a hardware device to prevent unexpected protocol communication, our CEO concluded that it was ethically questionable given our principles.

TLDR: The feature was dropped, and you can imagine that this decision had a significant impact on sales.

Pretty bold move, honestly.

Because of things like that, that's why I stay.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-16 21:44:56+00:00
This is an AI issue because people, including the developers of AI tools, don't care enough.

The Tragedy Of The Commons is always about this: people want what they want, and they do not care to prevent the tragedy, if they even recognise it.

> Project owners should instead be working ways to filter out careless code more efficiently.

Great. So the industry creates a burden and then forces people to deal with it — I guess it's an opportunity to sell some AI detection tools.
by nradov | 2025-11-16 21:45:05+00:00
Some of you have been watching too many sci-fi movies. The whole notion of "AI safety regulations" is so silly and misguided. If a safety critical system is connected to public networks with an exposed API or any security vulnerabilities then there is a safety risk regardless of whether AI is being used or not. This is exactly why nuclear weapon control systems are air gapped and have physical interlocks.
by vacuity | 2025-11-16 21:45:09+00:00
I think you're being uncharitable towards religion. While I agree that a belief such as "the Earth was made 6000 years ago" is ridiculous, a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not. I think "good beliefs" (a very loaded term, mind you) get rediscovered constantly, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike. These are beliefs attained through philosophical inquiry. The beliefs provided by science are complementary.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-16 21:45:36+00:00
> Further: sitting down to discuss how your project will adapt to change is never a waste of time, I’m surprised you stated it like that.

It is a waste of time for large-scale volunteer-led projects who now have to deal with tons of shit — when the very topic is "how do we fend off this stuff that we do not want, because our project relies on much deeper knowledge than these submissions ever demonstrate?"
by gwern | 2025-11-16 21:45:54+00:00
This works surprisingly well. If you look into enough dark corners of Unicode, it turns out that you can do a shocking amount of typography, going far beyond the obvious italics and bolds: https://gwern.net/utext

In fact, I found that writing as much math as possible in Unicode makes for the best HTML reading experience: it's fast, simple, and looks more natural (avoids font inconsistency and line-height jagginess, among other things). https://gwern.net/design-graveyard#mathjax

And if you find writing Unicode yourself a pain, you can just ask a LLM to translate from LaTeX to Unicode! https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/latex2u...
by cratermoon | 2025-11-16 21:46:07+00:00
Tooling is important. How hard is it to install, set up a project, and get working something more complex than "hello world"?

Are there good libraries, either inherent to the language or in quality libraries, for something I'm interested and competent with. It's hard to both learn a new language and a new programming domain. For example, I know very little about circuit design and have little interest in it, so I'm not going to learn Verilog.

If there aren't good libraries, is there at least enough capability that I could reasonably build my own library in an area I can apply my expertise?
by cortesoft | 2025-11-16 21:46:34+00:00
Part of the benefit over a dependency is that the code added will (hopefully) be narrowly tailored to your specific need, rather than the generic implementation from a library that likely has support for unused features.

Not including the unused features both makes the code you are adding easier to read and understand, but it also may be more efficient for your specific use case, since you don't have to take into account all the other possible use cases you don't care about.
by vintermann | 2025-11-16 21:47:46+00:00
The site says: "People like a challenge and playing against other people is often how games provide this challenge. Competition by itself is not necessarily a dark pattern. Classic games like chess and checkers, and most sports have competition. It's when competition is combined with other dark patterns that problems arise."

And this is true. In particular, competition where you gain rewards for staying on top of leaderboards, and there is a pay-to-win element. Competition isn't necessarily bad, competition can be fun, "but how is this game using competition" something you should think about before you get into a new game.
by amy_petrik | 2025-11-16 21:47:57+00:00
>(he described it as a slow motion bullet shot from a movie, landing in something/someone and then flashing the one frame, presumably the intention being "haha, get shot with the child porn bullet")

That's the slippery slope nature of these laws. For sure a CSAM is "out there" and easily acquired. And now it some sort of toxic, radioactive content that destroys systems, corporations, and most importantly, invididuals if weaponized.

I suppose these people with good intentions, seeking to wipe CSAM off the face of the earth with religious fervor ... I suppose they never realized that such thing as a troll exists on the internet who will gladly point their fervor as the troll pleases like a firehose of seething
by pessimizer | 2025-11-16 21:48:17+00:00
Not much is said in this story, but the explicit goal of the CIA and Ewen Cameron was to completely erase minds ("de-patterning") so they could be built back up again. It was scientific quackery that was part of the trendy fascination with psychedelics and the propagandistic idea that POWs in the East were being "brainwashed" into thinking that US imperialism was bad, rather than simply being convinced.

It's a little unfair to say that they were all convinced; if you're held prisoner and you're rewarded for agreement, maybe that's the Skinnerian reinforcement you need to change your mind. This mode of thought would reach its peak in the SERE program, and the black sites and torture chambers of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.

But the interesting part that I wanted to mention is that when people started investigating Cameron seriously, and his ties to the CIA (and pretending they didn't know anything), he suddenly burned all of his records, retired and immediately took a trip into the mountains with his son where he died of a "heart attack" or after falling off a cliff - I get inconsistent answers on this.

I almost think all of the hysterical, lurid coverage, and the connection made to the Unibomber (who described his experience as a bit insightful, but obvious iirc, and wasn't traumatized at all) aims to drive all of the actual primary source documents into the shadows. It's painful to find the papers that he published (although I've been able to find a couple dozen over time), his assistants and coworkers have written about what they saw, but all we get is tabloid drama from the mainstream press.

The fact that the CIA was actively trying to empty people's brains and fill them up with new things is interesting. Cameron was a quack, but a kind of quackery that aroused the US government, and other governments and universities that worked with it. It should be horrifying. Instead, the concept of brainwashing is worming its way back into our legal system, and simultaneously the effort to brainwash is coming back into vogue with a political elite that hates democracy.

There are a lot of defensive but revealing responses to a recent book on him by people who worked with him at https://inhn.org/inhn-projects/perspectives/thomas-a-ban-the... but they are a little difficult to get to (the menu is broken for me) without going through the sitemap. The linked page is actually the entry point for a bunch of subpages.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-16 21:48:29+00:00
You've got all the BIOS calls you need to actually shunt sectors on and off disk, read keystrokes, and display characters, right?

So with some code simple enough to hand-assemble you could write the bare bones of a Forth "inner interpreter", and from there the Forth compiler, which necessarily has a command line interpreter (or at least, a thing that breaks a text buffer down into words).

Then a simple "DOS" would have a command like "dir" which would read the directory sector into a block, format it, and print it, and so on.

Using a normal Forth-style "block editor" on a system with files wouldn't have to be complicated, you'd just be working on a 1kB (two sectors) block at a time, starting from the first block referenced by the filename.

You'd get to a point where you could read, edit, and compile Forth definitions or even just cope with text files in MS-DOS formatted disks pretty quickly.
by Yoric | 2025-11-16 21:49:20+00:00
I'm not going to discuss the details, because we obviously draw different conclusions from the same numbers. For me, the answer is going to be "I'm not going to buy a Steam Machine, not because it's a bad tech, but because it doesn't make my life better, and it uses resources that I'm not sure we can afford."

(Nice nickname, btw. French or Belgian?)
by foota | 2025-11-16 21:49:36+00:00
Am I missing something?

"This was the answer I needed! Rather than visiting all the live objects, I wanted to only visit the dead ones, and reference counting would let me do that.

So I added a way of maintaining a reference count for all the nodes in the doc. When we produce a new document, we decrement the reference count of the old root node (it will always be 0 afterwards). So we recursively decrement the ref count of its children, and so on. This gives me exactly what I wanted — a way to find all the nodes that were not reused, without having to visit most of the nodes in the doc."

I think there's a bit missing from the description here in the and so on, you would only recurse on a node when it's new refcount is zero, right (and the set of zero refcount nodes produced is exactly the set of dead nodes)?

Isn't this sort of just like having a dirty flag on nodes, and then replacing dirty nodes?
by efnx | 2025-11-16 21:49:38+00:00
How would you feel about a free game spending one frame per second mining a cryptocurrency? This would be as an alternative to a one-time purchase (and as an alternative to ads). So, you could play a full game for free, indefinitely, and have a small portion of compute do mining, and at any time you could pay a one time fee (purchase) to turn off mining forever.

(Edit: added stuff in parens)
by smj-edison | 2025-11-16 21:49:45+00:00
After reading the first five chapters, I'm leaning this way. Not because of a specific phrase, but because the pacing is way off. It's really strange to start with symbol exporting, then moving to while loops, then moving to slices. It just feels like a strange order. The "how it works" and "key insights" also feel like a GPT summarization. Maybe that's just a writing tic, but the combination of correct grammar with bad pacing isn't something I feel like a human writer has. Either you have neither (due to lack of practice), or both (because when you do a lot of writing you also pick up at least some ability to pace). Could be wrong though.