MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-13 20:51:56+00:00
And just like casinos optimizing for gambling addicts and sports optimizing for gambling addicts and mobile games optimizing for addicts, LLMs will be optimized to hook and milk addicts.

They will be made worse for non-addicts to achieve that goal.

That's part of why they are working towards smut too, it's not that there's a trillion dollars of untapped potential, it's that the smut market has much better addict return on investment.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-13 20:52:31+00:00
So basically, Chinese state-backed hackers hijacked Claude Code to run some of the first AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage, using autonomous agents to infiltrate ~30 large tech companies, banks, chemical manufacturers and government agencies.

What's amazing is that AI executed most of the attack autonomously, performing at scale and speed unattainable by human teams - thousands of operations per second. A human operator intervened 4-6 times per campaign for strategic decisions
by neutronicus | 2025-11-13 20:52:37+00:00
I think GP is more in response to "view[ing] men as a kind of primordial oppressor", then the "Kill All Men" statement.

In any case - "Kill All Men" was always just a shibboleth. Treating it as an actual policy recommendation is prima facie risible. Throwing it out there to see who is oblivious enough to object is the point.
by ApolloFortyNine | 2025-11-13 20:52:51+00:00
I had read a while ago, and I struggle to really argue with it, that legalizing marijuana is simply the carrot on the stick.

Many Republicans are just against it out right, and many Democrats are either indifferent or know that promising to legalize it will mobilize a subset of voters who prioritize it above else (or may just not vote at all otherwise, over 30% of Americans don't vote after all).

It'd explain why there's been so many opportunities to reschedule the drug, and why in some states even when they had the numbers to pass legalization, they still don't. Or do so with extra incentives (often the actual sale of it) to come later (vote next cycle!).
by lxe | 2025-11-13 20:53:32+00:00
Fair point about problem-fit - some problems do naturally lend themselves to one approach over the other.

But I think the Sudoku example is less about top-down vs bottom-up and more about dogmatic adherence to abstractions (OOP in that case). Jeffries wasn't just using a 'hacker' approach - he was forcing everything through an OOP lens that fundamentally didn't fit the problem structure.

But yes, same issue can happen with the 'mathematical' approach - forcing "elegant" closed-form thinking onto problems that are inherently messy or iterative.
by mothballed | 2025-11-13 20:53:50+00:00
Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.

So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
by ajb | 2025-11-13 20:53:51+00:00
The problem here is whether just applying some well studied technique to a new area like AI is really inventive enough to be patentable. There were loads of patents which basically added "in a computer" to some existing technique. Just because NN's are novel doesn't mean people should be able to get an exclusionary property right over the use of well known techniques in NN's because they put in half a day's work to be the first to apply that technique to NN's. This isn't the Guinness book of records.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-13 20:54:30+00:00
Yeah, the fanboys are in bliss right now, but seeing this pre built cost 999 (and that's my most generous estimate) will bring them back down to earth.That would still be a good deal as long as the GPU is decent. But it's not "console killer" territory in the slightest.

I do look forward to buying the decade awaited iteration on the Steam Controller, though. Very underrated piece of tech.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-13 20:54:31+00:00
I get what you are saying, but I think gerrymandering is a specific thing -- voters being chosen rather than being the ones to choose. You pick the state you want to live in, and the boundaries are not going to change. But at least every 10 years the congressional district you live in may change without you having any say. So it is definitely worse though I think the lopsided representation due to the senate is pretty shitty too.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-13 20:54:42+00:00
Bavarian attitude towards cannabis always bordered on authoritarianism, ever before weed legalisation became a political mainstream topic.

Police was infamous for kicking in your door if a random copper walked home and smelled weed. "You smell like you got some weed on you" was a popular excuse the cops used at Munich Central Station to fleece everyone they deemed to look like a punk or, worse, Black person.

And the latter, well, it's certainly not a coincidence that the cops asked for, and got, the weapon ban zones in train stations giving them back the authority to fleece people at will, right after the cannabis legalisation came in force last year.

It's not about cannabis, it's not about the guns, it's all about the ability of the fucking cops to abuse their power whenever they goddamn want to, and Bavarian police are notable in Germany for being particularly aggressive and ignorant.
by JadeNB | 2025-11-13 20:54:53+00:00
> do we really have to retread this? unless you are employed by a university to perform research (or another research organization), you are not a computer scientist or a mathematician or anything else of that sort. no more so than an accountant is an economist or a carpenter is an architect.

Doing math or science is the criterion for being a mathematician or scientist, not who employs you how.
by Retric | 2025-11-13 20:55:29+00:00
> Falcon Heavy isn't relevant to anything SpaceX is doing with Starlink.

You misunderstood my point, Starlink only cares about lower cost per kg to LEO. Spaceship is trying to do that and increase payload capacity.

Spaceship trying to do both is a major reason its R&D costs are so high. Where Falcon heavy is relevant is it demonstrates that there’s little demand for Shapeship’s significant increase in cargo capacity. There’s little economic justification that paying for the size related added R&D complexity driving up both timelines and costs is going to be worth it.

> Seems you've never heard of creative destruction

I was arguing for creative destruction namely killing off all manufacturing of Falcon 9 rockets which would then make Falcon heavy non viable without the economies of scale on the first stage.

> The things they intend to do with Starship aren't possible with Falcon 9 or Heavy period

The things that depend on cost per kg could be accomplished with a NEW but smaller than Starship rocket that could already be in service if they had gone down a different path. The only thing they gain from its current size is the ability to send payloads of that size.

It’s not my money being wasted here, but I’d like SpaceX to be on better financial footing simply to reduce the risks to Starlink.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-13 20:55:44+00:00
> I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you.

This works very well for the local wealth crowd. It is much easier to capture city or county government than it is state, and much easier to capture state government than federal. In fact, one of the reasons that we need a more powerful federal government than we did 200 years ago is precisely that local non-governmental power (read: rich folk) has grown in scale that often even state government cannot control it adequately.

There's no inherent reason federal government cannot be just as responsive as more local ones, other than an entire political philosophy and party that is committed to the idea that this is not just impossible but morally wrong.
by loughnane | 2025-11-13 20:56:04+00:00
Most public debates aren't a matter of truth seeking, and haven't been for a long time (two examples below). Rather, it's a platform for people to make their case to the audience.

That said, the level of respect and orderliness of the debates below is something I'd like to see more of.

* Russell v. Copleston on God https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMsbD1L5IlQ

* Buckley v. Baldwin on if the american dream is at the expense of the american negro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin%E2%80%93Buckley_debate
by rvz | 2025-11-13 20:56:11+00:00
> It's not a skill issue, it's an organizational issue.

We can say that for the majority of companies with large teams that already have this. Everyone knows Meta is no different.

In this case, it's a skill issue to ship low quality software which is what whoever that team at Meta just did and knowingly approved.

> The engineers at Meta are world class but they're nerfed by organizational constraints.

That doesn't mean anything given that shipping regressions to billions of users is not of "world class" calibre.

If fact, that is of amateurs behaviour and way below the expectation of a multi-trillion dollar company hiring the "best" engineers which they can certainly afford.
by hoherd | 2025-11-13 20:56:41+00:00
One thing I do with games is automate the grind. To me, that is part of the fun. I have built lego robots to press a sequence of buttons repeatedly, or programmed microcontrollers using circuitpython to press a series of keys or click the mouse at given intervals to grind various in-game currency and such. It's so common for me to do these kinds of things that I now instinctively look for places in gameplay that I can automate. I haven't done anything as complicated as using computer vision to look at the screen and respond to it, but I did see that Anthony Sottile did this to catch shiny pokemon https://youtu.be/-0GIY5Ixgkk and doing something like this has been out there on my horizon.
Ask HN: Retaliation for privately disclosing user IDs in DSA transparency data?
by hn773746483 | 2025-11-13 20:56:47+00:00
(note: I'm non-EU, company is American with EU branch)

I informed a country's DPA that a company was leaking millions of user IDs within DSA transparency reports. EU developer documentation + DSA text states PII must not be within this data multiple times, proving severe incompetency.

On the day of their final update, the company suddenly banned my account, losing access to a significant chunk of my online life as well as nearly a decade of daily conversations with friends and family.

From that day onward, daily DSA transparency reports were empty for weeks (down from thousands daily).

Eventually they resumed, and past files containing PII were replaced with user IDs removed.

Tried contacting NGOs like EFF and the DPA again, they won't help either due to my non-EU status or because of their own caseload.

The company's DPO & legal teams have been locking and ignoring all communication attempts for months, they don't have any contact point outside of zendesk.

I can't afford lawyers either.

What should my next steps be?
by input_sh | 2025-11-13 20:56:57+00:00
https://news.kagi.com/world/latest

Where's the part where you ask them to do this? Is this not something they do automatically? Are they not contributing to the slop by republishing slopified versions of articles without as much as an acknowledgement of the journalists whose stories they've decided to slopify?

If they were big enough to matter they would 100% get sued over this (and rightfully so).
by cthalupa | 2025-11-13 20:57:00+00:00
> Other have pointed out that the house ("Y seats are set according to census data on population")

This is repeated all over this thread, but it is just no longer actually true.

The Permanent Apportionment Act means that it is only partially tied to census data. The low cap and guaranteed seats mean that low population states have more power per capita in the house to a significant degree.
by mulmen | 2025-11-13 20:57:03+00:00
> Explaining that it costs 4c to make a 1c coin is a pretty clear and solid justification.

It’s really not though, for the reasons I described already.

> Complaining that one news article, which is just reporting a current event, doesn't give you an in-depth background analysis and context, is absurd.

Well then it’s good that I didn’t do that.

> If you care about a topic enough to want that level of in-depth, you can go look for it elsewhere.

Like the HN comment section?

Trump himself said:

> For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!

That certainly sounds like the reason is production cost and not any of the compelling reasons you have provided.
by JadeNB | 2025-11-13 20:57:04+00:00
> Yes and you have to be invited to publish in a place. Meaning at least one other person has to believe your opinion is significant........

I don't think that this is true. The vast majority of technical math publications, for example, are reviewed, but not invited. And expository, and even technical, math is widely available in fora without any refereeing process (and consequent lack of guarantee of quality).
by ryandrake | 2025-11-13 20:57:20+00:00
I look at that thread and I see "some people" (who?) and "a conversation" (with whom??). This stuff doesn't generalize to something that's happening in the world at large, and the OP even admits that himself. When I went to high school there were a handful of bullies and I could tell you I have personal experience with bullies, but that doesn't mean that in general, people are growing up in "a world of bullying" or that there is some kind of institutional push to increase bullying.

What's more likely? The entire world is actually persecuting young men, or: people are having a handful of bad personal experiences, extrapolating them to the whole world, going online to find validation of this world view, and then finally finding the exact SubReddit dedicated to that world view endlessly pumping out examples of it?
by henryfjordan | 2025-11-13 20:57:23+00:00
Newsom recently banned hemp-based THC at the state level anyway, so there's no real change in California.

https://www.cannabisbusinesstimes.com/us-states/california/n...

They were taking very low % hemp that is supposed to be for textiles and extracting the little THC there was into low quality vapes. Because they didn't need the state growers licenses to grow hemp, there was no mechanism to test for pesticides and such. When we do have all that infrastructure for legal THC regulation, why allow people to sidestep all that?
by loughnane | 2025-11-13 20:57:54+00:00
> Today, the only naked bodies that many Americans will likely ever see are their own, a partner’s, or those on a screen. Gone are our unvarnished points of physical comparison—the ordinary, unposed figures of other people. In their place, we’re left with the curated ideals of social-media posts, AI-generated advertising, and pornography. The loss may seem trivial, but it also may change how people see themselves.

I think the theme of "how we see ourselves" is the defining theme of our age. Never before have we been bombarded with so much imagery while at the same time being seeing so little of real life.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-13 20:58:26+00:00
> It's more of one additional anecdotal evidence that Rust is good.

But that means it's likely to be the worst kind of science:

- Group of people agree that Rust is good. This is a belief they hold.

- Same group of people feel the need to search for argument that their belief is good.

- The group does "science" like this.

And then the rest of us have a data point that we think we can trust, when in reality, it's just cherry picked data being used to convey an opinion.
by almosthere | 2025-11-13 20:59:09+00:00
I was thinking about GQL in this context recently.

In GQL you can query users, for example and select all fields except for a base64 picture of that user, so that the request is more performant.

However in the underlying implementation, you might be pulling the picture of the user anyway, but the GQL layer is simply dropping it because it's not in the requested set.

There's an argument, then, instead of hand-writing queries that have and don't have the picture (which is acceptable), we should write this backend code to take advantage of frameworks (such as apollo) that make the requested field set available, and then call the appropriate APIs to only fetch the requested set of fields.

Since most ORMs have this feature available, you can still use the ORM, you just need to use the lesser used feature of selecting only some columns.

This would result in the ultimate performance. This is also why I have always thought GQL (or something like GQL) will eventually replace plain old REST.
by gorgoiler | 2025-11-13 20:59:09+00:00
Halflife2 ran perfectly under WINE. At the time I assumed that it was a win for WINE but with hindsight — and typing this out makes me feel so naive! — was HL2 optimized for WINE in order to make WINE more successful? Of course it must have been!

It’s a shame the connotations are negative because this ironic comment otherwise works quite well: This large wooden horse is such an extravagant gift, it has to have some subversive purpose, right?!
by arjie | 2025-11-13 21:00:17+00:00
I do use (and am in the Backers.md of) neovim. But the GUI versions open much more slowly than Zed. Zed is near instantaneous. I do often edit text in neovim by opening a terminal window and doing things, but the experience of browsing a large log file and filtering through it is much nicer in a GUI text editor, so if I ever double-click or open a JSON file I want that to happen instantly.

I can't stand Nano. I find it impossible to use because my brain is strongly vim-bound.
by willmarch | 2025-11-13 21:01:16+00:00
I noticed the same thing happening (waiting around while the agent worked) so I adapted my agent to handle multiple chats/worktrees at the same time. Now, when the agent is working on a new feature, I can start another instance working on a different section of code and/or review the finished code I had started in a different chat. If I'm working with one agent, I get visual pings when another agent finishes its task and I can quickly switch over to guide it. I can scale the number of running agents up or down based on my focus and energy levels at any given time. It works great (though I find I can only juggle 3 to 4 serious tasks at the same time). The only real issue is my token burn rate is now regularly much higher than in the past, but I'm getting a lot more work done so it's worth it!
Ask HN: On-prem vs. self-serve for my SaaS?
by Vishal19111999 | 2025-11-13 21:01:21+00:00
I have been working on building this SaaS.

As I am integrating with and indexing a lot of user data, I planned on keeping it self-serve.

But now it's becoming super difficult for me to make people try it out.

I have to deny people who want to try it, or ask them to get it approved from their IT teams.

What should I do.

Reference - https://getharmony.ai
by d_burfoot | 2025-11-13 21:01:42+00:00
Wait a minute - the attackers were using the API to ask Claude for ways to run a cybercampaign, and it was only defeated because Anthropic was able to detect the malicious queries? What would have happened if they were using an open-source model running locally? Or a secret model built by the Chinese government?

I just updated by P(Doom) by a significant margin.
by thro1 | 2025-11-13 21:01:54+00:00
Edit: nRF52840 chip can have 12 Analog Inputs, ESP32S3 20 - e.g. ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 - but XIAO ESP32S3 and XIAO nRF52840 have 6 only, there are others with more pins (AFAIR up to ~128, not all analog) but more functions too - what's overkill regarding price and energy waste - not so cool. (BTW. of A beginner tries PCB assembly (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549736 )
by pndy | 2025-11-13 21:01:59+00:00
> I can see the vision here as creating something that is closer to a starship-type OS from scifi where interactions are increasingly natural

Then you're a real optimist. I'm afraid this whole AI technology once settles down will be nothing more than a corporate tool to manipulate populations economic behavior and perception of the world. An antithesis to what for example was seen in Star Trek, and something even worse than HAL9000.
by fakedang | 2025-11-13 21:02:23+00:00
Claude is a great example of a great product coupled with shitty UX, UI and customer service all in one.

Is it just me or does it slow down significantly after 5 chats or so? Or the fact that you have to set the style for each chat.

Oh, and their sales support is so shit for teams and enterprises that in order to use it effectively, you have to literally make your team register for Claude Max 200 on their personal accounts.
by delusional | 2025-11-13 21:02:35+00:00
I don't understand the graphs presented here. On the first graph showing "New Memory Unsafe Code" and "Memory safety Vulns" we don't have any steady state. The amount of both "unsafe code" and "memory safety vulns" had apparently already been dropping before 2019. None the matter though, we see a great big drop at 2022 in both.

Then in the next graph, showing "Rust" and "C++", we see that the amount of C++ code written in 2022 actually increased, with rust not really having gained any significant momentum.

How can one possibly square those two pieces of data to point at rust somehow fixing the "memory safety vulns"? Somehow an increase in C++ code led to a decrease in the amount of both "New Memory Unsafe Code" and "Memory safety Vulns".

Also "this approach isn’t just fixing things, but helping us move faster." is an AI red flag.
Show HN: An interactive 2D fractal tree generator/simulator created in Java
by mfanakagama | 2025-11-13 21:02:36+00:00
Hello. For the past week or two I found myself with extra time on my hands. With my given freedom I proceeded to build a tree generator program in Java Swing. The UI looks better because of Flatlaf. The tree generator can generate trees, obviously but it can also generate grass (Single blade, tall and short) and flowers (Single flower). All is derived from a tree.

The simulation is based on the Fractal Tree algorithm. Extra features include wind animations, png and gif export (Gif is partially broken). I think its could be a cool program to pass time with or even use in game dev (For 2d foliage).
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-13 21:02:51+00:00
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair.

If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.

For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...