MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anthonylevine | 2025-11-23 12:58:46+00:00
No problem and likewise. Conversations like this are great because they constantly make me re-evaluate what I think/say and often times I'll come out of it with a different opinion.

> Could be that some of the bad experiences we hear about are from people applying it to fields like content management (I've been tempted to try it there) or applying it to whole systems rather than individual parts

Amen. And I think what most people miss is that it's really hard to do for domains you're just learning about. And I don't blame people for feeling frustrated.
by gbin | 2025-11-23 13:01:11+00:00
It doesn't improve readability for sure but for me it comes across way worse as "I don't have time for this, deal with it" because all of the people I know doing that are self-important executives.

English is a second language for me and I feel really bad when I impose a grammar mistake or a badly put together sentence to my readers!

So for me pushing that on purpose is borderline insulting to the reader ie. suffer so I don't have to press the shift key, this extra effort is below me.
by anthonylevine | 2025-11-23 13:01:28+00:00
> It's inefficient because it's stringy data in an SQL database, but I look forward to support tickets because i don't have to "debug". I just read the events, and have the evidence to back up that the customer is wrong and the system is right.

I think one of the draws of ES is that it feels like the ultimate way to store stuff. The ability to pinpoint exact actions in time and then use that data to create different projections is super cool to me.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-23 13:02:31+00:00
Note that one very simple mitigation for browser fingerprinting is to simply run different browsers for "the business Internet" and "the fun Internet". You may need to do this anyway, because so many business sites only work on Chrome, with Javascript enabled, no VPN, no adblocker, and pop-ups enabled. But then you might use Chrome (which tracks everything you do anyway) for all your banking, SaaS, government tasks, so they all work, and then say Brave or Opera in an incognito window for all your fun reading. You get the adblocker, you get a different cookie jar for each session, you get easy access to Tor to hide your IP, etc.

Also recommended to have a separate sandbox for "projects" - basically things that you do that each might require their own research, toolchain, files you create, etc. I'd highly recommend doing this in a virtual machine though - oftentimes you need to install apps to do your project work, and that presents its own attack vector. Plus if it's all in a VM you can just backup the VM and start fresh on new hardware without having to install all the dependencies, while if you're just saving random files and backing them up they probably won't work as software gets updated and dependencies get out-of-date.
by ben_w | 2025-11-23 13:02:40+00:00
Yeah.

For most of my adult life, employment advice has been a T-shaped profile: Something you're very good at, plus a broad base of things you can work on even though you'd not be amazing at it.

I'm a general nerd, went through as much of brilliant.org as I could during the pandemic*, PBS Space Time and 3blue1brown videos, TWIML&AI podcasts, write for fun, hobby level interest in nuclear physics** and space, etc. — yet the original ChatGPT, mediocre as it was, was above the general knowledge threshold I had made for myself, and now only my single pillar of competence that remains, an I-shape profile instead of T-shape.

But even there, I have to wonder what the business value of that technical competence is, compared to the different skill that is "effective use of the LLMs": a user of an app does not care how clean the code is, they only care if it solves a problem they have.

* Looking at more recent updates, I think it was better material back then. Certainly nothing about the new content has made me want to re-subscribe.

** Still not actually built that Farnsworth…
by 71bw | 2025-11-23 13:02:57+00:00
I can relate to this probably the most out of everything I've seen on HN so far. My fiancee is pansexual and overall seems to prefer women, so I surely am quite a bit of a surprise in her life (to the point where her family laughed at the fact that I 'fixed her' the first time I met them...) as a straight man. I know she loves me, I love her with all my heart but I am aware that at some point she may want to change me for someone of the opposite sex. I have therefore decided that as long as this does not happen behind my back I will support her, even if that means I have to endure a lot of pain.
by wrochow | 2025-11-23 13:04:02+00:00
It seems to me that people are missing the point. AI is a tool, useful for some things, not so useful for others. The old adage applies here quite well. To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail.

Having used AI quite extensively I have come to realize that to get quality outputs, it needs quality inputs... this is especially true with general models. It seems to me that many developers today just start typing without planning. That may work to some degree for humans, but AI needs more direction. In the early 2000s, Rational Unified Process (RUP) was all the rage. It gave way to Agile approaches, but now, I often wonder if we didn't throw the baby out with the bath water. I would wager that any AI model could produce high-quality code if provided with even a light version of RUP documentation.
by amenhotep | 2025-11-23 13:04:04+00:00
The majority of the popular male musicians there are comparably photogenic to the females, Sheeran is really the major exception and he's not even ugly, just Distinctive in a way that's easily matched by Sia and personally I'd say both Gaga and Eilish.

It just looks like pretty people are in general a lot more successful, which is unsurprising. The attempt to apply a sexist lens to it is a bit tortured.
by TheTon | 2025-11-23 13:04:27+00:00
I admit I started reading with some skepticism. It didn't read like PR, so I assumed I was reading fanfic. By the midpoint, she managed to convince me otherwise.

I think the author is walking a tightrope between convincing the reader that she wrote this herself and that there's more depth to her than what we see on stage or in pop media. Writing this blog is definitely a tougher assignment than doing podcast interviews or behind the scenes videos.

You are right, of course, a good editor could make this better, but I think she's deliberately avoiding that here. A pop star is unwise to fire a good producer without a better replacement, but sometimes they have to bring out the piano and do an acoustic performance live.
by mnw21cam | 2025-11-23 13:06:35+00:00
No, this is a misunderstanding of how fission works.

When a nuclear reactor is run with mildly-enriched Uranium, which is a mixture of Uranium 235 and Uranium 238, it forms a self-sustaining chain reaction with the Uranium 235 (which is fissile) and a load of the spare neutrons get absorbed by the Uranium 238 (which is fertile), converting it into Plutonium 239, which is also fissile. But most Uranium 235 reactors use a moderator which slows down the neutrons, which makes them more likely to cause fission in Uranium 235 but less likely to transmute Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239. So most modern reactors don't produce much Plutonium. In any case, the fission you get from Uranium and the fission you get from Plutonium is from different source materials. Once an atom is fissioned, it is split into smaller atoms and can no longer be fissioned.

Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. That is, if you fire a neutron at Thorium 232, you get Thorium 233, which decays to Protactinium 233, which then decays into Uranium 233, which is fissile. You then fire another neutron at Uranium 233, which then fissions into much smaller nuclei, giving you energy and the neutrons to do the above. The Uranium is no longer around after that to form Plutonium. There is no way to get any significant amount of Plutonium 239 from this, because that would require adding 7 more neutrons to the original Thorium 232 and having none of them trigger a fission event. The fissions that do occur don't provide 7 neutrons anyway, so it wouldn't be possible to get a self-sustaining conversion of a significant amount of Thorium into Plutonium for final fission even if the previous sentence weren't true - it would have to be enhanced with some other provider of lots of neutrons.
by prmph | 2025-11-23 13:06:43+00:00
When you are building even moderately large non-trivial real world software with JS, you would thank your stars that TS exists and that it has features like this. It's amazing how quickly the basic concepts of software engineering become inadequate when they run up against the real world.

For example, a naive engineer might think, ah, databases have this oFFSET clause, good, I'll use, unaware that is a foot gun for real world performance.

Or they may think the DELETE operation on DBs is a normal thing, unaware that in most cases it should NOT be used at all.

Or they might think loops are idiomatic, unaware that when you are writing large software you should and can probably almost eliminate loops (unless you are using a DSL like SQL extensions, config languages, etc)

Or they may be unaware of the thorny issues around queues (or even why they might be necessary in the first place) and concurrent access to data.

Or they might not understand why the dogma of separating content and presentation is nonsensical in many situations.

Etc.
by blfr | 2025-11-23 13:07:02+00:00
Very cool but how useful is that for anyone beside the handful clients who wrote the checks here? I tried using Ubuntu 20.04 with the Pro support (you get a couple machines for free) and it worked but nothing else did. Even Firefox gave me trouble.

(To be fair to Cannonical, the upgrade from 20.04 to 24.04 through 22.04 went decently well. Despite some UEFI register running out of memory and the installation being interrupted, it resumed every time to complete upgrade. Three servers and a laptop came back up with full functionality. Even Unity seems to work.)
by bradfa | 2025-11-23 13:07:36+00:00
If no one is posting CVE that affects these old Ubuntu versions then Canonical doesn’t have to fix them. I realize that’s not your point, but it almost certainly is a part of Canonical’s business plan for setting the cost of this feature.

The Pro subscription isn’t free and clearly Canonical think they will have enough uptake on old versions to justify the engineering spend. The market will tell them if they’re right soon. It will be interesting to watch. So far it seems clear they have enough Pro customers to think expanding it is profitable.
by kurokawad | 2025-11-23 13:07:56+00:00
This will lead to engineers and tech people with less and less communicative skills... Being able to summarise your work and build solid descriptions about the main points of the commit is something so basic that should not be lost... If english is not your main language or you are not that good at writing, I understand that you could make a draft and ask AI to improve it or rewrite it, but this tool is directly a black box that builds the entire commit message based on a couple of prompts, as if it was an impossible task to be done by a human.
by lordnacho | 2025-11-23 13:08:01+00:00
So, what should you do if you know someone trapped in this kind of situation?

I currently know someone like this. He's not homosexual, so it's not quite the same issue.

But he's gotten himself trapped in a relationship, and worst of all, cannot admit it to his friends. The only reason I know is that the one friend he did tell, has told the rest of his friends. We've known each other since childhood, yet he doesn't ask me for help. Which is up to him, of course, but he also doesn't know that I know that he is keeping a remarkably straight face about his situation. In a way it would be easier if I hadn't been told.

So now, I have to pretend like I think he's just a single man about town. He just shows up to everything when I'm around, and chats to me like he always has throughout the years. We'll meet another old friend, yet his life update is that he's just like any other bachelor-for-life, just enjoying his video games and freedom, while the rest of us are having kids and worrying about school bills.

It's very odd. What would HN do?
by egeozcan | 2025-11-23 13:08:55+00:00
I don't agree the search for a technical solution. Fingerprinting is not useful for the small personal website, and when it's useful and abused, there's a 99% chance that there's a network behind. You can audit and control the networks using the law. Why not do that?

It's been obvious for a decade and a half that technical solutions won't be practical to implement.
by JackSlateur | 2025-11-23 13:08:59+00:00
The LTS, long support version and stuff are all confessions of a technical and organisational failures

If you are not able to upgrade your stuff every 2 to 3 years, then you will not be able to upgrade your stuff after 5, 10 or 15 years. After so long time, that untouched pill of cruft will be considered as legacy, built by people gone long ago. It will be a massive project, an entire rebuild/refactor/migration of whatever you have.

"If you do not know how to do planned maintenance, then you will learn with incidents"
by rmoriz | 2025-11-23 13:09:28+00:00
Cable TV is so bad to debug as it is not following a star topology in larger houses. What’s even worse: We have FTTB by the city carrier since 2009 but no efforts have been made to provide FTTH in-house. Recently they started an offer for retrofitting but as every flat is owned by a different party and nobody knows the difference in between FTTB+g.fast and FTTH, I gave up. Boomers and digital naives own our country.
by vintermann | 2025-11-23 13:09:55+00:00
As a rule, but the devil is in the details. The thing, the one big thing I want to use multimodal LLMs for, is accessing the data in historical mostly handwritten texts.

None of the big LLMs do an acceptable job. This is a task a trained human can do, but it's a lot of work. You have to learn, not just the script style of the period (which can vary far more than people think), but even the idiosyncracies of a given writer. All the time, you run into an unreadable word, and you need to look around for context which might give a clue, or other places the same word (or a similar looking word) is used in cleaner contexts. It's very much not a beginning-to-end task, trying to read a document from start to end would be like solving a crossword puzzle in strict left to right, top to bottom order.

Maybe autoregressive models can eventually become powerful enough that they can just do that! But so far, they haven't. And I have a lot more faith in that the diffusion approach is closer to how you have to do it.
by DarkmSparks | 2025-11-23 13:09:59+00:00
there are a few more angles to this.

Firstly, on the counter argument side, when you visit a website, you are using their hardware, they have every right to make any requirements they want to use their hardware, they are not public spaces.

But more importantly, the fix is actually easy, use more than one browser, use private browsing sessions, use more than one device, only log in to services you dont mind tracking you, use ad blocking. everywhere. Dont use sites that dont behave. All things you should be doing anyway.

However, I also think the whole concept of browser fingerprinting is exaggerated. None of the things that can be used for fingerprinting are long lived, meaning any fingerprint probably has a shorter life span than the average cookie, and also far less reliable than say an IP address, which absolutely doesnt personally identify you.

meanwhile, it is quite rediculous to log in to all these services with 2FA, then expect any kind of technical or legal measure to prevent them from knowing exactly who you are with 100% accuracy.

Mostly thinking out loud, truly anonymous browsing is a tor node away, but a long time since I used that, there wasn't anything there I was interested in after intel exchange went down.
by Sxubas | 2025-11-23 13:10:06+00:00
I'm a little bit skeptical but i dont have any objective argument or experience in the field to justify it. I didn't want to post it, but I was surprised that almost no one in the hn comments had the same feeling.

Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).

Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.

Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-23 13:10:12+00:00
You fucking wish it was just a problem for the Ukrainians.

If US ever gets into a serious near-peer war, the Pentagon may have to resort to doing the same thing Ukraine does. Mass produce inferior but easy-to-scale weapons to address the growing munition shortages.

The Pentagon understands this. This is why moves are made in that direction.
by hobofan | 2025-11-23 13:10:21+00:00
> there is a spot to look for a generally accepted way of how to do that

I think MCP-UI in it's current state can fill that role very well, and that's not the only lens with which to view a SEP like this.

From what I can tell the main thing that this SEP does is put the official blessing of the MCP project on the existing underlying protocol that MCP-UI is already using. I think the better way would be to let MCP-UI and competing implementations cook for a little bit longer, rather than trying to get an officially sanctioned extension out the door and then iterate on that, which will cause a lot more churn.

For a non-trivial feature like this, I would expect an SEP that highlights more alternative usage scenarios and potentially operates on a more technology agonistic layer (e.g. it's very JS+iframe bound, so what about mobile or terminal UIs?), similar to the main MCP spec. Especially given the backdrop of the main MCP specification, which feels much more well-rounded and throughly considered (though in a few areas still incomplete), this SEP does not seem to meet the same bar.

Reading that from the perspective of someone that builds a LLM Chat UI[0] (and aims to be able to maintain that long-term) that heavily builds on MCP as an interoperability concept, reading what is proposed here and seeing how prescriptive it is in many aspects does not spark a lot of joy.

[0]: https://erato.chat

---

EDIT: From what I can tell I'm replying to one of the co-creators of MCP. So let me just ask quite directly: Do you think that the risk of proprietary sprawl in terms of MCP-UI alternatives is currently greater than prematurely standardizing a potentially incomplete version?
by chickensong | 2025-11-23 13:11:35+00:00
> I don't see any developer complaining about LLM steeling our job, or that LLM are infringing copyright and are bad for humanity

Not sure if you're just trolling, but um... just look at every AI thread for the last year.

GenAI and vibe coding aren't the same thing because the end product is different. While you can find art and poetry in code, generally, the code is an means to an end. It's more the medium than the message.

I don't want to completely discount genAI, because I think it has it's place, but it's also a pollutant. People value human feelings, originality, and authenticity, which are cornerstones of art. GenAI is not those things, and feels like a fake to many people. It's muzak vs music. The industry plant that looks good, but has no real talent.

Personally, I don't think LLMs are the death of developers. Most software is a big steaming pile, held together with band-aids and duct tape, and the demand for it is never ending. Any tools that help us improve on the current situation are welcome IMHO.

Artists, on the other hand, already have a hard enough time just scraping by. Many take on soulless work, making corporate stock art or editorial copy, just to pay the rent. It's not what they want to be doing, but at least it's using their skill set. GenAI is arguably fine for generating that kind of content, but now the artists are out of a job and probably will just stop being artists in order to survive. Software isn't going anywhere, but artists of all kinds are dwindling. GenAI isn't helping on that front.

Then there's the whole "reality" issue... Code is just code, but genAI is making it harder to tell what's real, which probably isn't helpful for society in general.
by stopbulying | 2025-11-23 13:13:22+00:00
(Ben Stiller (Night at the Museum,) is an actor who also helps out the United Nations. Owen Wilson (Drillbit Taylor,) is an Actor who also helps in his own special way.)

"JPMorgan processed over $1B for Jeffrey Epstein despite internal concerns over sex offender status: report" https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/jpmorgan-processed-over...

epstein jp morgan https://www.google.com/search?q=epstein+jp+morgan&oq=epstein...

> JPMorgan Chase was the primary bank for Jeffrey Epstein for over 15 years, during which time it handled more than $1 billion in transactions despite numerous internal red flags and concerns. The bank has since paid $365 million in settlements related to its association with him

"How J.P. Morgan enabled Jeffrey Epstein" https://www.npr.org/2025/09/09/nx-s1-5535548/how-j-p-morgan-...

> "At the peak, he had about $300 million in his accounts."

"Continuing Epstein Investigation, Wyden Releases New Analysis Detailing How Top JPMorgan Chase Executives Enabled Epstein’s Sex Trafficking Operation" (2015-11-20) https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/continui...

"Epstein's sex trafficking was aided by JPMorgan, a U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit says" (2022) https://www.npr.org/2022/12/30/1146221454/epstein-jpmorgan-v...
by jchw | 2025-11-23 13:14:21+00:00
A *PDF* with embedded JPEG 2000 data should, as far as I know, decode in modern browser PDF viewers. PDF.js and PDFium both are using OpenJPEG. But despite that, browsers don't currently support JPEG 2000 in general.

I'm saying this to explain how JPEG XL support in PDF isn't a silver bullet. Browsers already support image formats in PDF that are not supported outside of PDF.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-23 13:14:55+00:00
Collatz, busy-beavers, and algorithmic information theory are all related. To the extent they offer insight into the sparseness or density of irreducible complexity in the space of all computation.. this has many implications for what can be computed efficiently, what can be learned efficiently, program-synthesis, what can be analyzed "at a distance" without just trying it and potentially needing to wait forever, etc.

Whether it will say anything very significant practically or only philosophically is a different question. Maybe it is something like the discovery of transcendentals.. finding out that most of the number line won't have a tidy algebraic closed-form isn't exactly a make-or-break deal for the program of mathematics itself, and it also doesn't matter much to people who are doing engineering
by fragmede | 2025-11-23 13:15:00+00:00
This seems like a good place to drop Blue Sky's RFC on contact list sharing. Basically, they're got a way that you can share your contact list without sharing your contact list.

Through the magic of cryptography, there's now (maybe) a way to "encrypt" your contact list, upload it, the server can then find your contacts without decrypting it, and connect you with them.

That's not remotely technically accurate a way to describe what is happening under the hood, but the point is, you can share your contact list without sharing your contact list.

This magic is in RFC status from Blue Sky here: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/contact-import-rfc