MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jameshilliard | 2025-11-02 02:28:23+00:00
> Say an operation was called off. I give it 50% odds between them finding a way to buy the devices to keep them from getting out into public vs 50% chance they just abandon them.

In all likelihood even if they were abandoned, probably nothing would happen since modern explosives tend to be designed to be rather stable unless intentionally detonated(an intelligence organization would want to design them this way to avoid detection due to accidental detonation of course).

> The angry pagers were being bought under the guise of legitimate companies. I find it very hard to believe that some gravel pit or factory who needed 20 and bought 200 on a "we pay you for 250 basis" didn't have their 20 go poof while sitting on the charging shelf in the office or whatever.

From what was reported it looks like Mossad essentially licensed the brand rights for the pagers through shell companies, manufactured the pagers themselves and then distributed them exclusively to the terrorists after infiltrating the terrorists hardware procurement process in some way. One would also likely assume only pagers actually connected to the network of the terrorists would get triggered.

> This whole thing is just too "meta targeted" for my taste in the same way that "signature strikes" were. It's not like these organizations lack the capacity to kill people the old fashioned way, heck it might even be cheaper.

I think there's a bit of a difference here, it's not like these pagers were random consumer devices actually being sold on the open market, they were in reality a highly exclusive device sold only to the terrorists through some sort of supply chain infiltration attack with what appears to be only the marketing material along with fake customer testimonials being distributed publicly to trick the buyers into thinking these were normal consumer devices. For such a precise attack against a terrorist organization it seems unlikely tradition methods would have been more effective for the cost of the operation. Most traditional methods would also likely incur far higher civilian casualties.
by rafabulsing | 2025-11-02 02:28:36+00:00
In my brief experiments with Flutter, I must admit I didn't enjoy the experience of using the autoformatting. Not knocking the author of the tool at all, I can definitely see how absurdly hard it is to create something that does what it is trying to do. And I'm not against autoformatting in general either. I think gofmt works much better, and that's in large part because it tries to do less.

With dart, I felt that very often, when time I saved a file after editing (which activated the formatter), the code would jump around a lot, even for very small edits sometimes. I actually found myself saving less often, as I found the sudden reorganizing kind of jarring and disorienting.

Most of this, I felt like came from this wish of making the formatter keep lines inside a given width. While that's a goal I appreciate, I've come to think is one of those things that's better done manually. The same goes for the use of whitespace in general, other than trivial stuff like consistent indentation. There's actual, important meaning that can be conveyed in how you arrange things which I think is more important than having it always be exactly mathematically consistent.

It's one of the reasons I still prefer ESLint over Prettier in JS land, also, even for stylistic rules. The fact that Prettier always rewrites the entire file from scratch with the parsed AST often ends up mangling some deliberate way that I'd arrange the code.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-11-02 02:29:40+00:00
BIG EDIT:

Because it's so trivially unsolvable, I had a quick look at the posted solution.

We're reading it wrong.

Take the first regex on the top row, one you included in your example:

[^X]*(DN|TE|NI)

You're supposed to fill that in from the bottom to the top.

In other words, the first letter goes immediately to the right of [^c]*[^R]*III.* - that square has to be a 'not X'. The hex immediately below it has to be an E, I, or N.
by adamisom | 2025-11-02 02:30:12+00:00
a CEO laying off 3% scales in absolute numbers as the company grows

should, therefore, large companies, even ones that succeed largely in a clean way by just being better at delivering what that business niche exists for, be made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people? keep in mind that people engage in voluntary business transactions because they want to be impacted (positively—but not every impact can be positive, in any real world)

what if its less efficient substitutes collectively lay off 4%, but the greater layoffs are hidden (simply because it's not a single employer doing it which may be more obvious)?

to an extent, a larger population inevitably means that larger absolute numbers of people will be affected by...anything
by array_key_first | 2025-11-02 02:30:32+00:00
Mechanics, and humans, are non-deterministic. Every mechanic works differently, because they have different bodies and minds.

LLMs are, of course, bad. Or not good enough, at least. But suppose they are. Suppose they're perfect.

Would I rather use an app or just directly interface with an LLM? The LLM might be quicker and easier. I know, for example, ordering takeout is much faster if I just call and speak to a person.
by zzzeek | 2025-11-02 02:31:48+00:00
What's scaring me the most about AI is that FOX News is now uncritically showing AI videos that portray fictitious Black people fraudulently selling food stamps for drugs, and they are claiming these videos are real.

AGI is not going to kill humanity, humanity is going to kill humanity as usual, and AI's immediate role in assisting this is as a tool that renders truth, knowledge, and a shared reality as essentially over.
by rexpop | 2025-11-02 02:32:04+00:00
There is something deeply disturbing about the commonality of the "paternalist" conception of government.

I've been troubled by the normalization of "daddy" and paternal government rhetoric, especially the "daddy's home" framing that's become so prevalent. This language isn't just colorful—it signals something genuinely dangerous about how we're being asked to relate to political authority.

When we accept government through a paternalistic lens, we're accepting a fundamentally anti-democratic premise: that citizens should be treated as dependents rather than as autonomous equals. This isn't new—fascist regimes have consistently used paternal imagery to justify concentrated power, from Stalin to Hitler to countless others. The "strong father" archetype is a proven tool for normalizing authoritarian control.

What's particularly troubling about the "daddy" rhetoric we're seeing is how it combines paternalism with threats of punishment and retribution. It invites a dynamic where citizens compete for approval from a leader who's positioned as both protector and disciplinarian—someone who will "spank" the nation for "misbehaving." This language erodes the principle that government authority should be accountable to the people, not the reverse.

Democracy requires citizens who see themselves as stakeholders in governance, not children waiting for a father figure to tell them what's best. When we accept government as "dad," we're tacitly accepting a hierarchy where some people are "favored children" (the in-group) and others are outsiders to be excluded or punished. History shows this path leads away from democracy.

We should resist this framing, not because strong leadership is bad, but because paternalism is incompatible with democratic equality and individual autonomy.
by cozzyd | 2025-11-02 02:33:30+00:00
There's a good reason for this. The average user has no idea and doesn't care what language some random distro-packaged program is written in. They want to be able to run ubxtool or gdal_calc or virt-manager or whatever without setting up a virtual environment. Python developers on the other hand should be adept at such things, should they choose to use a non-distro packaged version of something.

The tricky part is when "users" start using pip to install something because someone told them to.
by hunterpayne | 2025-11-02 02:33:32+00:00
My friend, the OP in this very thread has in multiple posts, made outright slanderous comments about C programmers. The reputation of the Rust community is very much the making of the Rust promoters. If you are seeing pushback, that's just the consequences of such behavior.

I also notice that these language debates are very much generational. That has a few consequences. First is that older devs have thicker skin. Second, older devs are more wary of the big promises made by Rust. Whether you like it or not, the push for Rust very much comes across as naivete as much as anything to older, more experienced devs who have seen this type of thing before.

You can't write a device driver without manipulating memory directly. A OS Kernel has to manipulate memory directly by definition. Most academic research into memory safe languages is mixed with a high amount of null results (meaning it doesn't work). Yet the Rust folks push it as the 'one true way'. Meanwhile, most Rust OpenSource projects are abandoned currently.

Its not hate, its pointing out track record and avoiding repeating past mistakes due to painful experiences in our youth. Your determination to repeat past mistakes doesn't come across as enlightenment like you think it does.
by liuliu | 2025-11-02 02:33:36+00:00
Note that busy_timeout is not applicable to SQLite in this case (the SQLITE_BUSY issued immediately, no wait in this case).

Also this is because WAL mode (and I believe only for WAL mode, since there is really no concurrent reads in the other mode).

The reason is because pages in WAL mode appended to a single log file. Hence, if you read something inside a BEGIN transaction, later wants to mutate something else, there could be another page already appended and potentially interfere with the strict serializable guarantee for WAL mode. Hence, SQLite has to fail at the point of lock upgrade.

Immediate mode solves this problem because at BEGIN time (or more correctly, at the time of first read in that transaction), a write lock is acquired hence no page can be appended between read -> write, unlike in the deferred mode.
by tennysont | 2025-11-02 02:33:45+00:00
It seems like the tl;dr is:

Cloudflare is helping to develop & eager to implement an open protocol called ARC (Anonymous Rate-Limited Credentials)

What is ARC? You can read the proposal here: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-yun-cfrg-arc-01.html#n...

But my summary is:

1. You convince a server that you deserve to have 100 tokens (probably by presenting some non-anonymous credentials)

2. You handshake with the server and walk away with 100 untraceable tokens

3. At anytime, you can present the server with a token. The server only knows

a. The token is valid b. The token has not been previously used

Other details (disclaimer, I am not a cryptographer):

- The server has a public + public key for ARC, which is how it knows that it was the one to issue the tokens. It's also how you know that your tokens are in the same pool as everyone else's tokens.

- It seems like there's an option for your 100 tokens to all be 'branded' with some public information. I assume this would be information like "Expires June 2026" or "Token Value: 1 USD", not "User ID 209385"

- The client actually ends up with a key which will generate the 100 tokens in sequence.

- Obviously the number 100 is configurable.

- It seems like there were already schemes to do this, but providing only one token (RFC 9497, RFC 9474) but I'm not sure how popular those were.
by lazide | 2025-11-02 02:33:50+00:00
If you read the Koran and Hadiths, there are numerous statements about the true Muslims duty being to spread Islam - at the point of the sword being a well supported one, scripture wise.

Abu Bakr [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr] and even Mohammed himself [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_expeditions_of_Muhamma...].

It has never been a particularly ‘turn the other cheek’ religion.
by never_inline | 2025-11-02 02:34:43+00:00
You foreigners read first few paragraphs of wikipedia article about caste and never stopped talking about it.

In practice most of Brahmins have been peasant agriculturists, teachers and clerics for centuries, and temple priests have been deservedly pretty poor unless they also had inherited land.

The current PM of India is from what is considered as "other backward caste".

Just noting it, so that your overly reductive american journalism won't convince you that India is a feudalist society where 5% "temple staff" rule over the 95% peasants or whatever. The caste system is mostly limited to ritual avtism and some nepotism (which happens among boomers across all castes but younger ones don't care).
by quuxplusone | 2025-11-02 02:34:55+00:00
"Move" in the sense of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3106110/what-is-move-sem...

Now, if you don't know what "move semantics" is, then "lvalues can't be moved from" isn't terribly helpful, and if you do then it's tautological, so I'm not saying you're wrong to criticize. :) But in a C++ context, "move" does have a single specific meaning — the one he's using properly if opaquely-to-non-C++ers.
by epistasis | 2025-11-02 02:35:19+00:00
OH! Thank you for pointing out the error! I seem to have pasted the wrong link, and am not on my computer that I was doing the searching on before... please accept this short book chapter instead, though it is far more dry than the page I remember reading before.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK385529/

Apologies!
by spacechild1 | 2025-11-02 02:35:32+00:00
> OP said "for me to reason about it", not for the LLM to reason about it.

But that's what I meant! Just recently I asked an LLM about a weird backtrace and it pointed me the supposed source of the issue. It sounded reasonable and I spent 1-2 hours researching the issue, only to find out it was a total red herring. Without the LLM I wouldn't have gone down that road in the first place.

(But again, there have been many situations where the LLM did point me to the actual bug.)
by lukeschlather | 2025-11-02 02:35:58+00:00
I think you're confusing "more intelligence means you have to have more values" with "more intelligence means you have to have morally superior values."

The point is, you're unlikely to have a system that starts out with the goal of making paperclips and ends with the goal of killing all humans. You're going to have to deliberately program the AI with a variety of undesirable values in order for it to arrive in a state where it is suited for killing all humans. You're going to have to deliberately train it to lie, to be greedy, to hide things from us, to look for ways to amass power without attracting attention. These are all hard problems and they require not just intelligence but that the system has very strong values - values that most people would consider evil.

If, on the other hand, you're training the AI to have empathy, to tell the truth, to try and help when possible, to avoid misleading you, it's going to be hard to accidentally train it to do the opposite.
by pols45 | 2025-11-02 02:36:06+00:00
It is not decay. People are just more conscious than previous generations ever were about how the world works. And that leads to confusion and misunderstandings if they are only exposed to herd think.

The chicken doesn't understand it has to lay a certain number of eggs a day to be kept alive in the farm. It hits its metrics because it has been programmed to hit them.

But once it gets access to chatgpt and develops consciousness of how the farm works, the questions it asks slowly evolve with time.

Initially its all fear driven - how do we get a say in how many eggs we need to lay to be kept alive? How do we keep the farm running without relying on the farmer? etc etc

Once the farm animals begins to realize the absurdity of such questions, new questions emerge - how come the crow is not a farm animal? why is the shark not used as a circus animal? etc etc

And thro that process, whose steps cannot be skipped the farm animal begins to realize certain things about itself which no one, especially the farmer, has any incentive of encouraging.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-02 02:36:10+00:00
What problem is this trying to solve exactly?

If a computer (or “agent” in modern terms) wants to order you a pizza it can technically already do so.

The reason computers currently can’t order us pizza or book us flights isn’t because of a technical limitation, it’s because the pizza place doesn’t want to just sell you a pizza and the airline doesn’t want to just sell you a flight. Instead they have an entire payroll of people whose salaries are derived from wasting human time, more commonly know as “engagement”. In fact those people will get paid regardless if you actually buy anything, so their incentive is often to waste more of your time even if it means trading off an actual purchase.

The “malicious” uses of AI that this very article refers to are mostly just that - computers/AI agents acting on behalf of humans to sidestep the “wasting human time” issue. The fact that agents may issue more requests than a human user is because information is intentionally not being presented to them in a concise, structured manner. If Dominos or Pizza Hut wanted to sell just pizzas tomorrow they can trivially publish an OpenAPI spec for agents to consume, or even collaborate on an HPOP protocol (Hypertext Pizza Ordering Protocol) to which HPOP clients can connect (no LLMs needed even). But they don’t, because wasting human time is the whole point.

So why would any of these companies suddenly opt into this system? Companies that are after actual money and don’t profit from wasting human time are already ready and don’t have to do anything (if an AI agent is already throwing Bitcoin or valid credit card details at you to buy your pizzas, you are fine), and those that do have zero incentive to opt in since they’d be trading off “engagement” for old-school, boring money (who needs that nowadays right?).
by webnrrd2k | 2025-11-02 02:36:58+00:00
Re: likelyness of hothouse earth scenario: I don't think that the clathrate gun hypothesis [0] was ever really off the table. It's the thing that has me the most worried about the long-term future, both for myself and my children.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
by roenxi | 2025-11-02 02:37:56+00:00
The standing world order is already dead since well before AI, it ended back in 2010s in terms of when the US had an opportunity to maybe resist change and we're just watching the inevitable consequences play out. They no longer have the economic weight to maintain control over Asia even assuming China is overstating their income by 2x. The Ukraine war has been a bloodier path than we needed to travel to make the point, but if they can't coerce Russia there is an open question of who they can, Russia isn't a particularly impressive power.

With that backdrop it is hard to see what impact AI is supposed to make to people who are reliant on US hegemony. They probably want to find something reliable to rely on already.
by richard_todd | 2025-11-02 02:38:32+00:00
Nah, I called out redox and another commenter pointed out ripgrep as an even better example of what I’d prefer to see, and those are also by what I would call rust enthusiasts. I don’t think of them as a monolithic group.

Where we disagree is I would not call injecting rust into an established project “writing a better version”. I would love it if they did write a better version, so we could witness its advantages before switching to it.
by tennysont | 2025-11-02 02:40:27+00:00
I think the idea would be that you ask your credit card to convert $10 into 10 untraceable tokens, and then spend them one at a time. You do a handshake dance with the credit card company so you walk away with tokens that only you know, and you have assurance that the tokens are in the same pool as everyone else who asked for untraceable tokens from that credit card company.

Then you can go and spend them freely. The credit card company (and maybe ever third parties?) can verify that the tokens are valid, but they can't associate them with a user. Assuming that the credit card company keeps a log, they can also verify that a token has never been used before.

In some sense, it's a light-weight and anonymous block chain.
by simonw | 2025-11-02 02:40:43+00:00
I'm still not 100% sure I understand what a symlink in a git repository actually does, especially across different operating systems. Maybe it's fine?

Anthropic say "put @AGENTS.md in your CLAUDE.md" file and my own experiments confirmed that this dumps the content into the system prompt in the same way as if you had copied it to CLAUDE.md manually, so I'm happy with that solution - at least until Anthropic give in and support AGENTS.md directly.
by hedora | 2025-11-02 02:41:25+00:00
But, why do we want to tie the agent to the user’s identity?

The interface the user wants is “I pay for and obtain pizza”. The interface the pizzaria wants is “I obtain payment via credit card, and send a pizza to some physical location”.

It doesn’t matter who the agent that orders the pizza is acting on behalf of, or if there is an agent, or if some third party indexed the pizzaria menu, then some anarcho-crypto syndicate based in the White House decided to run an auction, and buy this particular pizza for this particular person.
by hollerith | 2025-11-02 02:41:41+00:00
The gaping hole in that analogy is that the scientists at Los Alamos could (and did) calculate the explosive power of the first nuclear detonation before the detonation. In contrast, the AI labs have nowhere near the level of understanding of AI needed to do a similar calculation. Every time a lab does a large training run, the resulting AI might end up being vastly more cognitively capable than anyone expected provided (which will often be the case) that the AI incorporates substantial design changes not found in any previous AI.

Parenthetically, even if it were known by AI researchers how to determine (before unleashing the AI on the world) whether an AI would end up with a dangerous level of cognitive capabilities, most labs would persist in creating and deploying a dangerous AI (basically because AI skeptics have been systematically removed from most of the AI labs very similar to how in 1917 the coalition in control of Russia started removing from the coalition any member skeptical of Communism), so there would remain a need for a regulatory regime of global scope to prevent the AI labs from making reckless gambles that endanger everyone.
by simonw | 2025-11-02 02:41:42+00:00
I really like this take on MCP: https://blog.sshh.io/i/177742847/mcp-model-context-protocol

> Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway that provides a few powerful, high-level tools [...] In this model, MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way.
by reverendjames | 2025-11-02 02:42:24+00:00
Trying to make them look interesting is a bad idea, tried numerous times in the past. The best a designer can do is to make them disappear and not draw your eye. Trying to make them look interesting generally isn't the way to go. It's been tried and abandoned in California and numerous other places. I'd add some citations, but most writing about transmission lines is internal to the companies building and maintaining them. You can't make them into a beautiful sculpture because you ultimately need their utility of supporting the conductors, and that hardware is difficult to make aesthetically pleasing.