MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swapnilt | 2025-11-25 13:12:21+00:00
The headline reads like a therapy session report. 'What did they do?' Presumably: made more money. In seriousness, this is the AI industry's favorite genre—earnest handwringing about 'responsible AI' while shipping products optimized for engagement and hallucination. The real question is why users ever had 'touch with reality' when we shipped a system explicitly trained to sound confident regardless of certainty. That's not lost touch; that's working as designed.
by daylankifky | 2025-11-25 13:12:33+00:00
My professional activity spans several areas, from software deployment to creative disciplines. I have always struggled to explain how these pieces fit together.

To address this, I built a portfolio that includes a latent-space visualization of my projects. It finally gives me a way to show how the value of an interdisciplinary profile emerges.

I also released the code so others can generate similar visualizations for their own portfolios. The repository is linked on the page.

Feedback is welcome :)
by jrmg | 2025-11-25 13:12:42+00:00
Hardware and software are fungible.

Do you demand circuit schematics? Hardware description language source code for all the ICs? Does it matter if it’s a FPGA vs a custom IC? What about CAD files for the industrial design - some of that is ‘functional’ (camera lenses and antennas being obvious examples).

If you don’t require hardware description language source or circuit schematics, does your position change if it’s a microcontroller with firmware? The functionality could be outwardly identical to a fully ‘hardware’ IC or FPGA, down to pinout and timing (see, for example, the many projects ‘cloning’ obsolete and unavailable custom ICs with microcontrollers in the retrocomputing field).
by riazrizvi | 2025-11-25 13:13:00+00:00
This is exactly how natural language is meant to function, and the intervention response by OpenAI is not right IMO.

If some people have a behavior language based on fortune telling, or animal gods, or supernatural powers, picked up from past writing of people who shared their views, then I think it’s fine for the chatbot to encourage them down that route.

To intervene with ‘science’ or ‘safety’ is nannying, intellectual arrogance. Situations sometimes benefit from irrational approaches (think gradient descent with random jumps to improve optimization performance).

Maybe provide some customer education on what these systems are really doing, and kill the team that puts in response, value judgements about your prompts to give it the illusion you are engaging someone with opinions and goals.
by mrkeen | 2025-11-25 13:13:07+00:00
> Another criticism comes from functional programmers, who argue that you don’t need to maintain invariants and thus don’t need much information hiding if data is immutable.

Yep

> Information hiding also encourages people to create small, self-contained objects that “know how to handle themselves,” which leads directly into the topic of encapsulation.

This is where it all goes wrong. No module is an island. There's always relationships between different objects/modules/actors in your system.

Who delivers a letter: Postman or Letter? Who changes a light globe, Handyman or LightGlobe?

Things rarely handle themselves - and if they do, it's probably just a pure function call - so why use Objects?

If you start bending over backwards to implement Letter.deliver(Postman p) (and then make it "general" by changing it to IPostman) you'll never stand up straight again. What if I have a List<Letter>, where does the deliver() code go now?"

If you instead write Deliver(Postman p, Letter l), the opportunities to rewrite/refactor/batch just present themselves.
by kamaal | 2025-11-25 13:13:10+00:00
>>Between 1951 and 1992, the United States conducted 928 atomic tests at the Nevada Test Site about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of the city of Las Vegas.

Just how nuclear waste polluted is Nevada?

Surely ~1000 tests in one place can't be good. Wouldn't be surprised if people around there do get cancers.
by atq2119 | 2025-11-25 13:13:25+00:00
The counter-devil's advocate[0] is that consuming CSAM, whether real or not, normalizes the behavior and makes it more likely for susceptible people to actually act on those urges in real life. Kind of like how dangerous behaviors like choking seem to be induced by trends in porn.

[0] Considering how CSAM is abused to advocate against civil liberties, I'd say there are devils on both sides of this argument!
by swapnilt | 2025-11-25 13:13:28+00:00
Opus 4.5's scaling is impressive on benchmarks, but the usual caveats apply: benchmark saturation is real, and we're seeing diminishing returns on evals that test pattern-matching vs. genuine reasoning. The more relevant question: has anyone stress-tested this on novel problems or complex multi-step reasoning outside training data distributions? Marketing often showcases 'advanced math' and 'code generation' where the solutions exist in training data. The claim of 'reasoning improvement' needs validation on genuinely unfamiliar problem classes.
by Dquiroga | 2025-11-25 13:14:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Daniel. I’ve spent the last few years building internal tools and automations for companies like FINN and Personio. I built PUNKU.AI to solve a frustration I had with the current state of automation.

Right now, you generally have two choices: Manual: Dragging and dropping nodes in tools like Make/Zapier (reliable, but tedious for complex logic). "Magic" AI Agents: Giving a prompt to an agent and hoping it works (fast, but impossible to debug or trust with sensitive data).

PUNKU.AI is an attempt to bridge the gap. It uses an LLM to "architect" the workflow, but it outputs a fully editable visual node graph (JSON-based) that you can verify before running.

How it works: 1. The "Interview": Instead of taking a zero-shot prompt, the system acts proactively. It parses your request and asks clarifying questions to resolve ambiguity (e.g., "If the API returns a 404, should I retry or alert you via Slack?").

2. Graph Generation: It generates the logic, loops, and branching, visualizing it as a node graph. You can manually tweak connections if the LLM hallucinated a step, or ask it to regenerate specific parts. 3. Integrations: We are connecting to ~3,000 API endpoints. The agent handles the authentication handshake and schema mapping.

The Tech: We are focusing heavily on the "translation layer" between natural language and structured automation flows. The goal is to have the speed of a chat interface but the determinism of a state machine.

I’d love for you to try breaking it. Ask it to build something complex (loops, conditional logic) and let me know if the generated graph makes sense.

Link: https://www.punku.ai

Thanks!
by frabert | 2025-11-25 13:14:27+00:00
This has been a sore point in a lot of discussions regarding compiler optimizations and cryptographic code, how compilers and compiler engineers are sabotaging the efforts of cryptographers in making sure there are no side-channels in their code. The issue has never been the compiler, and has always been the language: there was never a way to express the right intention from within C (or most other languages, really).

This primitive we're trying to introduce is meant to make up for this shortcoming without having to introduce additional rules in the standard.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-11-25 13:15:34+00:00
The answer to AI use in schools breaking old teaching and evaluation methods isn't to cripple students, it's to create new assignments and evaluation methods.

One idea: Have students generate videos with their best "ELI5" explanations for things, or demos/teaching tools. Make the conciseness and clarity of the video video and the quality/originality of the teaching tools the grading criteria. Make the videos public, so classmates can compare themselves with their peers.

Students will be forced to learn the material and memorize it to make a good video. They'll be forced to understand it to create really good teaching tools. The public aspect will cause students to work harder not to feel foolish in front of their peers.

The beauty of this is that most kids these days want to be influencers, so they're likely to invest time into the assignment even if they're not interested in the subject.
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 13:15:40+00:00
Papers like this are fascinating engineering, but dangerous marketing.

They convince every Series A startup that they need a multi-region federated control plane for their 50 microservices. I spend half my time convincing my team not to emulate Google, because we don't have Google's scale problems—we have velocity problems.

Complexity is an asset for Google (it's a moat), but a liability for the rest of us. I just want a cluster that doesn't require a dedicated ops team to upgrade.
by alpinisme | 2025-11-25 13:15:59+00:00
In a world where some but not all programs are “diploma treadmills,” you would expect that the reputation of the bad credentials would go down and the good credentials would go up. In some sense if the credentials were really being used (and not just as a perfunctory first pass elimination), you’d expect the most elite programs to have the highest signal to noise ratio. But the market doesn’t seem to respond to changes in credentialing capability (by hiring more from programs that start focusing on the “right” things to test). Instead it’s really just a background check.
by windexh8er | 2025-11-25 13:16:14+00:00
> Once the glitches are eliminated, this workflow will be unstoppable.

"... unstoppable." - What? I'm genuinely curious. Do you think this type of video is enjoyable? Maybe one, or even two like this is palatable - but I don't see anything 1) interesting or new 2) that would make me want to watch this by choice.

And when everyone is swimming in a sea of this type of work I don't think most people will enjoy it, either. It's also too bad we aren't more cognizant of how we got here, either. All of the artists work that was stolen to generate those images and then the watt hours burned. I'm not saying these types of offerings are completely for naught, but I do think some of these services should be forced to put a few pre or post pended frames that show (like nutrition facts) the environmental impact including model inference and that copyright was violated to make it.
by squigz | 2025-11-25 13:16:41+00:00
> The point is that one-off LLM-generated projects don’t get support.

Just sounds like more headaches for maintainers and those of us who provide support for FOSS. 5 hours into trying to pin down an issue and the user suddenly remembers they generated some code 3 years ago.

> If a vibe-coder needs to solve a problem and their LLM can’t, they can hire a real developer. If a vibe-coded project gets popular and starts breaking, whoever decides to use it can pool a fund to hire real developers to fix it, probably by rewriting the entire thing from scratch.

Considering FOSS already has a funding problem, you seem very optimistic about this happening.
by M95D | 2025-11-25 13:16:45+00:00
> I use btrfs for my backups...

Say what?!?

I got burned too. I made a snapshot and "btrfs send" it by pipe to an xz archive. When I tried to restore, I got a CRC error (from "btrfs receive", not xz). Everything lost. There's no way to restore it now.
by ceayo | 2025-11-25 13:16:49+00:00
> We can limit the damage before it's too late.

Maybe we should begin by waiting to see the scale of said so-called damage. Right now, there have maybe been a few incidents, but there are no real rates on "oh x people kill themselves a year from ai" and as long as x is still that, an unknown variable, it would be foolish to speed through limiting everybody for what can be just a few people.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-25 13:17:54+00:00
My wife and I are both paid to work on AI products and we both think the whole thing’s only sorta useful in-fact. Not nothing, but… not that much, either.

I’m not worried about AI taking our jobs, I’m worried about the market crash when the reality of the various failed (… to actually reduce payroll) or would’ve-been-cheaper-and-better-without-AI initiatives the two of us have been working on non-stop since this shit started break through the hype of investment and the music stops.
by mrweasel | 2025-11-25 13:17:58+00:00
Apparently the largest atmospheric test done in Nevada was 74kT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbbob_Hood)

It's kinda hard to imagine why on earth you'd ever build a warhead larger than 100kT. At that point it's just destruction for the sake of destruction, not to win a war, but to ensure that everyone loses... Well, that is the point of MAD, but it just seems reckless and inhuman.
by nhatcher | 2025-11-25 13:18:11+00:00
As and old physicist and a computer programmer these days, I am so jealous of the things you can build these days "vibe coding". That someone with moderate knowledge of programming can build these things is fascinating.

Now, on the physics part, I would like to "see" the phase transition that you have in 2D. I don't know if that is missing from this simulation or if I am not looking at it with the correct eyes.
by leo_e | 2025-11-25 13:18:32+00:00
We learned this the hard way with "cold" backups stored in a literal safe.

We treated NVMe drives like digital stone tablets. A year later, we tried to restore a critical snapshot and checksums failed everywhere. We now have a policy to power-cycle our cold storage drives every 6 months just to refresh the charge traps.

It's terrifying how ephemeral "permanent" storage actually is. Tape is annoying to manage, but at least it doesn't leak electrons just sitting on a shelf.
by traceroute66 | 2025-11-25 13:19:54+00:00
> So did Ubuntu or Debian

According to Wikipedia, Debian has had apt since 1998.

My point is OpenBSD didn't have binary updates until well into the 2000's as mentioned above. Initially in 2017 with syspatch and the finally full coverage in 2019 when sysupgrade came along.

As you can see on some old OpenBSD Mailing List posts[1] there was a high degree of resistance to the very idea of binary updates. People even being called trolls when they brought up the subject[2] or being told they "don't understand the philosophy of the system"[3]

I just felt it was an important point of clarification on your original post. Yes, I agree, OpenBSD updates are painless ... now, today. But until very recent history they were far from painless.

[1] https://misc.openbsd.narkive.com/IOf20unK/openbsd-binary-upd... [2] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=117255609026625&w=2 [3] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=117256318700031&w=2
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-25 13:20:15+00:00
> Pretty sure it would downclock if i removed it. So it works without a fan, but not without a heatsink

The Raspberry Pi 4 will throttle performance at 80C (if I recall correctly) but it can work without a heatsink. I have a R.Pi 4 working without a passive cooler in an enclosure and it reports 55C-62C most of the time.

> I bet the keyboards have a heatsink for the Pis built in

You are right, both models use a heatsink. The PCB is also different, although the respective CPUs are standard Pi 4 or Pi 5.

Incidentally, the CPU in the R.Pi 400 has a higher clock rate than the standard R.Pi 4, so it performs better.
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-11-25 13:20:25+00:00
AI music is completely and utterly pointless, just like any other type of AI 'art'. Art is inherently a human activity, and moving the creation of it to computers removes the entire point of it. Maybe it could be OK if it was a small part of larger workflow, but even then it just feels gross.

Im not even completely against AI, i find them useful while coding and solving work problems, or even for explaining things. But it should stay far away from any art form.

But its most likely a lost battle. Looking at current improvements, i wont be surprised if in 5 to 10 years large parts of new movies and shows will be AI generated and it will be basically impossible to evade it all unless you stick to anything made before 2023 or so.
by iamcalledrob | 2025-11-25 13:22:18+00:00
I struggle to imagine existing Android apps being useful in a desktop form factor.

It's not just about touch vs mouse/keyboard, it's the whole interaction design philosophy.

And it's not as if you can say that getting the Android developer experience on desktop is going to entice developers. Compose is decent, but the actual Android system APIs make Win32 look brilliant. At least Win32 is stable.

For this to be viable, there has to be a bigger strategy than just "Android apps and APIs on a desktop" -- because neither of those are appealing.

Users and developers will just stick with the web.
by ArkhamMirror | 2025-11-25 13:22:45+00:00
I'm no dev. I can't even read code. I have NO idea what I'm doing. Last week I found out journalists have to upload sensitive data leaks to use investigative tools, and they have to pay for it, and that sucks. So I built an AI dev team to build a 100% local, 100% free version.

https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror
by devilslaughs | 2025-11-25 13:22:52+00:00
It’s that time of the year again, everyone’s hunting for discounts, limited-time deals, and that one item you’ve been keeping an eye on all year. You know the drill: tabs open everywhere, price tracker sites breaking under traffic, browser extensions that promise magic but fail right when The Deal drops.

So this year, I decided to build something different, something that actually works when I need it the most.

A personal price-alert system, powered by:

Python Zyte’s Automatic Extraction API An IFTTT mobile notification trigger And honestly? It ended up being one of the simplest, useful and most reliable holiday project I’ve made in a long time.

No HTML parsing. No complex CSS selectors. No brittle scrapers that break during peak traffic. Just a clean API call, structured product data, and a push notification when the price hits your set target.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-25 13:23:33+00:00
This is a rather poor article. It focuses on the human brain, but animals show a lot of intelligence; and many of the behavioural descriptions can be found in animals too, such as certain instinct behaviour (e. g. in female birds feeding offspring and so forth). So the whole term "preconfigured" is really weird applied here. It insinuates as if this is something special or unique or awesome. Well, ants also do many individual tasks, and also group task. For instance, they can even solve puzzles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao

I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain.

Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid.

> Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input

I don't really see it.

Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good.

> “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said

Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here.

> Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain

But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here?

> “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said.

See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though.

Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title:

"Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

does not fit the content.
by ben_w | 2025-11-25 13:24:41+00:00
I was about to say the same; suspiciously good, even. Feels like it's either memorised a bunch of SVG files, or has a search tool and is finding complete items off the web to include either in whole or in part.

Given that it also sometimes goes weird, I suspect it's more likely to be the former.

While the latter would be technically impressive, it's also the whole "this is just collage!" criticism that diffusion image generators faced from people that didn't understand diffusion image generators.
by thunky | 2025-11-25 13:24:59+00:00
> If you're so upset, fork it, revert the default branch name and maintain it yourself infinitely. That's definitely worth it just to keep a default branch name you like, right?

No idea how you got that impression from my comment. It sounds like you're the one that's upset.

I don't care what you name your branches. I do think it's dumb to tell other people what (not) to name their branch though. But definitely not something I feel compelled to rearrange my life over.
by ArkhamMirror | 2025-11-25 13:25:14+00:00
It's live right now. https://github.com/mantisfury/ArkhamMirror… Star if you think whistleblowers shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and modern tools.

GitHub Discussions are open for questions, bug reports, and “here’s how I used it on a real investigation” stories.

Early testers: Drag the tutorial files into the app, ask 'Who is Captain Silver?', and watch it link a handwritten note to an email payment. No setup hell—just works offline.
by mynti | 2025-11-25 13:25:33+00:00
".. Claude estimates that AI reduces task completion time by 80%. We use Claude to evaluate anonymized Claude.ai transcripts to estimate the productivity impact of AI."

What is this? So they take Claude and ask how much do you think you saved on time here? How can you take this seriously. ChatBots are easy to exaggerate, especially about something positive like this.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-25 13:25:47+00:00
Earlier on was only a couple of years if I remember correctly (obviously my time messing with Neopets is a little fuzzy hardly a core memory!)especially once it was acquired by Viacom.

Did a cursory search so take all this with a grain of salt, but looking at the timeline of when ads are introduced, then the acquisition, peak users, etc. I’d say most people were playing in a pretty serious corporate sandbox for most of its most relevant years.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-25 13:25:53+00:00
> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.

Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.