MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buu700 | 2025-11-16 20:57:38+00:00
I'd be all for creating a separate category of child-friendly LLM chatbots or encouraging parents to ban their kids from unsupervised LLM usage altogether. As mentioned, I'm also not opposed to opt-out restrictions on mainstream LLMs.

"For the children" isn't and has never been a convincing excuse to encroach on the personal freedom of legal adults. This push for AI censorship is no different than previous panics over violent video games and "satanic" music.

(I know this comment wasn't explicitly directed at me, but for the record, I don't necessarily believe that all or even most "AI 'safety'" advocacy is in bad faith. It's psychologically a lot easier to consider LLM output as indistinguishable from speech made on behalf of its provider, whereas search engine output is more clearly attributed to other entities. That being said, I do agree with the parent comment that it's driven in large part out of self-interest on the part of LLM providers.)
by pjmlp | 2025-11-16 20:57:55+00:00
Except Windows is available on PC stores where humans can be talked in person for sorting out issues, while most Linux powered laptops have to be ordered online, with various degrees of missing functionality, with a black box when comes to sending them back for repairs.

Same applies to Apple, Chromebooks and Android pseudo laptops regarding stores available with out of the box experience, the latter two while using the Linux kernel aren't certainly GNU/Linux distributions.
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-16 20:57:57+00:00
More likely, what we will see is the decline of low effort projects. The JavaScript/ Typescript ecosystem has been plagued with such packages. But that’s more anomalous to the JS community than it is a systemic problem with open source in general.

So if fewer people are including silly dependencies like isEven or leftPad, then I see that as a positive outcome.
by maxbond | 2025-11-16 20:58:31+00:00
You can be skeptical of anything but I think it's silly to say that these "Not just A, but B" constructions don't strongly suggest that it's generated text.

As to why it matters, doesn't it matter when people lie? Aren't you worried about the veracity of the text if it's not only generated but was presented otherwise? That wouldn't erode your trust that the author reviewed the text and corrected any hallucinations even by an iota?
by maxbond | 2025-11-16 20:58:45+00:00
So petty as to lie about using AI or so petty as to call it out? Calling it out doesn't seem petty to me.

I intend to learn Zig when it reaches 1.0 so I was interested in this book. Now that I see it was probably generated by someone who claimed otherwise, I suspect this book would have as much of a chance of hurting my understanding as helping it. So I'll skip it. Does that really sound petty?
by chaps | 2025-11-16 20:59:05+00:00
Once did some programming/networking work for a company that did the networking of a office sharing building that Coinbase was running out of. Early in my work there I noticed that the company had its admin passwords written on a whiteboard -- visible from the hallway because they had glass for walls. So I sent them an email to ask that they remove it (I billed them for it).

Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.

What a time.
by lewis1028282 | 2025-11-16 20:59:10+00:00
I use socket activation instead of running reverse proxy with `CAP_NET_BIND`. Caddy supports socket binding, and can handle SSL certs. I now just log-in every week or so and run `journalctl --user -f --since "2025-11-09" --grep "error"` to check for anything going on.

https://github.com/eriksjolund/podman-caddy-socket-activatio...
by mopsi | 2025-11-16 20:59:15+00:00
The Kherson human safari leaves no other option to anyone. When Russian drone pilots have nothing better to show to their fans on the social media to raise funds, they are attacking men fixing a roof of a small home, elderly women returning from the city with grocery bags, people waiting at a bus stop, and in case you want to classify all of the former as disguised soldiers, they are attacking even stray dogs.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-11-16 20:59:35+00:00
If your product needs people to stop wearing makeup and agreeing that it's chauvinistic, it's dead in the water.

Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset, esp. the Apple Vision Pro which has pretty much nothing to do on it but watch movies and TV and use the laptop / desktop you already own
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-16 20:59:48+00:00
I have a question about this part:

> moving the entire hosting to CloudFlare that will do it for me ... nor do I want to route my visitors through tracking-enabled USA servers

Isn't there some EU equivalent to CloudFlare he can use?

It's hard to admit, but DDoS mitigation is an essential part of having even a simple website these days.
by roughly | 2025-11-16 21:00:22+00:00
Sure: yes, the true leftist answer is to abjure any and everything used by the enemy and sequester ourselves in glorious seclusion, but so long as we’re stuck in the machine, it’s nice to be able to carve parts of it out for ourselves.

It’s also nice, when and where available, to create the conditions to allow people to discover the way to our glorious commune on their own without giving them a purity test ahead of time, and for that kind of thing, I find uncensored information access and defanging corporate tools to be both laudable acts of praxis.
by wtcactus | 2025-11-16 21:00:52+00:00
As you might understand (or avoid to). Franco didn't wake up one day and decided to start a civil war out of nowhere. In the period of 1933-1936, there was major violence against the legitimately elected Right-Wing government from Marxist groups that adopted a revolutionary approach to take power in Spain:

"The defeat in the elections and its consequences led to disenchantment with parliamentarism and radicalization within the Socialists. The increasing militancy within the Socialist workers was followed by Francisco Largo Caballero's adopting a revolutionary Marxist rhetoric which justified revolutionism as a way to combat rising fascism, uncharacteristic of European social democratic mainstream and the reformist traditions of the PSOE.[69] The CNT adopted a similar rhetoric in the wake of the elections, threatening with a revolution if "Fascist tendencies" would win the elections.[70] Open violence occurred in the streets of Spanish cities, and militancy continued to increase,[71] reflecting a movement towards radical upheaval, rather than peaceful means as solutions.[72] A small insurrection by anarchists occurred in December 1933 in response to CEDA's victory, in which around 100 people died.[73]

[...]

Fairly well armed revolutionaries managed to take the whole province of Asturias, murdering numerous policemen, clergymen and civilians, destroying religious buildings including churches, convents and part of the university at Oviedo.[75] Rebels in the occupied areas proclaimed revolution for the workers and abolished the existing currency.[76] The uprising was crushed in two weeks by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War
by mccoyb | 2025-11-16 21:00:56+00:00
Sounds like a lot of FUD to me — if major projects balk at the emergence of new classes of tools, perhaps the management strategy wasn’t resilient in the first place?

Further: sitting down to discuss how your project will adapt to change is never a waste of time, I’m surprised you stated it like that.

In such a setting, you’re working within a trusted party — and for a major project, that likely means extremely competent maintainers and contributors.

I don’t think these people will have any difficulty adapting to the usage of these tools …
by jmmv | 2025-11-16 21:00:57+00:00
Yep, I thought so too! It’s a very interesting and fun topic.

So… I cannot resist redirecting you to a set of articles I wrote about two years ago on DOS and memory management, which I think covers some of the basic parts. The first one is https://open.substack.com/pub/blogsystem5/p/from-0-to-1-mb-i...
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-16 21:02:05+00:00
> Sure, you could use blob-util, but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks.

Use of an AI to write your code is also a form of dependency. When the LLM spits out code and you just dump it in your project with limited vetting, that's not really that different from vendoring a dependency. It has a different set of risks, but it still has risks.
by Grimblewald | 2025-11-16 21:02:06+00:00
How do you know?

I'm not trying to be recalcitrant, rather I am genuinly curious. The reason I ask is that no one talks like a LLM, but LLMs do talk like someone. LLMs learned to mimic human speech patterns, and some unlucky soul(s) out there have had their voice stolen. Earlier versions of LLMs of LLMs that more closely followed the pattern and structure of a wikipedia entry were mimicking a style that that was based of someone elses style and given some wiki users had prolific levels of contributions, much of their naturally generated text would register as highly likely to be "AI" via those bullshit ai detector tools.

So, given what we know of LLMs (transformers at least) at this stage it seems more likely to me that current speech patterns again are mimicry of someones style rather than an organically grown/developed thing that is personal to the LLM.
by nxobject | 2025-11-16 21:02:14+00:00
You're right: I wish OpenAI could find a way to "donate" GPT-2 or GPT-3 to the CHM, or some open archive.

I feel like that generation of models was around the point where we were getting pleasantly surprised by the behaviors of models. (I think people were having fun translating things into sonnets back then?)
by tyre | 2025-11-16 21:02:28+00:00
You’d need to prove harm, which is somewhat nebulous here.*

Matt Levine has a prescient and depressing quote about the only recourse for being being shareholder lawsuits:

> I find all of this so weird because of how it elevates finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as citizens, or as humans. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth as citizens. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies as shareholders. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.

* To be clear, I don’t think it is nebulous, and you’re right to feel harmed. But, legally, I don’t know the harm in “they didn’t respond to my emails” after there’s no concrete damage.
by thaumaturgy | 2025-11-16 21:05:22+00:00
I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a likely near-term outcome.

Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.

All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.

Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.

You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.

There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.

Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.

I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
by Syzygies | 2025-11-16 21:05:36+00:00
My gut, reading the HN title, was "half the time". I had to read the article, to see how many words piled up before he said that.

Of course, considering finite fields of prime power order, one might leap to the conclusion "a quarter of the time". One can adjoin "i" for prime powers p^n for half the primes and odd n.

Alas, this be wrong, for an amusing reason.
by jsight | 2025-11-16 21:06:31+00:00
Yeah, I'm still confused as to why so many people in "AI engineering" seem to think that MCPs are the key to everything.

They are great if you have a UI that you want and it needs a plugin system, obviously.

But the benefits become much more marginal for a developer of enterprise AI systems with predefined tool selections. They are actually getting overused in this space, if anything, sometimes with security as a primary casualty.
by qayxc | 2025-11-16 21:07:07+00:00
> With many of the good usecases of AI the end user doesn't know that ai exists and so it doesn't feel like there is AI present.

This! The best technology is the one that you don't notice and that doesn't get in the way. A prominent example is the failure of the first generation of smart phones: they only took off once someone (Apple) managed to the hide OS and its details properly from the user. We need the same for AI - chat is simply not a good interface for every use case.
by est31 | 2025-11-16 21:07:13+00:00
All information technology is killing privacy, deriving from the trend that it's getting easier to collect and copy data.

Of course it doesn't help that people tell their most secret thoughts to an LLM, but before ChatGPT people did that to Google.

The recent AI advancements do make it easier though to process large amounts of data that is already being collected through existing means, and distill them, which has negative consequences on privacy.

But the distillation power of LLMs can also be used for privacy preserving purposes, namely local inference. You don't need to go to recipe websites any more, or go to wikipedia, or stack overflow, but can ask your local model. Sadly though, the non-local ones are still distinguishably better than the locally running ones, and this is probably going to stay.
by slg | 2025-11-16 21:07:22+00:00
>"For the children" isn't and has never been a convincing excuse to encroach on the personal freedom of legal adults. This push for AI censorship is no different than previous panics over violent video games and "satanic" music.

But that wasn't the topic being discussed. It is one thing to argue that the cost of these safety tools isn't worth the sacrifices that come along with them. The comment I was replying to was effectively saying "no one cares about kids so you're lying if you say 'for the children'".

Part of the reason these "for the children" arguments are so persistent is that lots of people do genuinely want these things "for the children". Pretending everyone has ulterior motives is counterproductive because it doesn't actually address the real concerns people have. It also reveals that the person saying it can't even fathom someone genuinely having this moral position.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-16 21:07:41+00:00
This.

I wouldn't mind a technical person transparently using AI for doing the writing which isn't necessary their strength, as long as the content itself comes from the author's expertise and the generated writing is thoroughly vetted to make sure there's no hallucinationated misunderstanding in the final text. At the end of the day this would just increase the amount of high quality technical content available, because the set of people with both a good writing skill and a deep technical expertise is much narrower than just the later.

But claiming you didn't use AI when you did breaks all trust between you a your readership and makes the end result pretty much worthless because why read a book if you don't trust the author not to waste your time?
by nearbuy | 2025-11-16 21:07:58+00:00
> The main ones are that most people don't want to be mass murderers and actually doing it would be the fast ticket to Epic Retaliation.

The main thing preventing random nutcases from making nuclear weapons is they don't have access to the required materials. Restricting the instructions is unnecessary.

It would be a very different story if someone discovered a new type of WMD that anyone could make in a few days from commonly available materials, if only they knew the secret recipe.
by mwkaufma | 2025-11-16 21:08:09+00:00
Yes, but they said that in the context of a tailored language for persistent/HDD-backed data, where implicitly performance crosses the line into an additional measure of correctness, rather than an orthogonal one. ("to find live references means walking nearly the entire heap including the portions living in secondary storage, and now you're in a world of pain")

So the "increased cognitive overhead" is intrinsic to the problem domain, not an unforced defect of the language design. Overgeneralization in such a case would induce even worse overhead as there'd be no user-level way to fix perf.
by evanelias | 2025-11-16 21:08:21+00:00
Every DBMS handles errors slightly differently. In a sane world you shouldn't ever ignore errors from the database. It's unfortunate to hear that a Python MySQL client library had a bug that failed to expose errors properly in one specific situation 16 years ago, but that's not terribly relevant to today.

Postgres behavior with errors isn't even necessarily desirable -- in terms of ergonomics, why should every typo in an interactive session require me to start my transaction over from scratch?
by rangestransform | 2025-11-16 21:08:23+00:00
Having to test the AirPods with more standards compliant devices, having to waste time to tell customers to fuck off if their phone/laptop/toaster is not standards compliant, having to waste engineering time to investigate non compliant aliexpress phones/laptops/toasters, wasting time to implement additional functionality for Apple customers because it has to go into the spec first
by paulbjensen | 2025-11-16 21:08:32+00:00
I got rung in the UK I think a month ago from someone claiming to be from Coinbase. I told them I only had about £5 of Bitcoin cash in my account (which was true), and they immediately lost interest and said a forthcoming email would handle the matter.

They also asked if I had cold storage. I told them I had a fridge (also true).
by Crespyl | 2025-11-16 21:09:10+00:00
Hey, I've also used and loved Orpie!

I'm not extremely familiar with any of the ML family, but Eric Lippert had a blog series I followed for a while in which he was writing a Z-Machine in OCaml: https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/01/west-of-house/ I followed along but in Rust for a while, though I think he paused the project at some point and I lost steam.

I learned more about Rust (which, IIRC was first implemented in OCaml) than I did about OCaml, but it's always seemed like a nice language.
by culi | 2025-11-16 21:10:28+00:00
This map of Flock cameras[0] is pretty neat. It actually utilizes OpenStreetMap data. It was controversial but at some point in the last decade OSM decided to allow annotating surveillance cameras. You can add all sorts of characteristics including what they're mounted to and which direction they're facing. As well as the manufacturer which is what that map is based on.

The open-source project Every Door has been a really convenient on-the-go tool for contributing these annotations[1]

[0] https://banishbigbrother.com/flock-camera-map/

[1] https://every-door.app/
by doug_durham | 2025-11-16 21:10:45+00:00
This isn't an AI issue. It is a care issue. People shouldn't submit PRs to project where they don't care enough to understand the project they are submitting to or the code they are submitting. This has always been a problem, there is nothing new. The thing that is new is more people can get to a point where they can submit regardless of their care or understanding. A lot of people are trying to gild their resume by saying they contributed to a project. Blaming AI is blaming the wrong problem. AI is a a tool like a spreadsheet. Project owners should instead be working ways to filter out careless code more efficiently.
by rsynnott | 2025-11-16 21:12:02+00:00
... I mean, on what are you basing this assumption? Mass psychiatric institutionalisation has been phased out pretty much everywhere at this point; if your thesis is correct, how do you explain differing rates of homelessness (and in particular unsheltered homelessness, where the US more or less leads the developed world) between the US and other developed countries? Like, it seems more likely to be some other factor.

Ireland, for instance, had the highest rate of psychiatric institutionalisation in the western world in the 60s (some Warsaw Pact countries were likely higher). It was rapidly phased out in the 80s and early 90s. Homelessness (though a persistent problem since the 19th century) remained rather low until the early tens, then rose rapidly. I've never heard of anyone attributing this to the mental hospitals closing 30 years previously (this seems to be a uniquely American belief); it is generally attributed largely to _shortages of housing_ (itself due to the near-total collapse of the construction industry for a decade after the financial crisis).
by XorNot | 2025-11-16 21:13:42+00:00
Its weird how people keep saying the rise of AI generated content will "kill AI" as though the companies training models don't have complete archives of all the data they already scraped from the Internet.

It doesn't take all the text of the public Internet for someone to learn to talk, and all these companies are much more in the data curation business for the purposes of teaching models.

Scraping is to make them up to date on current events (and has obvious alternative sources), or the actions of the start up space which don't already have such datasets.