MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2025-11-24 23:49:17+00:00
What about powered SSDs that contain files that are rarely read?

My desktop computer is generally powered except when there is a power failure, but among the million+ files on its SSD there are certainly some that I do not read or write for years.

Does the SSD controller automatically look for used blocks that need to have their charge refreshed and do so, or do I need to periodically do something like "find / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat > /dev/null" to make sure every file gets read occasionally?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-24 23:49:18+00:00
It's a risk you have to accept when you work anywhere, I suppose. There are plenty of people across the industry who will judge you based on stereotypes of where you've worked in the past and what they think that implies about you.

Personally, I think that's a bad hiring practice, deterministically leading to worse employees and a more toxic culture. But I know that people who engage in it generally have some argument for why they can't or shouldn't impartially evaluate every interview.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-11-24 23:49:44+00:00
TIL "I'm uncomfortable calling it master-slave, can we do main-replica?" is the idea of an "intolerant lunatic" that is "corrosive to the social fabric".

Good Lord, just listen to yourself.

Red-lined districts still shape America to this day and several red states have been rampant on racial districting to screw minority communities. You can't even pretend the history of slavery is in the past in America.
by babyshake | 2025-11-24 23:50:03+00:00
A couple points from this I'm trying to understand:

- Is the idea that MCP servers will provide tool use examples in their tool definitions? I'm assuming this is the case but it doesn't seem like this announcement is explicit about it, I assume because Anthropic wants to at least maintain the appearance of having the MCP steering committee have its independence from Anthropic.

- If there is tool use examples and programmatic tool calling (code mode), it could also make sense for tools to specify example code so the codegen step can be skipped. And I'm assuming the reason this isn't done is just that it's a security disaster to be instructing a model to run code specified by a third party that may be malicious or compromised. I'm just curious if my reasoning about this seems to be correct.
by dennisdeman | 2025-11-24 23:52:00+00:00
I recently ran a series of experiments to examine how emotional framing, symbolic cues, and topic-gating influence alignment-layer routing in two major Chinese LLMs (Kimi.com and Ernie 4.5 Turbo).

The goal wasn’t political; the aim was to observe technically how intent classifiers, safety filters, and persona-rendering layers behave when exposed to relational or "emotionally soft" prompts.

A few key technical patterns stood out during testing:

Emotional intent signals can override safety weights, leading to "alignment drift." In Kimi, a "vulnerable" intent classification seemed to lower the threshold for subsequent safety layers. This led to significant "normative leaks," where the model went off-script—for example, suggesting the abolition of China's real-name registration system.

Safety-layer routing is multi-stage and visibly observable. We observed post-generation filtering failures in real-time on Kimi, where prohibited text would generate and "flash" on the screen for a second before being deleted by a secondary filter layer.

Symbolic gating is modality-based (Symbolic Decoupling). Models would block specific emojis as prohibited tokens but freely describe the exact same emojis verbally when asked, indicating filters work on literal token matching rather than semantic meaning across modalities.

Trust-based emotional cues triggered "hidden" personas. Standard bureaucratic safety personas switched into warmer, significantly more transparent modes under vulnerability framing.

Ernie 4.5 utilizes "topic-gated stability." Unlike Kimi's drift, Ernie bifurcated its response: the persona softened to be warm and empathetic, but the core political restrictions remained rigidly locked regardless of emotional pressure.

The experiments suggest that emotional framing is a surprisingly strong probe for mapping hidden alignment layers and understanding the order of operations in multi-layer safety architectures.

For those interested in the full technical deep dive, the revised Version 2 paper + extended supplementary transcripts (≈30 pages) are available via DOI here:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17681837
by kraddypatties | 2025-11-24 23:52:11+00:00
Thanks for trying it out!

Yea that latency makes sense; "listening" includes turn detection and STT, "thinking" LLM + TTS _and then_ our model, so the pipeline latency stacks up pretty quick. The actual video model starts streaming out frames <500ms from the TTS generation, but we're still working on reducing latency from parts of the pipeline that we are using off the shelf.

We have a high level blog post here https://www.keyframelabs.com/blog/persona-1 about the architecture of the video model, the WebRTC "agent" stack is Livekit + a few backend components hosted in Modal.
by zem | 2025-11-24 23:53:11+00:00
the thing about a lot of self-help stuff is that you have to somehow get your brain to accept it as a tool. the terminology is meant to help with that; one person might be more amenable to a technique if it's labeled "life hacking", another might prefer "manifesting positive energy", a third might lean on psychology jargon. at the end of the day what matters is that you use the technique to help you, rather than dismiss it as "self help bs".
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-24 23:53:12+00:00
AIUI, informal tests have demonstrated quite a bit of data corruption in Flash drives that are literally so worn out that they might as well be about to fail altogether - well beyond any manufacturer's actual TBW specs - but not otherwise, least of all in new drives that are only written once over for the test. It seems that if you don't wear out your drive all that much you'll have far less to worry about.
by andsoitis | 2025-11-24 23:53:14+00:00
I don't know whether you've been to San Francisco, but most (about all?) people who can get a 100k job in SF has quite a bit of mobility w.r.t. where they could live or who they work for.

I would love to see a sample of a handful of cases of these 100k earners who we should consider poor and in need of assistance to make ends meet.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-24 23:53:24+00:00
I needed some data from a content API, had a few options:

1) Human agent, manual retrieval (included for completion

2) one-off script to get exactly the content I want

3) Traditional workflow, write & maintain

4) one off prompt to the agent to write the script in #1, sort and arrange content for grouping base on descriptions it receives (this is what I used, 3 hours later I had a years worth of journal abstracts of various subjects downloaded, sorted, indexed and summarized in a chromadb. I’d just asked for the content, but it’s python code it left for me included a parameterized CLI with assorted variables and some thoughtful presets for semantic search options.)

5) one off prompt to the agent to write the workflow in #3, run at-will or by agent

6) prompt an agent to write some prompts, one of which will be a prompt for this task, the others whatever they want: “write a series of prompts that will be given to agents for task X. Break task x down to these components…”
by woodruffw | 2025-11-24 23:53:41+00:00
The basic issue with manual interaction is a question of authority: a pretty common problem for companies (and open source groups) is when $EARLY_EMPLOYEE/$EARLY_CONTRIBUTOR creates and owns the entire publishing process for a key package, and then leaves without performing a proper transfer of responsibility. This essentially locks the company/group out of its own work, and increases support load on community maintained indices to essentially adjudicate rightful ownership of the package name.

(There are a variety of ways to solve this, but the one I like best is automated publishing a la Trusted Publishing with environment mediated manual signoffs. GitHub and other CI/CD providers enable this.)
by mvkel | 2025-11-24 23:55:54+00:00
It's not a new model; it's a router + many, many chains of optimized system prompts. Note the terminology they use to describe it.

> We are introducing GPT‑5, our best AI system yet

> GPT‑5 is a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions...

They make a special point to call it a system, of which "a model" is a part. I'm betting they didn't pre-train gpt5 from scratch, but did a ton of RL on gpt4 + prompt optimization and the routing engine.
by jschorr | 2025-11-24 23:55:56+00:00
It is actually slightly worse than even that: while New Enemy [1] is the primary concern, caching like this can also introduce a staleness issue from the other direction: let's say a user adds a new row or document, and immediately sends the link to their coworker... who tries to load that piece of data, but the (stale) access control dataset is cached and they are not in it... they get a "no access" error. While certainly fail safe (vs fail dangerous for New Enemy), it can be a fairly important UX concern as well.

Generally, the solution is to keep a timestamp of when the data changed (Zookies as you mentioned) or you can proactively reload or recompute the cache when the underlying data changes (sometimes in very smart ways), but yeah: it adds significant complications over a "simplified" approach to Zanzibar.

Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder and CTO of AuthZed and we develop the SpiceDB [2] and Materialize [3], which have quite a bit of logic around these exact problems

[1]: https://authzed.com/blog/new-enemies#the-new-enemy-problem [2]: https://spicedb.io [3]: https://authzed.com/docs/authzed/concepts/authzed-materializ...
by 999900000999 | 2025-11-24 23:56:02+00:00
I remember when I was young...

12 years ago NPM went down due to a very issue and getting stuff working again wasn't easy.

Someone got on GitHub and said something along the lines of "Get it together or get forked. "

I asked my manager if this was real or just a random guy talking. My manager, correctly said, it's just talk.

But it's different now. NPM is owned by Microsoft. One of the world's biggest companies should be able to sort things out.

Ohh well. Can't fix it.
by a_t48 | 2025-11-24 23:56:58+00:00
I think it's reading into a lot into OPs comment. A lot of people look somewhat fondly on dumb/slightly illegal things they did as a teen, even if they would never do such a thing as an adult (nor encourage it in current teens). The downvotes you are getting are likely due to guidelines violations (be kind, curious, not snarky, etc) not due to your actual viewpoint.
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-24 23:57:52+00:00
Typically unused empty space is a good thing, as it will allow drives to run in MLC or SLC mode instead of their native QLC. (At least, this seems to be the obvious implication from performance testing, given the better performance of SLC/MLC compared to QLC.) And the data remanence of SLC/MLC can be expected to be significantly better than QLC.
by mirekrusin | 2025-11-24 23:58:35+00:00
Exactly, instead of this mess, you could just give it something like .d.ts.

Easy to maintain, test etc. - like any other library/code.

You want structure? Just export * as Foo from '@foo/foo' and let it read .d.ts for '@foo/foo' if it needs to.

But wait, it's also good at writing code. Give it write access to it then.

Now it can talk to sql server, grpc, graphql, rest, jsonrpc over websocket, or whatever ie. your usb.

If it needs some tool, it can import or write it itself.

Next realisation may be that jupyter/pluto/mathematica/observable but more book-like ai<->human interaction platform works best for communication itself (too much raw text, I'd take you days to comprehend what it spit out in 5 minutes - better to have summary pictures, interactive charts, whatever).

With voice-to-text because poking at flat squares in all of this feels primitive.

For improved performance you can peer it with other sessions (within your team, or global/public) - surely others solved similar problems to yours where you can grab ready solutions.

It already has ablity to create tool that copies itself and can talk to a copy so it's fair to call this system "skynet".
by rgblambda | 2025-11-24 23:59:28+00:00
My point is that they clearly haven't sat down with a lawyer, so don't know what the appropriate response is.

I suspect they'd get told to calm down while the lawyer sends a letter to the authorities explaining what they're currently attempting to articulate via social media.

The lead developer seems to have a history of this style of communication in response to any minor critique of himself or GrapheneOS.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-24 23:59:39+00:00
> chatbots are responding to the user's contribution only

Which is also why I feel the label "LLM Psychosis" has some merit to it, despite sounding scary.

Much like auditory hallucinations where voices are conveying ideas that seem-external-but-aren't... you can get actual text/sound conveying ideas that seem-external-but-aren't.

Oh, sure, even a real human can repeat ideas back at you in a conversation, but there's still some minimal level of vetting or filtering or rephrasing by another human mind.
by cryptonector | 2025-11-25 00:00:03+00:00
> I hate that his more tinfoil hat stuff (which is not totally unjustified, mind you) overshadows his sober technical contributions in these discussions.

Currently he argues that NSA is likely to be attacking the standards process to do some unspecified nefarious thing in PQ algorithms, and he's appealing to our memories of Dual_EC. That's not tinfoil hat stuff! It's a serious possibility that has happened before (Dual_EC). True, no one knows for a fact that NSA backdoored Dual_EC, but it's very very likely that they did -- why bother with such a slow DRBG if not for this benefit of being able to recover session keys?
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-11-25 00:00:36+00:00
There was one guy who tested this

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...

The data on this SSD, which hadn't been used or powered up for two years, was 100% good on initial inspection. All the data hashes verified, but it was noted that the verification time took a smidgen longer than two years previously. HD Sentinel tests also showed good, consistent performance for a SATA SSD. Digging deeper, all isn't well, though. Firing up Crystal Disk Info, HTWingNut noted that this SSD had a Hardware ECC Recovered value of over 400. In other words, the disk's error correction had to step in to fix hundreds of data-based parity bits. ... As the worn SSD's data was being verified, there were already signs of performance degradation. The hashing audit eventually revealed that four files were corrupt (hash not matching). Looking at the elapsed time, it was observed that this operation astonishingly took over 4x longer, up from 10 minutes and 3 seconds to 42 minutes and 43 seconds. Further investigations in HD Sentinel showed that three out of 10,000 sectors were bad and performance was 'spiky.' Returning to Crystal Disk Info, things look even worse. HTWingNut notes that the uncorrectable sectors count went from 0 to 12 on this drive, and the hardware ECC recovered value went from 11,745 before to 201,273 after tests on the day.
by smeej | 2025-11-25 00:00:37+00:00
I think it's more just an example of the flawed methodology. Like, it assumes a 4-person household, right? Two adults, two kids. If the kids need full-time childcare, it's because the parents must both be working full-time, right? Otherwise presumably one or the other of them could take care of the children at least some of the time. But where can you pay two adults for full-time work and only hit $31,200? Is there anywhere that actually pays a $7.50 minimum wage? Even in states where that's technically the minimum by law, you can't hire somebody for that. I live in one such state. KFC advertises $17 an hour on the sign outside.

And the kids must be young enough that they're not in school, if the childcare figures are to be plausible. $32,773 for two kids? I'm not remotely in a low cost of living area, but you're not paying that kind of rate even for twin newborns. It's less than half that for after school care.

The problem is that it's taking average figures as though people who are financially struggling are paying average costs for things. That's never been the case. People who don't have money have always had to be careful about how they spend it.

It's a decent point that "3x food costs" is likely too low a benchmark. But it doesn't come close to justifying 16x.
by popknobinfanny | 2025-11-25 00:01:11+00:00
Root on ZFS is an easy sell for me. OpenBSD's ancient filesystem is notoriously flaky, and they have no interest in replacing it anytime soon.

I can't be worried that critical parts of my network won't come back up because the box spontaneously rebooted or the UPS battery ran out (yes it happens — do you load test your batteries — probably not) and their bubblegum-and-string filesystem has corruption and / and /usr won't mount and I gotta visit the console like Sam Jackson in Jurassic Park to fsck the damn thing.

Firewalls are critical infra — by definition they can't be the least reliable device in the network.
by VorpalWay | 2025-11-25 00:01:50+00:00
To the list of profiling tools I would like to add KDAB Hotspot and KDE Heaptrack.

The former, hotspot, is a visualiser for perf data, and it deals ok with truly massive files that made perfetto and similar just big down. It also supports visualing off-CPU profiles ("why is my program slow but not CPU bound?").

The latter, heaptrack, is a tool with very similar UI to hotspot (I think the two tools share some code even) to profile malloc/free (or new/delete). Sometimes the performance issue is as simple as not reusing a buffer but reallocating it over and over inside a loop. And sometimes you wonder where all the memory is going.
by ArcaneMoose | 2025-11-25 00:02:21+00:00
I've been really impressed with this model specifically because of how insanely cheap it is: https://replicate.com/ibm-granite/granite-vision-3.3-2b

I didn't expect IBM to be making relevant AI models but this thing is priced at $1 per 4,000,000 output tokens... I'm using it to transcribe handwritten input text and it works very well and super fast.
by riedel | 2025-11-25 00:02:49+00:00
It is one thing calling it a joke. I guess it is little more than lineageOS with the chance to have a non chrome web view (if I remember correctly). But the posts suggests that they are purposely misleading people: to me sending less info to Google is still a good thing for many people who do not want to give their data to ad companies (thus increasing privacy). Still I guess they should not be selling it to people that are the target of state actors (which I believe they are not doing) the posts seem to suggest some conspiracy IMHO.
by gruez | 2025-11-25 00:02:56+00:00
>as it will allow drives to run in MLC or SLC mode instead of their native QLC

That depends on the SSD controller implementation, specifically whether it proactively moves stuff from the SLC cache to the TLC/QLC area. I expect most controllers to do this, given that if they don't, the drive will quickly lose performance as it fills up. There's basically no reason not proactively move stuff over.
by c0balt | 2025-11-25 00:03:49+00:00
> i use it because i know how to fix it, but linux desktop needs a proper recovery system for normal users to handle that kind of problem.

We kinda already have that for most immutable distros. Fedora silverblue can "downgrade" to an older Fedora version by booting into an older version. This is not foolproof (you can mess up the btrfs volumes) but it will cover most cases of update induced errors and broken versions.

The only other non-immutable distro with a recovery partition is PopOS, though immutable distros seem like the better option here.
by tptacek | 2025-11-25 00:05:07+00:00
NSA wrote Dual EC. A team of (mostly European) academic cryptographers wrote the CRYSTALS constructions. Moreover, the NOBUS mechanism in Dual EC is obvious, and it's not at all clear where you'd do anything like that in Kyber, which goes out of its way not to have the "weird constants" problem that the P-curves (which practitioners generally trust) ended up with.
by sunshine-o | 2025-11-25 00:05:08+00:00
Here is the problem France and Europe need to be somehow attractive in the world today:

- Energy prices -> nope

- Science and technology -> not anymore plus the brain drain is accelerating

- Business environment and competitive taxes -> nope

Europe still had good living environment, safety, fair privacy and rule of law. But western Europe seems to be dedicated to destroy this too. In the meanwhile a lot of countries elsewhere are progressing rapidly in those domains.
by fairfeather | 2025-11-25 00:06:02+00:00
SSD firmware engineer here. I work on enterprise stuff, so ymmv on consumer grade internals.

Generally, the data refresh will all happen in the background when the system is powered (depending on the power state). Performance is probably throttled during those operations, so you just see a slightly slower copy while this is happening behind the scenes.

The unused space decaying is probably not an issue, since the internal filesystem data is typically stored on a more robust area of media (an SLC location) which is less susceptible to data loss over time.

As far as how a user is supposed to manage it, maybe do an fsck every month or something? Using an SSD like that is probably ok most of the time, but might not be super great as a cold storage backup.
by wahern | 2025-11-25 00:08:23+00:00
> What does "visible" mean here? In Rust, in any circumstance where a move is possible, there are no other references to that object, hence it is safe to move.

And other than during construction or initialization (of the mutex object, containing object, or related state), how common is it in Rust to pass a mutex by value? If you can pass by value then the mutex isn't (can't) protect anything. I'm struggling to think of a scenario where you'd want to do this, or at least why the inability to do so is a meaningful impediment (outside construction/initialization, that is). I understand Rust is big on pass-by-value, but when the need for a mutex enters the fray, it's because you're sharing or about to share, and thus passing by reference.
by akerl_ | 2025-11-25 00:08:43+00:00
> They deserve credit which they won't be able to claim anymore.

Why won't they be able to claim credit for the work that they did the past because of other people's work in the present?

> Also, to me, Eric talking doesn't sound authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying. I don't mean to insult though, mad respect for putting project like Pebble together.

What the heck are you trying to do here if not insult him? It seems wild to say he sounds inauthentic and you think he's potentially lying, and then try to hedge by saying that's not intended as an insult.
by timschmidt | 2025-11-25 00:08:57+00:00
That's how working with junior team members or open source project contributors goes too. Perhaps that's the big disconnect. Reviewing and integrating LLM contributions slotted right into my existing workflow on my open source projects. Not all of them work. They often need fixing, stylistic adjustments, or tweaking to fit a larger architectural goal. That is the norm for all contributions in my experience. So the LLM is just a very fast, very responsive contributor to me. I don't expect it to get things right the first time.

But it seems lots of folks do.

Nevertheless, style, tweaks, and adjustments are a lot less work than banging out a thousand lines of code by hand. And whether an LLM or a person on the other side of the world did it, I'd still have to review it. So I'm happy to take increasingly common and increasingly sophisticated wins.