MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-11-30 01:19:20+00:00
Honestly, in this scenario I’d lean toward the LLM providing the better answer. Whoever shared this parable didn’t understand that ChatGPT isn’t just a search engine that regurgitates the top voted accepted comment from Stack Overflow. An LLM is probably more likely to parse the entire page and all of the comments if it pulls an URL. It would also be more likely to pull multiple URLs. It would also be more likely to pull from accumulated embedded knowledge. Unfortunately for this fabricated example, the casual visitor to Stack Overflow is most likely to be duped by an incorrect accepted answer if they don’t scroll down and read the fine print (which isn’t that common, a fact that surprises people who always read the comments and all answers).
by williamstein | 2025-11-30 01:19:55+00:00
codex-cli is a neat example of an open source Rust program that uses Landlock to run commands that an LLM comes up with when writing code (see [1]). The model is that a user trusts the agent program (codex-cli), but has much more limited trust of the commands the remote LLM asks codex-cli to run.

[1] https://developers.openai.com/codex/security/
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-30 01:20:51+00:00
You still need to pay off that loan eventually though.

These asset backed loans are just regular loans with lower interest rates. So instead of getting $50M @ 11% they can get it at 4%. That's the extent of the "hack".

They then keep the ball rolling by refinancing at each expiry and just paying the interest (and hoping their assets maintain or increase in value)

Eventually those loans will need to be repaid and the money will need to come from realizing capital gains.

So if anything its a tax deferral scheme with a low interest rate and elevated liquidation risk. Which all raises the issue of being taxed twice on the same money. Taxes once when you take the loan against it, and taxed again when you realize the profit to pay the loan.
by bilekas | 2025-11-30 01:20:58+00:00
Unfortunately the sheer scale of updating that is not possible by just the mods etc, it usually comes down to someone who has searched the problem, come across the question, realized it's too old to apply, figured out a fix themselves, and THEN had the decency to update the question with an updated answer.

It's just unsustainable depending on the goodwill of users, especially when SO score means very little these days.

Edit : It might be very doable by AI.. But they would have to sacrifice their "no ai answer" policy. (maybe they have already)
by godelski | 2025-11-30 01:21:00+00:00
Thanks, I forgot about that one.

To critique that (and maybe suggest what OP can do to make theirs better) is that there's poor visualization. What's great is that it tells me there right in center

> Our tests indicate *that you have **strong protection against Web tracking***. > Blocking tracking ads? Yes Blocking invisible trackers? Yes Protecting you from fingerprinting? Your browser has a nearly-unique fingerprint

But give me some visualization. Sentences like

Bits of identifying information: 6.76 One in x browsers have this value: 108.61

Are not super helpful, though they should exist. Showing a density plot[0] is very useful[1]. It gives the user more information, telling them where they need to go. Even a simple replacement to

One in *108.61* browsers have this value

Makes things easier to read.

In an ideal setting I think the site should suggest to users what they should change and show them where they could be with the new settings. Letting them play around and adjust a some settings.

I know I'm being nitpicky here and to be honest I think the EFF version is "good enough" but I still think adding such visualizations and letting users "see" the results makes things easier to understand and can help them know what to do.

[0] https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.kdeplot.html

[1] In this case it isn't going to be continuous since I pulled from the User agent so this will have more discrete bins. Helping inform the user would be seeing the proportion of those other bins. That way they know what to change their user agent to!
by malwrar | 2025-11-30 01:21:14+00:00
> These are adequate reactions and preparations before war.

> Essentially, it’s an attempt to prevent the looming war.

I don’t see how mass surveillance is going to be effective against Russian/Chinese/etc agents, let alone prevent war. Why do you assume that spies and saboteurs are going to use the surveilled systems? I think this is more about controlling citizens than it is about monitoring foreigners.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-30 01:21:17+00:00
> Cities only exist because of economies of scale!

Sure if you want to have an intellectual debate about what the economics of scale means then that's fine but your point about economics of scale about suburban super-markets was still wrong and that was the context of my critic.

The rest of your post is irrelevant to my point. I have not advocated for any policy specifically to help small business. Small shops in cities can and are operate by major cooperation. There is no contradiction between large companies and small/urban locations. Not sure why you are even bringing this up. Are you so 'America'-brained that you think large companies can only exist in large commercial zones right of highway exchanges?

> I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society.

I didn't say the issue is that its incurring policing cost, I said the cost it incurs is higher then the taxes its paying. The whole point of taxes is that they finance the operation of a geographical area. And everybody living or operating in that area should help finance that area.

If somebody operates in that area that incurs more cost then benefits then that somebody should only continue to be doing so if people consider it a 'social good'. And supporting Wallmart a highly profitable company, clearly doesn't fall under that.

So designing policies so that a multi-billion $ company can show up and extract value from your town is nonsensically stupid.

In fact you are stealing from other business and people in your area to give more profits to wallmart.

> The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all.

No 'the implication' is that when a community does land use, infrastructure and tax planning it should consider facts, and consider cost to provide services and infrastructure for to those areas.

The fact is, most communities make most of their money in the 'down town' that is true even for very small town and even villages.

What you are proposing is basically that a community should finance, build and maintain a lot of public infrastructure, then finance continue police and other services far away from where most people actually live to protect cooperate property (and specifically the parking lot) all while Wallmart does everything in its power to pay the absolute minimum back to the community it is in. Both by local tricks and by tricks on a federal level.
by woodruffw | 2025-11-30 01:21:47+00:00
> Problem is that you might want to have the tests run before even looking at it.

Why is this a problem? The default `pull_request` trigger isn't dangerous in GitHub Actions; the issue here is specifically with `pull_request_target`. If all you want to do is have PRs run tests, you can do that with `pull_request` without any sort of credential or identity risk.

> Hilariously the people at pypi advise to use trusted publishers (publishing on pypi from github rather than local upload) as a way to avoid this issue.

There are two separate things here:

1. When we designed Trusted Publishing, one of the key observations was that people do use CI to publish, and will continue to do so because it conveys tangible benefits (mostly notably, it doesn't tie release processes to an opaque phase on a developer's machine). Given that people do use CI to publish, giving them a scheme that provides self-expiring, self-scoping credentials instead of long-lived ones is the sensible thing to do.

2. Separately, publishing from CI is probably a good thing for the median developer: developer machines are significantly more privileged than the average CI runner (in terms of access to secrets/state that a release process simply doesn't need). One of the goals behind Trusted Publishing was to ensure that people could publish from an otherwise minimal CI environment, without even needing to configure a long-lived credential for authentication.

Like with every scheme, Trusted Publishing isn't a magic bullet. But I think the proscription to use it here is essentially correct: Shai-Hulud propagates through stored credentials, and a compromised credential from a TP flow is only useful for a short period of time. In other words, Trusted Publishing would make it harder for the parties behind Shai-Hulud to group and orchestrate the kinds of compromise waves we're seeing.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-30 01:21:49+00:00
Most HNers won't listen to you, but frankly they truly do not matter. There's a reason legislation like the Espionage Act, the G10 Act, and Official Secrets/NSA Act 2023 exist, and why personal heroes of mine like Abe Lincoln enabled their administrations to prosecute sedition during states of war and near states of war severely.

Much of Europe has been seeing near weekly grey scale warfare [0] that in most other cases can be treated as an act of war.

I had friends in Ukraine who acted the same until their family had to leave Donetsk due to shelling during the 14-16 period, and others who voted for Zelensky's olive tree which the Putin admin unceremoniously rejected in 2022 (at least Zelensky decided to stay in Kyiv and own up to his admin's mistaken policies in their beginning). Being well paid techies, they all paid bribes and left for Vietnam, the US, Germany, Czechia, and other countries while those who couldn't afford to leave were paying for those techies votes.

So will other HNers (and Redditors) who act high and mighty until the shoe is on the other foot - they would all leave the moment war started with nary a sense of loyalty nor the wherewithal to support policies that can act as a deterrent. The kind of people on HN will keep their heads in the sand until they are personally affected, because people who base their life on ideals and ideology don't understand how messy the world actually is.

Hell, most of them probably never heard of the 2010-12 purge China's MSS did against CIA informants - a number of whom were summarily executed in public in a government office courtyard [1]. Counterespionage is dirty work.

[0] - https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-rus...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...
by hollerith | 2025-11-30 01:22:17+00:00
I agree. When it is sunny, I get at least 20 min of sun on my bare skin and in my eyes (not protected from UV by glasses) every other day as recommended by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. I am however careful not to get a lot more than that at once and have high-UPF clothing, hat and sunglasses to protect myself if I ever do need to be out in the sun for an extended period. (I am of Northern European ancestry.)

Even though I believe that the vitamin D we can buy in bottles is probably just as good as the vitamin D my skin makes, I do not consider vitamin D supplementation an adequate replacement for getting UV light on my skin and in my eyes because vitamin D production is only one of the benefits of getting UV light on the skin and in the eyes. (BTW I think HN put way too much emphasis on vitamin D.)

There are UV light receptors (that use a compound called neuropsin to sense the UV light) on the skin and in the parts of the brain that receive UV light (which gets into the skull mainly through the eyes). These receptors have nothing to do with vitamin D. Getting UV light onto these receptors is a more potent trigger for the release of endorphins in the brain than exercise is.

Regular UV light exposure also increases levels of sex hormones in men and in women. In men, increasing testosterone increases optimism and motivation and drive. Again, IIUC this effect has nothing to do with vitamin D.

When people eat plants, the compounds (e.g., lutein, zeaxanthin and lycopene) that plants use to protect themselves from UV light and blue light tend to be absorbed and to end up in high concentrations in the retina. If you do what I do, namely, get UV light from the sun every other day in moderate doses, then I suggest making sure you are getting plenty of these compounds. (Alexis Cowan says that omega 3 is helpful here, too.)
by Leftium | 2025-11-30 01:23:16+00:00
The layout/pixel density remains exactly the same (you can also get better scaled resolutions, if desired). (Most) things just look less fuzzy.

It's hard to find good before/after shots. The difference is much more dramatic in real life:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/10oy6xo/i_use_switchre...

- https://youtu.be/eyckJiws_30
by array_key_first | 2025-11-30 01:24:06+00:00
I agree, the preferences don't do anything unless used as a collective. But from the point of view of comparing the viewpoints, they're not apples to apples, because one requires the cooperation of other people. WFH isn't actually 'from home', it's from not-office-with-everyone-else. So if you just want to work in an office, then WFH is perfect for you. Arguably even better than working in the one and only office, because you get to choose the office.

But the buried lede so to speak is that RTO has literally nothing to do with the office. The office is just an empty box that happens to exist somewhere.

So the level of control for each preference is wildly different, and they can't just be compared like that. One is naturally 'closed', and the other naturally 'open'. That, to me, does speak to the intrinsic value of each preference.
by gnabgib | 2025-11-30 01:24:25+00:00
Popular in:

2024 (335 points, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448

2022 (249 points, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142

2020 (620 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066
by jdoliner | 2025-11-30 01:24:27+00:00
It's not totally obvious to me that you can get the economics of this to work. A Google search costs ~.04 cents to serve, whereas a frontier reasoning LLM request costs about 2 cents. The revenue from a Google search is also around 2 cents. So the margins are dangerously thin on an LLM.

Now there's lots of variables that can be tweaked on this. So it's possible to get it to work. But there's a lot less room for error.
by josephg | 2025-11-30 01:24:43+00:00
> the reason why you'd pick Fil-C is that it's actually memory safe for real, unlike the alternatives, which just give you safety for newly written code but pull in a ton of unsafe depenendencies.

Right; that makes a lot of sense. So currently the only implementation of pam is written in Yolo-C. If you want to build a safe, secure tool which depends on pam - like sudo - then you either need to trust pam (like sudo-rs does). Or you need some way to compile pam to safe code. Fil-C is a way to do that.

Just to name them - I can think of two other solutions to this problem:

1. Sandbox pam within a wasm container. This is probably less convenient than Fil-C (although it would allow that wasm container to be linked from yolo-c, rust, go, js, etc). For pam in particular, this would also be much less safe than Fil-C, since memory bugs in pam would still be possible, and might still result in privilege escalation. Wasm only sandboxes memory at the boundary. It wouldn't protect pam itself from its own bugs like Fil-C does.

2. Rewrite pam itself in a safer language, like C#, Go or Rust. Then sudo-rs doesn't need to link to yolo C code. I suspect someone will do this soon.

I think this also reaffirms the role I see for Fil-C: as a tool to make legacy C code (like pam) safe, at the cost of performance. For new code, I'd rather pick a fully GC language if I don't care about performance, or use rust if performance matters. Again, it would be nice if I could have the best of both worlds - use fil-c to wrap and sandbox pam, but write the rest of my program in rust or C# or Go or something else that is already safe without needing to pay fil-c's cost.

> But, unlike Rust, Fil-C does not attempt to ensure race-freedom for your own logic.

It depends what you're doing, but this can be a pretty big deal. I suppose this puts Fil-C in about the same safety and performance camp as Go, Java and C#. Ie, it has some protections that rust is missing - like there aren't any unsafe blocks. And its missing some protections rust has - like better thread safety. The unique selling point is it works with existing C code, like old C libraries that we don't want to rewrite. Thanks for your work on it!
by pembrook | 2025-11-30 01:25:08+00:00
I prefer the profit motive over the authoritarian "altruist" motive.

Pessimists before ads: OpenAI is a bubble fueled by dumb money waiting to pop, they'll never be profitable!

Pessimists after ads: Ok it's not a bubble but advertising is evil!

Pessimists after hearing paid subscribers won't get ads: Pffftttt $20 per month??? Profit is evil!! I can spin up a local LLM on my Linux machine for free!

Pessimists after admitting you can just choose not to use ChatGPT, a result of the free market: But I don't like that OTHER people are using ChatGPT because they're obviously dumb if they don't agree with me!
by hexeater | 2025-11-30 01:25:20+00:00
The conversations around taxation and gov finance in the USA are absolutely delulu. I'm in California. Not including sales and property taxes, high earners are paying over 50% in taxes. Whereas the overall expenditures are unsustainable and in many cases just not working anyway. Notable examples are that we are paying more in Interest than for military at the federal level, and we are burning cash on failed homeless policies without any hope of actual change. Any rational conversation has to cut spending.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-30 01:26:57+00:00
Can someone parse what this blog is trying to say with the whole Joe story at the top? I’m too deep in post-Thanksgiving travel acquired illness to understand what this story is trying to tell me. The StackOverflow links are 404s because they were deleted, which the article oddly acknowledges after the links but without removing the deleted links.

As far as I can tell, the author of this blog post had their StackOverflow question deleted for some reason, it made them angry, and now they want us all to delete our StackOverflow accounts and moved to Discord, Slack, Matrix, a forum they acknowledge is actually pretty mean to new users, and a lot of other alternatives?
by gerdesj | 2025-11-30 01:28:22+00:00
An LLM is a tool and its just as mad as slide rules, calculators and PCs (I've seen them all although slide rules were being phased out in my youth)

Coding via prompt is simply a new form of coding.

Remember that high level programming languages are "merely" a sop for us humans to avoid low level languages. The idea is that you will be more productive with say Python than you would with ASM or twiddling electrical switches that correspond to register inputs.

A purist might note that using Python is not sufficiently close to the bare metal to be really productive.

My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies - that will involve problem definition and formulation and then an iterative effort to solve the problem. It will obviously involve how to spot and deal with hallucinations. They'll need to start discovering model quality for differing tasks and all sorts of things that look like sci-fi to me 10 years ago.

I think we are at, for LLMs, the "calculator on digital wrist watch" stage that we had in the mid '80s before the really decent scientific calculators rocked up. Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role.

They will be great tools when used appropriately but they will not run the world or if they do, not for very long - bye!
by adidoit | 2025-11-30 01:29:22+00:00
This sounds like one of the "Ironies of Automation" as Lisain Bainbridge pointed out several years ago.

The more prevalent automation is, the worse humans do when that automation is taken away. This will be true for learning now .

Ultimately the education system is stuck in a bind. Companies want AI-native workers, students want to work with AI, parents want their kids to be employable. Even if the system wants to ensure that students are taught how to learn and not just a specific curriculum, their stakeholders have to be on board.

I think we're shifting to a world where not only will elite status markers like working at places like McKinsey and Google be more valuable but also interview processes will be significantly lengthened because companies will be doing assessments themselves and not trusting credentials from an education system that's suffering from great inflation and automation
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-11-30 01:29:27+00:00
I never heard of Anthony Bourdain until years after he died. I guess I wasn't the right age, I was having a family and at work all day whenever his shows took off. He seems like a genuinely interesting person, but there are so many other interesting thoughtful people that don't have relatable cooking shows and I think Anthony Bourdain, as great as he is, gets quite a bit more attention than he probably warrants. Don't take that the wrong way, he's genuinely thoughtful and interesting, but he gets a LOT of attention OVER AND OVER.

I'll throw out Tim Kreider (author of We Learn Nothing, among other books) as someone else you might find worthwhile to checkout.
by BirAdam | 2025-11-30 01:29:51+00:00
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.

Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-30 01:29:56+00:00
It doesn't require the debtor to pay back the difference between the collateral liquidation value and the loan value.

I don't think any bank though is giving non-recourse loans for risky or depreciating assets (investors do that). It's usually for things that the bank is confident will be a good investment anyway if the loan goes sour - you default on the loan? Fine. But we keep the land.
by fragmede | 2025-11-30 01:30:44+00:00
what does it add to the conversation? The fact that incoming UCSD freshman cannot solve the problem is being brought up as a failure. That this six year old can solve it does nothing to address the issue of UCSD students being unable to solve a problem that we all expect them to. It it as if you are a stoichastic parrot, bringing up a fact that, yes, it happens to be true, because it is nearby on some vector space. Hence the downvotes.
by jsmeaton | 2025-11-30 01:30:47+00:00
Stackoverflow started failing when Jeff left. While he had a big hand in the whole mantra of being more of a Wiki than just Q&A, I feel his sense of community wouldn’t have let it get so bad.

Then all of the OG engineers left (I hope Nick Craver is doing well, his blog posts were incredible), an investment company took over, and whatever good will and vibe that was left melted away.

I’ll still occasionally find a good answer there. But it has zero future of making answers available for future good questions.

They took the fun away.