MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nis0s | 2025-11-10 19:05:24+00:00
There’s a gap that LLMs are trying to fill in such cases, which is that there’s too much information that we can possibly hope to make sense of in a lifetime. Just as it’s possible to compute something incorrectly with a calculator, you can definitely be led astray by an LLM, which is why I am surprised that people think these models are good enough to replace humans at work. The only thing which makes sense is to both raise the bar for publishing, and to only take published works seriously. If something isn’t published, then authors should provide code to demonstrate the effect they’re describing.
by gowld | 2025-11-10 19:05:41+00:00
I recently asked a leading GenAI chatbot to help me understand a certain physics concept. As I pressed it on the aspect I was confused about, the bot repeatedly explained, and in our discussion, consistently held firm that I was misunderstanding something, and made guesses about what I was misunderstanding. Eventually I realized and stated my mistake, and the chatbot confirmed and explained the difference between my wrong version and the truth. I looked at some sources and confirmed that the bot was right, and I had misremembered something.

I was quite impressed that it didn't "give in" and validate my wrong idea.
by jojomodding | 2025-11-10 19:05:42+00:00
This is already the case. Or rather, a corporation can not (e.g.) commit murder or theft because that usually requires some physical action. That physical action will be performed by a human, who can then be found guilty. If he was ordered to do so by (e.g.) the board, the board will be held as accessory to the crime and cam also be found guilty.

The problem is just that the board can usually claim they did not know, and that they have deep pockets to afford good attorneys. To get around the first thing, you have strict liability laws.

Strict liability laws, though, are how you end up with the situation where barkeepers are criminally liable for selling alcohol to underage people, even if they could not have known the buyer was underage (and that's about the only instance of strict liability in criminal law). I personally find this very unjust and would rather that strict liability was not part of criminal law.
by pizza234 | 2025-11-10 19:05:53+00:00
> Rust's popularity seems to be dropping or holding steady in indexes like TIOBE, and a lot of big "influencers" seem to be over Rust's hype cycle

It is correct that the hype is past its peak, however, the TIOBE trend (if one wants to use that) is actually steadily increasing.

> There is still some development in linux

"Some development" is a miscarachterization - the official addition to the Linux kernel itself is a very big deal, and its adoption is increasing and will continue to do so.

I think that Rust has found its niche in safe low-level programming, and it will slowly have an increasingly dominant role in (although the ceiling of this area is certainly limited in the global landscape).
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-10 19:05:58+00:00
> There are multitudes of online storage providers outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction

Not according to the UK, lately. The problem is still domestic. UK wants to exert this control over any service a UK citizens happens to use, whether they have a UK presence or not. Same with the ID/Age verification stuff.

Moving away from Apple and Google probably is something they should do, but it's not going to be a solution to the problem of the UK government's overreach.

UK citizens need to turn their attention inward against their government.
by _verandaguy | 2025-11-10 19:06:40+00:00
It's condescending to describe it as a quirk, in the sense that it's no more a quirk than anything else in history. In the current climate where this sort of rhetoric has been publicly and visibly used by Russia to justify their invasion of Ukraine, and by the PRC to justify their ongoing pressure campaigns against the ROC, I also don't take this kind of wording at face value.

Wars were fought. People died, generations were involved in discourse about national identity and where borders should be drawn.

The US and Canada were both at one point British properties, so by some definitions, we also used to be unified. Then we weren't.

Is it insecure? Maybe. The reality is that in a shooting war, we wouldn't last very long against the US, in all likelihood. Under these conditions, the least I can do is to push back against rhetoric that undermines our legitimacy as our own country.
by smsm42 | 2025-11-10 19:06:43+00:00
You may think you're being sarcastic, but you are just stating a true fact here. For about 99.9% of this planet's population, it's not just hard, it's something they'd never ever know how to do and have no intention to ever learn. Like it or hate it, but that's what it is.

And, for 99.9% of people who know how to do that, they'd still be too lazy to do it properly (hint: where do you keep secret.txt exactly? What happens if your dog eats it?) and will use some third-party solution instead.
by amysox | 2025-11-10 19:06:44+00:00
I'm reviving a project I last touched in 2006, in the hopes that it might be of use today in making social networking human again.

Back in the day, after the company I worked for bought the Electric Minds community and migrated it to its own CommunityWare system, and then the company that bought our company decided to shut the platform down, I reimplemented the community platform in Java and helped rescue the community. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/09/08/electric-minds/

EMinds eventually sputtered out because of the rise of platforms like Facebook. Well, now we see what came of that. So I think there's room for a platform like the one I used to have. See: https://erbosoft.com/blog/2025/11/03/what-we-once-had-and-co...

The new system is being written in Go. I'm porting the code over without using AI, though I have used Claude to translate the old crusty HTML pages into modern HTML with Tailwind CSS. Once it gets to the functionality I had back in 2006, I'll put it up...and then see about going beyond that, including how to make it distributed and provide more interoperability.
by qwertox | 2025-11-10 19:06:58+00:00
My hope was to find a system which does ASR, then LLM processing with MCP use and finally TTS: "Put X on my todo list" / "Mark X as done" -> LLM thinks, reads the todo list, edits the todo list, and tells me "I added X to your todo list", ... "Turn all the lights off" -> llm thinks and uses MCP to turn off the lights -> "Lights have been turned off". "Send me an email at 8pm reminding me to do" .... "Email has been scheduled for 8pm"

That's all I want. It does not have to be fast, but it must be capable of doing all of that.

Oh, and it should be energy efficient. Very important for a 24/7 machine.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-10 19:07:14+00:00
You'll want to bookmark Harmony even if you're using Picard since it's driven by the same database. Happily, once you add an item using Harmony, Picard can find your just-entered release almost immediately via the Release ID of the release you just created.

I find myself needing to create releases for ~10% of the albums I tag, and Harmony is a game-changer for that.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-11-10 19:07:31+00:00
They're quite different, but in subtle ways, and sometimes it's not about what they offer but rather what they don't offer.

What they all have in common is that they have great documentation, and they're all very unix-y and all have some virtualization support for linux.

Some things FreeBSD offer are good performance, IME the largest package repository, zfs integration, capsicum and jails. The experience IMO is a bit like Arch, except you'll rely less on a wiki and more on their official documentation.

OpenBSD and NetBSD offer a more "complete" experience like you'd expect from a desktop OS, while at the same time being quite minimal and simple.

OpenBSD focuses a lot on security, and is probably more likely to work with your hardware with fast wifi. It doesn't offer the same virtualization nor security the same type of security as Linux, but instead encourages you to pledge and unveil your applications, which means you lock down each application by saying what it can and can't do. It notoriously removes features from the kernel that are unmaintained and also doesn't include things it considers insecure like bluetooth. It's probably the OS that gives you the most "works out-of-the-box" experience.

NetBSD gives you a full desktop experience as well, but also has some unique security features like kauth, veriexec, extra-hardened chroot and security.curtain. It also offers some cool features like rumpkernels, smolbsd, and is probably the easiest to hack and compile yourself (even cross-compiling is very simple). It has a package manager, pkgsrc, that runs on many other OSes and it's also quite easy to port to new platforms. It's a fun OS to tinker with.
by miningape | 2025-11-10 19:07:51+00:00
You gave some good context I missed - The (even) more technical (read: pretentious) explanation is that it's a tertiary source. As a general rule of thumb secondary sources are preferred over primary sources, but both are acceptable in the right academic context.

I do understand the "latest version" argument, and it is a weakness, but it's also a double edged sword - it means Wikipedia can also be more up-to-date than (almost) any other source for the information. Thats why I say there's "nothing specifically wrong about Wikipedia either" it can be held in similar regard to other tertiary sources and encyclopaedias - with all the problems that come with those.
by solumos | 2025-11-10 19:08:04+00:00
1 Could maybe make sense for a proof of concept, but realize that you're probably throwing it away (sooner better than later).

Start with 2, and think about the separation of deployable targets and shared libraries/plugins. You can eventually carve out separate infra for deployable targets when resource contention becomes a problem (e.g. DB load is affecting unrelated services)

3 is rarely the right first step for a small team

4 is never the right first step for a small team
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-10 19:08:38+00:00
Thatcher didn't so much shut them down as turned off the life support subsidies. They were already dead, commercially.

A bailout isn't great and Obama was criticized for it, but it's not the same as ongoing state subsidies and outright nationalization. Boeing and SpaceX get oney for selling the government unique services. The USA has historically not gone in for subsidies of industries like steel and coal, and that's one reason it's ahead.
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-11-10 19:08:44+00:00
Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.
by officeplant | 2025-11-10 19:09:05+00:00
It's not the greatest piece of fiction ever written, but Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards podcast has a pretty easy read[1]. It's also offered as a free audiobook read by him as a series of podcasts.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Revolution

Might not be what you want if you want more technical & hacking versus dystopian capitalism collapse. But he gets bonus points for Texas getting nuked as a lore point.
Show HN: AI Photo Cleaner iOS app (on-device processing)
by nicklewers | 2025-11-10 19:09:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I've recently published my first iOS app to the Appstore! Its a photo cleanup app which uses on-device Apple Vision models to cluster similar images together into groups, and then ranks each photo within each group.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/ai-photo-cleaner-sorter/id6754172...

How it works: The best photo from each group gets marked as "Saved" by default, however in the Review stage, you can select others from the group to save if you want or unselect the "Best" one and choose another one to keep. The general concept is "keep the best, remove the rest", and in theory if you agree with the clustering/scoring and didn't want to make any amendments, you could clean up 100's of photos (and MBs) with just a few taps.

Motivation: I'm one of those people who somehow builds up an insanely bloated camera roll - 15 photos of the same restaurant dish, 10 versions of the same sunset. So I initially built this for myself to help cleanup those 500 photos taken during a 1 week vacation... I've tried a load of the other apps out there, but most seem to have adopted a Tinder style process - swipe left, swipe right, which hardly decreases the workload. I wanted an opinionated way to do a mass cleanup easily.

Things on my roadmap: - Localisation for major languages - Improved background processing (so you can clean up 1,000+ photos without keeping the app open) - User preferences for how the photo scoring is calculated i.e. some people value emotional signals over image sharpness.

Its totally free to use (maybe one day I'll try and monetise it, if I'm ever fully satisfied )), I'd love any feedback - good and bad! (Especially would appreciate feedback on how well the grouping and scoring performs for you - any quirks?)

Thanks! Nick
by boplicity | 2025-11-10 19:09:43+00:00
Not every college has crazy tuition. The school I attended in 2000 to 2004 has kept pace with inflation generally. Annual tuition is now around $10k, which is a lot, but not unmanageable for many middle class families. I'm curious how this compares across universities throughout the U.S. Maybe the tuition story has bifurcated somewhat?
by pron | 2025-11-10 19:10:24+00:00
I agree! Memory safety is important because it's the cause of some of the top vulnerabilities, which is precisely why it's great that both Rust's level of memory safety (which is not absolute) and Zig's level of memory safety (also not absolute), both eliminate those top weaknesses!

But once you've taken care of the top weaknesses, it becomes harder to justify putting more effort into eliminating some weaknesses that could go into reducing more common/dangerous ones. If vulnerabilities are the justification, it definitely makes more sense to reduce, say, #4 on the list than #7.
by fuzzylightbulb | 2025-11-10 19:10:31+00:00
Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these actively passive systems are a threat.
by Muromec | 2025-11-10 19:10:33+00:00
Rule of thumb — if a bank already was there and dealing with things 30 years ago, it likely has some cobol left.

Generalizing — if the company had enough need for it 30 years ago, was big enough to but a mainframe and the thing they used it for barely changes — chances are it’s still there, if the company is still there.

Banks absolutely do have it in house, in a dedicated secure site with a fence and a moat
by mindcrash | 2025-11-10 19:11:25+00:00
ServeTheHome has already benchmarked the DGX Spark architecture against the (very obvious) Ryzen AI Max 395+ with 128G RAM:

https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-dgx-spark-review-the-gb1...

If (and in case of Nvidia that's a big if at the moment) they get their software straight on Linux for once this piece of hardware seems to be something to keep an eye on.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-10 19:12:21+00:00
> I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them.

That's already happening. I don't even think we had a very long "Don't trust LLMs" phase, if we did it was very short.

The "normies" already trust whatever they spit out. At leadership meetings at my work, if I say anything that goes against the marketing hype for LLMs, such as talking about "Don't trust LLMs", it's met with eye rolls and I'm not forward thinking enough, blah blah.

Management-types have 100% bought into the hype and are increasingly more difficult to convince otherwise.
by robocat | 2025-11-10 19:12:21+00:00
A shame the front image is so irrationally greebled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

SciFi art continues its strange stylistic journey.

Makes me want to look through my old SciFi art books.

Edit: The Greeble article refers to the art term diapering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering
by jandrese | 2025-11-10 19:12:53+00:00
Don't undersell it. The game is playable in a browser. The graphics are just blocks, the aliens don't return fire. There are no bunkers. The aliens change colors when they descend to a new level (whoops). But for less than 60 seconds of effort it does include the aliens (who do properly go all the way to the edges, so the strategy of shooting the sides off of the formation still works--not every implementation gets that part right), and it does detect when you have won the game. The tank and the bullets work, and it even maintains the limit on the number of bullets you can have in the air at once. However, the bullets are not destroyed by the aliens so a single shot can wipe out half of a column. It also doesn't have the formation speed up as you destroy the aliens.

So it is severely underbaked but the base gameplay is there. Roughly what you would expect out of a LLM given only the high level objective. I would expect an hour or so of vibe coding would probably result in something reasonably complete before you started bumping up into the context window. I'm honestly kind of impressed that it worked at all given the minuscule amount of human input that went into that prompt.
by ssalmon74 | 2025-11-10 19:12:57+00:00
I see a major contradiction here. You want to keep elite, high-standard tracks (like medicine) separate, but also want everyone to mix to create "synergy."

That just recreates the exact same two-class system inside the university. The "academics" and the "open access" crowd will stay in their separate bubbles, defeating the entire purpose of the proposal.
by waffletower | 2025-11-10 19:13:01+00:00
Try any of those example acronyms (which are far more common in search indices IMO "in my opinion" :) and they will be immediately disambiguated by Google's top results. Type "TCN" and "Technical Capability Notice" doesn't show up after 4 pages. I needed to use an LLM and provide a paragraph of context for it to learn about it.
by aanet | 2025-11-10 19:13:03+00:00
Kudos on the launch.

This would be useful for somebody like me (254 GB out of 256 GB used!)

Would love to hear more about how the on-device AI model works... What is it? What does it look for ? how does it score? How does the user specify which are "similar photos to look at" ? etc etc .

Thanks
by rekabis | 2025-11-10 19:13:27+00:00
> he told me AI made him at least twice as productive.

He’s not only lying to you, he’s also lying to himself.

Recent 12-month studies show that less than 2% of AI users saw an increase in work velocity, and those were only the very top-skilled workers. Projection also indicated that of the other 98%, over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without, no matter how long they work with AI.

TL;DR: the vast majority of people will only ever be slower with AI, not faster.
by jgon | 2025-11-10 19:13:36+00:00
One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.
by iepathos | 2025-11-10 19:13:45+00:00
I can tell they're using MkDocs for the HyperDocs static site gen based on the screenshot. I'm working on an open source solution to generating docs with AI for codebases and maintaining them for documentation drift. I wrote a bit about it initially here https://entropicdrift.com/blog/prodigy-docs-automation/ for anyone who is interested. I'm currently using mdbook instead of mkdocs, may add support for a mkdocs workflow to produce similar doc sites for just the cost of the LLM tokens. I didn't realize COBOL had such a large market for documentation with code as the source of truth. I'll have to try generating docs on an open source COBOL codebase to see how it fairs. Would be nice if hypercubic had actual live doc examples for what hyperdocs generates instead of just a screenshot, hard to judge how good or bad it is with just a single screenshot.
by korse | 2025-11-10 19:13:55+00:00
I think you're taking this too far. First off, limiting screen time and access to feeds while making sure kids are socialized is generally a good thing regardless of where they decide to go in life. Computers that make things a bit 'harder' help stave off mindless consumption of content without being oppressive.

Arguably you could just put your kids in a high-end private school with other well socialized children who have had significant sums of money invested in their development and haven't even been pacified with tech out of parental laziness/necessity but hey, whatever works...

Secondly, providing a linux based computer or old windows as an intro to technology has one very basic benefit. It teaches mindful interaction with technology. These things are tools. Regardless of how hard many companies try, computers (smartphone, tablet or desktop) remain machines that do exactly what we ask them when you ask them to do it and internalizing this at a young age builds stronger humans.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-11-10 19:14:22+00:00
I remember all of our encyclopedias being decades out of date growing up. My parents bought a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica in 1976 or something like that, so by the time I was reading the Encyclopedia for research on papers in the late 90s and early 00s, it was without a doubt less factual than even the earliest incarnation of Wikipedia was.

Either way, you are correct, we weren't allowed to cite any encyclopedia, but they were meant to be jumping off points for papers. After Wikipedia launched when I was in 9th grade, we weren't allowed to even look at it (blocked from school computers).

I definitely used it though.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-10 19:14:46+00:00
Drop another rung for the patriarchy- is chat just a very temporary stop gap en route to partnership parity or even matriarchal dominance?

Let’s just say intelligence is changing and wisdom is in deep collapse using this tech.

Our drive to be creative and chance failure and seek expert help dissolves in a general tool that automates what it is to be human.