MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2025-11-25 22:26:37+00:00
> this implies higher intelligence

Not necessarily. The problem is that we can't precisely define intelligence (or, at least, haven't so far), and we certainly can't (yet?) measure it directly. And so what we have are certain tests whose scores, we believe, are correlated with that vague thing we call intelligence in humans. Except these test scores can correlate with intelligence (whatever it is) in humans and at the same time correlate with something that's not intelligence in machines. So a high score may well imply high intellignce in humans but not in machines (e.g. perhaps because machine models may overfit more than a human brain does, and so an intelligence test designed for humans doesn't necessarily measure the same thing we think of when we say "intelligence" when applied to a machine).

This is like the following situation: Imagine we have some type of signal, and the only process we know produces that type of signal is process A. Process A always produces signals that contain a maximal frequency of X Hz. We devise a test for classifying signals of that type that is based on sampling them at a frequency of 2X Hz. Then we discover some process B that produces a similar type of signal, and we apply the same test to classify its signals in a similar way. Only, process B can produce signals containing a maximal frequency of 10X Hz and so our test is not suitable for classifying the signals produced by process B (we'll need a different test that samples at 20X Hz).
by kridsdale3 | 2025-11-25 22:26:41+00:00
I was at Meta when it was forced by the FTC to start adding this compliance stuff. It SUCKED to retrofit everything.

Now I'm at google, and onboarded on to the version of the infra that already went through that, and I can take it all at face value. It is a PAIN still, but this is the reality of a system that interfaces with O(10^8) users, O(10^2) governments.
by imiric | 2025-11-25 22:26:59+00:00
Yeah, the core ideas sound great, but if the only way code can be published and imported is via their cloud platform, that would be a hard pass for me.

Glancing at their docs, I see mentions of Unison Share, which is also hosted on unison-lang.org.

So I would appreciate this being clarified upfront in all their marketing and documentation.

Ah, I do see the BYOC option you mention. It still requires a unison.cloud account and an active subscription, though...
by kccqzy | 2025-11-25 22:27:21+00:00
As much as I hate to say it, the fact that the attacks are “known issues” seems well known in the industry among people who care about security and LLMs. Even as an occasional reader of your blog (thank you for maintaining such an informative blog!), I know about the lethal trifecta and the exfiltration risks since early ChatGPT and Bard.

I have previously expressed my views on HN about removing one of the three lethal trifecta; it didn’t go anywhere. It just seems that at this phase, people are so excited about the new capabilities LLMs can unlock that they don’t care about security.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-11-25 22:27:24+00:00
For the simple case, suppose that you're writing a TUI application that takes over the terminal. When it exits, even by panic, you want to clean up the terminal state so the user doesn't have to blindly type "reset".

Today, people sometimes do that by using `panic = "unwind"`, and writing a `catch_unwind` around their program, and using that to essentially implement a "finally" block. Or, they do it by having an RAII type that cleans up on `Drop`, and then they count on unwinding to ensure their `Drop` gets called even on panic. (That leaves aside the issue that something called from `Drop` is not allowed to fail or panic itself.) The question is, how would you do that without unwinding?

We have a panic hook mechanism, where on panic the standard library will call a user-supplied function. However, there is only one panic hook; if you set it, it replaces the old hook. If you have only one cleanup to do, that works fine. For more than one, you can follow the semantic of having your panic hook call the previous hook, but that does not allow unregistering hooks out of order; it only really works if you register a panic hook once for the whole program and never unregister it (e.g. "here's the hook for cleaning up tracing", "here's the hook for cleaning up the terminal state").

Suppose, instead, we had a mechanism that allowed registering arbitrary panic hooks, and unregistering them when no longer needed, in any order. Then, we could do RAII-style resource handling: you could have a `CursesTerminal` type, which is responsible for cleaning up the terminal, and it cleans up the terminal on `Drop` and on panic. To do the latter, it would register a panic hook, and deregister that hook on `Drop`.

With such a mechanism, panic hooks could replace anything that uses `catch_unwind` to do cleanup before going on to exit the program. That wouldn't fully solve the problem of doing cleanup and then swallowing the panic and continuing, but it'd be a useful component for that.
by rockinghigh | 2025-11-25 22:28:23+00:00
You should read the transcript. He's including 2025 in the age of scaling.

> Maybe here’s another way to put it. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling—maybe plus or minus, let’s add error bars to those years—because people say, “This is amazing. You’ve got to scale more. Keep scaling.” The one word: scaling.

> But now the scale is so big. Is the belief really, “Oh, it’s so big, but if you had 100x more, everything would be so different?” It would be different, for sure. But is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don’t think that’s true. So it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers.
by agreeahmed | 2025-11-25 22:28:24+00:00
Unless I'm misunderstanding, I think you might have gotten sides mixed up?

Issuing side (the side that "issues" the cards) is usually the one that people describe as "all of the value", while acquiring (the side that "acquires" merchants) usually is that one that needs to bring substantial volumes to market.

For context to anyone not familiar with payments, about 60-70% of the card revenue in a transaction goes to the customer's / issuing side because they are the side that assumes credit risk for the consumer. The merchant's / acquiring side has significantly tighter margins and usually needs substantial volume before it can become an interesting business. One way that entrants on the merchant side of the stack monetize is by bundling value-add software.

E.g. Stripe does this with Billing (+.7%) and Connect (+.25%).

Fwiw I agree that most people will find this tech extremely un-fun. But I'm a "payments rail guy" in the way that others might be "train guys". My inner child lights up at the thought of payment rails. My Substack, Vivid Leaves, is basically a bunch of essays about historical payment systems - some we worked with in Kenya, and others I studied from the USSR. I wrote all this before I had any idea I'd be starting a payments company: https://agree.substack.com

We know it's going to be a schlep, and we're going to have a blast schlepping through it.

* vocab fyis for anyone reading this not familiar with payments.
by infogulch | 2025-11-25 22:28:24+00:00
I've been following Unison for a long time, congrats on the release!

Unison is among the first languages to ship algebraic effects (aka Abilities [1]) as a major feature. In early talks and blog posts, as I recall, you were still a bit unsure about how it would land. So how did it turn out? Are you happy with how effects interact with the rest of the language? Do you like the syntax? Can you share any interesting details about how it's implemented under the hood?

[1]: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-25 22:28:30+00:00
>> To fix this, we would not change anything in unsafe.

> You're supposed to.

To me, it just sounds like we're disagreeing on definitions. You can view it as unsafe corrupting the vec, I don't disagree with that, but it's the way the safe code coordinated the unsafe code that caused that problem.

I'm happy to be shown a different way. Would you kindly show me how you would fix this in the unsafe block only?

> Some coders might implicitly count the rest of the function as trusted code that's part of enforcing the invariants of the unsafe code. So there's an implied "unsafe" that fills up the rest of the function, as far as responsibility goes

That's essentially what I'm arguing.

> but if anything outside the function with the unsafe block is part of enforcing invariants, then that is clearly wrong

What is clearly wrong? I'm not saying none of it is wrong, I'm just saying unsafe allows you to make bugs outside of it. And yes, it can happen at arbitrary depth, not just in the function containing unsafe code.
by throwaway2562 | 2025-11-25 22:28:34+00:00
What is the utility of denying it?

What do you or anyone else actually get from such obvious absurdity, I wonder?

If it helps - and I have doubts - does (say) a working knowledge of Galois theory require more advanced mathematical cognition than arithmetic?

Would it be immoral to introduce such ghastly, hierarchical language? Etc.

I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.

How much more help do you need here? It’s not very complicated, but you prefer to showboat.
by echelon | 2025-11-25 22:28:38+00:00
> If Midjourney is a niche, then what is the broader market for AI image generation?

Midjourney is one aesthetically pleasing data point in a wide spectrum of possibilities and market solutions.

Creator economy is huge and is outgrowing Hollywood and the Music Industry combined.

There's all sorts of use cases in marketing, corporate, internal comms.

There are weird new markets. A lot of people simply subscribe to Midjourney for "art therapy" (a legit term) and use it as a social media replacement.

The giants are testing whether an infinite scroll of 100% AI content can beat human social media. Jury's out, but it might start to chip away at Instagram and TikTok.

Corporate wants certain things. Disney wants to fine tune. They're hiring companies like MoonValley to deliver tailored solutions.

Adobe is building tools for agencies and designers. They are only starting to deliver competent models (see their conference videos), and they're going about this a very different way.

ChatGPT gets the social trend. Ghibli. Sora memes.

> Porn, obviously, though if you look at what's popular on civitai.com, a lot of it isn't photo-realistic.

Civitai is circling the drain. Even before the unethical and religious Visa blacklisting, the company was unable to steer itself to a Series A. Stable Diffusion and local models are still way too hard for 99.99% of people and will never see the same growth as a Midjourney or OpenAI that have zero sharp edges and that anyone in the world can use. I'm fairly certain an "OnlyFans but AI" will arise and make billions of dollars. But it has to be so easy a tucker who doesn't learn to code can use it from their 11 year old Toshiba.

> Presumably personalized advertising, but this isn't something we've seen much of yet.

Carvana pioneered this almost five years ago. I'll try to find the link. This isn't going to really take off though. It's creepy and people hate ads. Carvana's use case was clever and endearing though.
by sudosysgen | 2025-11-25 22:28:39+00:00
These are twin studies, you don't need to get into heritable epigenitics. The expression of the shared environment in the womb would be reasonably expected to lead to epigenetic correlations in twins at a crucial stage of development where they would have the highest impact, without them being heritable.

Put simply, the common epigenetics between twins need not be held in common with the parents.
by aunty_helen | 2025-11-25 22:29:22+00:00
If we take AGI as a certainty, ie we think we can achieve AGI using silicon, then Ilya is one of the best bets you can take if you are looking to invest in this space. He has a history and he's motivated to continue working on this problem.

If you think that AGI is not possible to achieve, then you probably wouldn't be giving anyone money in this space.
by defrost | 2025-11-25 22:29:37+00:00
If you're curious the linked article has pretty much all the infomation available.

It was written by Alex Wellerstein,

a historian of science and nuclear weapons and a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

who has likely looked over almost all the unclassified US bomb test material, read a substantial amount of it, and at various time has had access to classified portions.

The article has three addendum, updates as more information came to light about the name of dancer, the photographer, the article series that was published, etc.

It's bound to more informative than anything I could tell you given I'm in AU not the US and know somewhat more about Emu Field and the Montebello's than I do about Yucca Flat.
by delaguardo | 2025-11-25 22:29:38+00:00
What do you mean under "syntax typing" and complications in the syntax?

> The whole world seems to run on JSON

That is true, and I don't like that :)

From my perspective JSON syntax is too "light" and that translates to many complications typically in the form of convention: {"id": {"__MW__type": "LONG NUMBER", "value": "9999999999999999999999999"}}.
by wrs | 2025-11-25 22:29:45+00:00
"The idea that we’d be investing 1% of GDP in AI, I feel like it would have felt like a bigger deal, whereas right now it just feels...[normal]."

Wow. No. Like so many other crazy things that are happening right now, unless you're inside the requisite reality distortion field, I assure you it does not feel normal. It feels like being stuck on Calvin's toboggan, headed for the cliff.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-11-25 22:29:54+00:00
Single AOC 27" UHD monitor on my desktop Windows system at home. I use multiple desktops for context switching. No gaming, just a bit of dev and photo stuff.

At work, a couple of Dell 27" UHD monitors attached to my Windows laptop via DP ports on a dock. Single desktop as I have plenty of screen space. I mostly live in Visual Studio and Outlook/Teams.

No complaints about either - all works pretty well.
by burnte | 2025-11-25 22:29:57+00:00
Yeah, except it's pure bullshit. I'm actually a tiny bit irritated they worded it like this because it's insultingly misleading.

"From day one, we made the deliberate choice to build Orion on WebKit, the open‑source engine at the heart of Safari and the broader Apple ecosystem."

Chromium's Blink is based on Webkit and was for YEARS. While Blink and Webkit had some major differences now, it's not Webkit that's the better core now.

They picked Webkit because it's fast and easy, what ships on both MacOS and iOS. They couldn't put an alternative engine in the iOS and distribute it outside of Europe, so they stuck with webkit. For an Apple-only application, it's a smart choice for fast development, but it's NOT an act of resistance AT ALL. It's completely caving to Apple.

This is not a bold new choice in the browser space, it's just another privacy focused Webkit browser. That's great, but pretending this is sticking it to the man is delusional.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-25 22:30:12+00:00
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization

Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.

The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.

A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
by btown | 2025-11-25 22:30:43+00:00
So if an agent has no access to non-public data, that's (A) and (C) - the worst an attacker can do, as you note, is socially engineer themselves.

But say you're building an agent that does have access to non-public data - say, a bot that can take your team's secret internal CRM notes about a client, or Top Secret Info about the Top Secret Suppliers relevant to their inquiry, or a proprietary basis for fraud detection, into account when crafting automatic responses. Or, if you even consider the details of your system prompt to be sensitive. Now, you have (A) (B) and (C).

You might think that you can expressly forbid exfiltration of this sensitive information in your system prompt. But no current LLM is fully immune to prompt injection that overrides its system prompt from a determined attacker.

And the attack doesn't even need to come from the user's current chat messages. If they're able to poison your database - say, by leaving a review or comment somewhere with the prompt injection, then saying something that's likely to bring that into the current context via RAG, that's also a way of injecting.

This isn't to say that companies should avoid anything that has (A) (B) and (C) - tremendous value lies at this intersection! The devil's in the details: the degree of sensitivity of the information, the likelihood of highly tailored attacks, the economic and brand-integrity consequences of exfiltration, the tradeoffs against speed to market. But every team should have this conversation and have open eyes before deploying.
Ask HN: When an AI holds your company hostage, what will be the best defense?
by isodude | 2025-11-25 22:31:41+00:00
Pure hypothetical, but the clearly possible case when an AI targets and infects a company, and it does not have a real person holding the strings.

What would be the best line of defence or best way to prepare? Do we need firewalls for our own AI agents such that they are not infected and taken over?
by bluesounddirect | 2025-11-25 22:31:47+00:00
Personally, living with two T1D ( type 1 insulin dependent diabetic, the autoimmune disease not to be confused with the i am old, fat and over eat disorder) when your blood sugar is too high or low , you act weird , you are in a fog . Long term effects of the swings and sustained levels cause brain damage, not necessarily traumatic brain injuries but damage nonetheless.

So i can see the correlation for T1D and undiagnosed T2D cases Alzheimers. Now having a parent with both T2D and Alzheimers when they were taking rebelsis there was a change in their overall mood and activity , but i saw the change was "hey your sugar is under control, and no i am not your buddy from the army" . To be clear the difference is the fog of being unclear about what's going on like you're drunk , vs the grand delusions of seeing a different person that's not there .

This should have been obvious for the researchers.
by in_cahoots | 2025-11-25 22:32:26+00:00
The social aspect is a part of it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. So much of how we fundamentally see the world- the role of the individual vs society, luck vs skill vs determination as being important for success, what defines a 'happy' life- is determined by our own conditioning. By seeing someone else's perspective you start to appreciate that there aren't many 'first principles' in life.

Take a simple example, marriage. If you're a Millennial you were probably brought up to think marriage is for love, and should produce kids. Depending on your orientation and enculturation, the wife is 'supposed' to stay at home or 'supposed' to have a career. We don't question the basic outlines of what a marriage looks like, unless you happen to be a part of the polyamory or fundamental religious communities, in which case you probably take those standards as being the ideal.

My husband's entire family had arranged marriages. Seeing their relationships gave me a new perspective on what a marriage can be, and forced us to be intentional about what parts of our culture we bring along. It's not that we're doing marriage 'better' than anyone else, but when you can't assume anything about what a marriage looks like you have to really examine it in detail.
by matt_heimer | 2025-11-25 22:32:29+00:00
Kids and preteens don't care about the experience being better in one environment vs another. That age group has less patience than older age groups, all they want to do is to see the movie NOW. They don't want to go to the theater, they want instant gratification. If a movie also released on streaming they'd be watching it before you could get them in the car for a trip to the theater.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-25 22:32:46+00:00
Came here to say this. I still think that Linus Torvalds has the most profound advice to building a large, highly successful software system:

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project."

-- Linux Times, October 2004.
by Animats | 2025-11-25 22:33:10+00:00
I've been saying that for decades now. My point was that if you could get squirrel-level common sense, defined as not doing anything really bad in the next thirty seconds while making some progress on a task, you were almost there. Then you can back-seat drive the low-level system with something goal-oriented.

I once said that to Rod Brooks, when he was giving a talk at Stanford, back when he had insect-level robots and was working on Cog, a talking head. I asked why the next step was to reach for human-level AI, not mouse-level AI. Insect to human seemed too big a jump. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the creator of the world's greatest robot mouse".

He did go down in history as the creator of the robot vacuum cleaner, the Roomba.
by flyinghamster | 2025-11-25 22:33:47+00:00
It just seems insane to me that this mentality has been allowed to take root. I live in an area where kids on bikes are a regular sight, any time the weather is even halfway decent. Just last year, I came across a brother and sister riding up the forest preserve bike trail with fishing poles. But the media-driven "fear, fear, fear, nothing but fear" narrative has really done a hell of a lot of harm to society.
by johnxie | 2025-11-25 22:33:53+00:00
Feels like pricing is becoming a moving target again. Cursor’s experiments showed how fast teams will change plans the moment usage patterns shift, and LLM speed only accelerates that loop. Every new model drop forces you to rethink what’s “metered,” what’s “included,” and what users actually feel in the product.

The part that buckles first is always the billing logic. Not the API calls, but the lifecycle math behind experiments… and the experiments never stop now.

So anything that lets teams iterate without rewiring state machines every week is going to find an audience. Most people just want to ship, test, adjust, repeat, without their billing layer collapsing under the pace of AI.

Nice launch!