MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-20 22:33:56+00:00
At the extreme end: If my Javascript frontend is being told about a database configuration error happening in the backend when a call with specific parameters is made - that is a SERIOUS security problem.

Errors are massaged for the reader - a database access library will know that a DNS error occurred and that is (the first step for debugging) why it cannot connect to the specified datastore. The service layer caller does not need to know that there is a DNS error, it just needs to know that the specified datastore is uncontactable (and then it can move on to the approriate resilience strategy, retry that same datastore, fallback to a different datastore, or tell the API that it cannot complete the call at all).

The caller can then decide what to do (typically say "Well, I tried, but nothing's happening, have yourself a merry 500)

It makes no sense for the Service level to know the details of why the database access layer could not connect, no more than it makes any sense for the database access layer to know why there is a DNS configuration error - the database access just needs to log the reasons (for humans to investigate), and tell the caller (the service layer) that it could not do the task it was asked to do.

If the service layer is told that the database access layer encountered a DNS problem, what is it going to do?

Nothing, the best it can do is log (tell the humans monitoring it) that a DB access call (to a specific DB service layer) failed, and try something else, which is a generic strategy, one that applies to a host of errors that the database call could return.
by cryzinger | 2025-12-20 22:33:56+00:00
> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.

Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...

Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
by girvo | 2025-12-20 22:34:35+00:00
> because the cost of residential power in Australia

This so doesn't really matter to your overall point which I agree with but:

The rise of rooftop solar and home battery energy storage flips this a bit now in Australia, IMO. At least where I live, every house has a solar panel on it.

Not worth it just for local LLM usage, but an interesting change to energy economics IMO!
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-20 22:34:52+00:00
> "it's hard to imagine a more favorable situation"

Granted, but this reads a bit like a headline from The Onion: "'Hard to imagine a more favourable situation than pressing nails into wood' said local man unimpressed with neighbour's new hammer".

I think it's a strong enough example to disprove "they're an interesting phenomenon that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL ... either through ignorance or a sense of desperation". Not enough to claim they are always useful in all situations or to all people, but I wasn't trying for that. You (or the person I was replying to) basically have to make the case that Simon Willison is ignorant about LLMs and programming, is desperate about something, or is deluding himself that the port worked when it actually didn't, to keep the original claim. And I don't think you can. He isn't hyping an AI startup, he has no profit motive to delude him. He isn't a non-technical business leader who can't code being baffled by buzzwords. He isn't new to LLMs and wowed by the first thing. He gave a conference talk showing that LLMs cannot draw pelicans on bicycles so he is able to admit their flaws and limitations.

> "But this is cherry-picking."

Is it? I can't use an example where they weren't useful or failed. It makes no sense to try and argue how many successes vs. failures, even if I had any way to know that; any number of people failing at plumbing a bathroom sink don't prove that plumbing is impossible or not useful. One success at plumbing a bathroom sink is enough to demonstrate that it is possible and useful - it doesn't need dozens of examples - even if the task is narrowly scoped and well-trodden. If a Tesla humanoid robot could plumb in a bathroom sink, it might not be good value for money, but it would be a useful task. If it could do it for $30 it might be good value for money as well even if it couldn't do any other tasks at all, right?
by constantcrying | 2025-12-20 22:35:01+00:00
To be honest, I found Fusion 360 and Onshape very intuitive to learn.

>and if one has trouble modeling something, well, arriving at a solution is just a matter of learning the appropriate mathematics.

Which is the terrible thing about OpenSCAD. YOU need to derive the equations. In a modern CAD program you define the constraints on the object and the equations are derived for you.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-20 22:36:42+00:00
The Hidden Life of Trees [0] uses this terminology, and is absolutely brilliant storytelling. Turns out you can learn about sociology through immobile plants.

[0] <https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...>

We're all interconnected; in a properly-functioning society parents nourish undergrowth until their turn to die.
by tripdout | 2025-12-20 22:37:01+00:00
You may not be stealing the actual content, more so “making a copy”, but in doing that you’re taking away money the artist would have earned if you bought their album or streamed it on Spotify (admittedly that’a a very small amount for the artist but that’s another thing)

And if I stole something physical you had for sale, you wouldn’t make the money, so the end result is effectively the same.
by tim333 | 2025-12-20 22:37:03+00:00
String theory has always seemed intuitively wrong to me. From Wikipedia:

>In theories of particle physics based on string theory, the characteristic length scale of strings is assumed to be on the order of the Planck length, or 10E−35 meters

Yet electrons repel each other over distances of many meters by I think the virtual exchange of photons. How on earth would that work? How does your photo string know to head to an electron string trillions and trillions of times it's length away?

As far as I can tell the field became popular for sociological reasons that you could get grants for it and the like rather than any connection to reality(?)
by willio58 | 2025-12-20 22:37:46+00:00
I recently got into the whole homelab *arr stack for things like movies and tv and while I know options exist for music I just don’t see the need yet price-wise. Spotify is still just cheap enough for me to not care enough. We’ll see how long this holds.

That being said it’s no secret Spotify and other streaming services barely pay even popular artists. Artists make money from live shows and merch. The fact that their music is behind a paywall at all could mean they make less money from some lack of exposure.

I do hope one day self-hosting music with an extremely easy setup with torrenting for sourcing is set up again. What I’m talking about exists to some extent, but it’s not trivial for most people.
by tylervigen | 2025-12-20 22:38:11+00:00
This is big news. For decades, NOAA’s model has basically just been a huge Fortran physics simulation. Now they are making the leap to AI.

I suspect the nail in the coffin was the hurricane season, where NOAA’s model was basically beat by every major AI model. [0]

The GFS also just had its worst year in predicting hurricane paths since 2005. [1] That’s not a trend you want to continue.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-...

[1] https://www.local10.com/weather/hurricane/2025/11/03/this-hu...
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-20 22:39:15+00:00
There is over 250 years of legislative history indicating that regulating dangerous things is part of promoting the public welfare.

Literally, the First Congress made up almost entirely of Founding Fathers passed laws regulating dangerous things...

If you want to use a nonstandard definition to suit your own ideology you're free to do so but don't expect others to join you.
by girvo | 2025-12-20 22:39:35+00:00
> I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it

Thats surprising! Last time I used software like this (Inventor, back in ~2005-2006) constraints meant that I didn't need to do this at all
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-20 22:39:42+00:00
PCIe 3.0 is the nice easy convenient generation where 1 lane = 1GBps. Given the overhead, thats pretty close to 10Gb ethernet speeds (low latency though).

I do wonder how long the cards are going to need host systems at all. We've already seen GPUs with m.2 ssd attached! Radeon Pro SSG hails back from 2016! You still need a way to get the model on that in the first place to get work in and out, but a 1Gbe and small RISC-V chip (which Nvidia already uses formanagement cores) could suffice. Maybe even an rpi on the card. https://www.techpowerup.com/224434/amd-announces-the-radeon-...

Given the gobs of memory cards have, they probably don't even need storage; they just need big pipes. Intel had 100Gbe on their Xeon & Xeon Phi cores (10x what we saw here!) in 2016! GPUs that just plug into the switch and talk across 400Gbe or UltraEthernet or switched CXL, that run semi independently, feel so sensible, so not outlandish. https://www.servethehome.com/next-generation-interconnect-in...

It's far off for now, but flash makers are also looking at radically many channel flash, which can provide absurdly high GB/s, High Bandwidth Flash. And potentially integrated some extremely parallel tensorcores on each channel. Switching from DRAM to flash for AI processing could be a colossal win for fitting large models cost effectively (& perhaps power efficiently) while still having ridiculous gobs of bandwidth. With that possible win of doing processing & filtering extremely near to the data too. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sandisk-and-sk-hy...
by cjs_ac | 2025-12-20 22:40:52+00:00
The AI providers' operations remain heavily subsidised by venture capital. Eventually those investors will turn around and demand a return on their investment. The big question is, when that happens, whether LLMs will be useful enough to customers to justify paying the full cost of developing and operating them.

That said, in the meantime, I'm not confident that I'd be able to find another job if I lost my current one, because I not only have to compete against every other candidate, I also need to compete against the ethereal promise of what AI might bring in the near future.
by IgorPartola | 2025-12-20 22:41:03+00:00
The “if you bought their album” is the non-trivial part of that sentence. A pirate is not necessarily going to fork over $20 for an album if they couldn’t pirate. Chances are they will simply not buy the album. In either case the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 (6% to the artist the rest to the studio and distributors). So the result is really not the same because the artist and the pirate can both have the album in different ways and in both cases the artist doesn’t get their $1.20 unlike a physical good which cannot be cloned.

What this really is exposing is that most art is not worth the same. A Taylor Swift album is not worth the same on the open market as a Joe Exotic album. Pricing both at say $20 is artificial. Realistically most music has near zero actual value, hence why if you are a B tier or lower artist you won’t make much compared to an A tier artist on platforms like Spotify or YouTube which pay per listen/watch.
by keeda | 2025-12-20 22:42:01+00:00
Anecdote, but I've never been able to use Claude (directly) because their defense systems seem overly sensitive to your email address. I signed up for Claude using a relatively new Outlook email address that I set up for an independent purpose. My account got instabanned. Like, I couldn't proceed at all. I don't even know what the Claude UI looks like. All I could do was appeal using a Google Form.

I appealed and got a standard Google Forms response. There was no follow-up after that. It never got fixed and I never tried again... plenty of free, more accessible fish out there, and various agents like Copilot give me access to Sonnet anyway.

But now I wonder, what is it about the account that triggered this block. If it was because of the reputation of the account, how did Anthropic even know that this account was created a few weeks ago?
by Xss3 | 2025-12-20 22:42:18+00:00
Some programs are error resistant and need an additional level: Fatal.

A warning can be ignored safely. Warnings may be 'debugging enabled, results cannot be certified' or something similar.

An error should not be ignored, an operation is failing, data loss may be occurring, etc.

Some users may be okay with that data loss or failing operation. Maybe it isnt important to them. If the program continues and does not error in the parts that matter to the user, then they can ignore it, but it is still objectively an error occurring.

A fatal message cannot be ignored, the system has crashed. Its the last thing you see before shutdown is attempted.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-12-20 22:42:40+00:00
> almost always just maps to logging anyway

Yes, that’s the point. You log it until you encounter it for the first time, then you know more and can do something meaningful. E.g. let’s say you build an API client and library offers callback for HTTP 429. You don’t expect it to happen, so just log the errors in a generic handler in client code, but then after some business logic change you hit 429 for the first time. If library offers you control over what is going to happen next, you may decide how exactly you will retry and what happens to your state in between the attempts. If library just logs and starts retry cycle, you may get a performance hit that will be harder to fix.
by VTimofeenko | 2025-12-20 22:42:44+00:00
Fair question, it does look a bit jarring when not rendered. I write a lot of markdown and it's a very strong force of habit to use backticks to sort of highlight a technical term and turn it into a noun. Similar to writing endash as a double hyphen.

When I read what I write, my eyes glance through backticks and maybe come back if I need to parse the inner term in more detail.
by eurleif | 2025-12-20 22:43:05+00:00
>EVENTVALIDATION is (was?) a novel security measure implemented in 2006 by the ASP.NET team to "prevents unauthorized requests sent by potentially malicious users from the client [..] to ensure that each and every postback and callback event originates from the expected user interface elements, the page adds an extra layer of validation on events".

The attack it prevents is called XSRF, and this security measure wasn't novel in 2006.
by zimpenfish | 2025-12-20 22:43:53+00:00
Bless you for your service, sir! I have used `sdf` to create a whole bunch of stuff (buttons for my mother, tealight holders, etc.) and `gg` gets used in a bunch of places (including a couple of bots).

> I should probably do more with this project.

I, for one, would be glad.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-12-20 22:44:04+00:00
You can't change ChatGPT email address, either, fwiw.

The email I signed up for got compromised a couple of months ago and I ended up having to delete my entire GPT account, losing all my history, to recreate using a new email.

It was super annoying and, out of hundreds of websites I had to update, only OpenAI and Anthropic wouldn't let me change my email. A few of them required contacting support with some sort of proof, but at least doable.
by lazyc0der | 2025-12-20 22:44:20+00:00
Boulder County is working on utility undergrounding, https://bouldercolorado.gov/services/utility-undergrounding, and in particular they are working on undergrounding at Chautauqua, https://bouldercolorado.gov/news/undergrounding-chautauqua, which is next door to the NIST facility.
by vgeek | 2025-12-20 22:45:54+00:00
Look at where Fanduel/Draftking/Caesars type sportsbooks make their most margin-- it is parlays. Probably 95% of people wagering on these sites don't have even a tenuous grasp on basic statistics, yet alone how to derive actual probabilities of their action for simple spread/moneyline/total wagers. When you're letting them combine 5 wagers each with an EV of 90 cents on the dollar, the books are loving it. Layer on that these books simply ban winning players, it is insanely predatory.

Prediction markets, as they currently stand, are at least better with regard to having a lower take and are less predatory in their wagering products and marketing (although these points can very easily change, but the complex wagering menus will be less liquid and harder to grow). If the house cut is 1-3%, that is still drastically better than the other parimutuel wagering in America, horse racing, which is typically 20-25%.
by nospice | 2025-12-20 22:45:57+00:00
> most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.

I think you have it the wrong way round. I'm sure that musicians would love to make money from album / song sales. It's just that between piracy and companies like Spotify, artists make pennies on these activities, so their only choice is to make money on more labor-intensive stuff where they retain more control.

Note that Spotify, somehow, finds it profitable to be in the streaming business.
by hannasanarion | 2025-12-20 22:46:01+00:00
That's literally exactly what they do. This is why you should consider reading beyond headlines from time to time.

> You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

> (from the attached FAQ) Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
by cornonthecobra | 2025-12-20 22:46:54+00:00
CenturyLink, an ILEC, only offers IPv6 using 6rd gateways. The IPv6 throughput is a fraction of IPv4 and has much higher latency. During peak times, the 6rd gateway saturates, forcing me to stop advertising the prefix to restore internet access. It has been this way for years.

It is also impossible to report IPv6-specific outages. CenturyLink technical support is the worst of the worst, with agents utterly incapable of doing more than pushing a "check ONT" button on their end and scheduling a technician visit with a multiday window. If you ask them for the 6rd configuration information, they act like you're speaking an alien language.

Even among their technicians, IPv6 knowledge is rare. Imagine the guy installing hundreds of dollars of gigabit fibre equipment at your demarc staring you like an idiot because you spoke two extra syllables between "IP" and "address". I'd think the term "IPv6" is chatbot poison if it weren't for the fact it's a human physically in front of me.

The result is their service is effectively IPv4-only.
by esrauch | 2025-12-20 22:47:31+00:00
Protobuf is the example I had in mind. It uses sun.misc.Unsafe which is being removed in upcoming Java releases, but it has a slow fallback path. It logs a warning when it runs if it can tell it's only using the fallback path but the fast path is still available if the application owner set a flag to turn it back on if they want to:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/20760

Java Protobuf also logs a warning now if you can tell you are using gencode old enough that it's covered by a DoS CVE. They actually did a release that broke compatability of the CVE covered gencode but restored it and print a warning in a newer release.
by black_knight | 2025-12-20 22:50:01+00:00
Simply assuming the negation of AC is boring, as negations often are. But there are stronger statements, implying the negation of AC which might be as useful. I think for instance one could assume all subsets of the plane to be measurable. Seems convenient to me.

Same with law of the excluded middle. Tossing it out we can assume all functions are computable and all total functions in the real are continuous. Seems nice and convenient too!
by AndroTux | 2025-12-20 22:50:23+00:00
Yes. At an airbus scale, most definitely.

But to give you another example (from the article): Try migrating Google Workspace to an EU solution. Actually impossible. I tried it myself, and gave up. The closest you’ll get is Proton, which isn’t EU to begin with and doesn’t even have half of the features Google Workspace offers.
by perotid | 2025-12-20 22:51:46+00:00
>When creating an account, please make sure you use an email you'll have long-term access to.

I'm just guessing, but the above might suggest a potential incentive: They would like you to hand over a valuable/longterm email, as opposed to a temporary email (for supposedly more privacy or testing), by making it difficult to change it later.

'Dark patterns are the pavement of todays corporate infrastructure.'
by cj | 2025-12-20 22:51:58+00:00
Is there a way to export out of one account into another?

I made the mistake of using my company provided ChatGPT account for non-work stuff. It was fine before the memory features came out. But now I'm regretting not having a separate personal one.

Edit: For ChatGPT (not sure about Claude) https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9106926-transferring-con...
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-20 22:52:18+00:00
> so they can't do anything useful

I never claimed that. They demonstrate just how powerful Markov chains can be with sophisticated state representations. Obviously LLMs are useful, I have never claimed otherwise.

Additionally, it doesn’t require any logical leaps to understand decoder only LLMs as Markov Chains, they preserve the Markov Property and otherwise be have exactly like them. It’s worth noting that encoder-decoder LLMs do not preserve the Markov property and can not be considered Markov chains.

Edit: I saw that post and at the time was disappointed by how confused the author was about those topics and how they apply to the subject.
by Hendrikto | 2025-12-20 22:53:18+00:00
Such as? Currently, the top comments are

> LLMs have certainly become extremely useful for Software Engineers

> LLMs are useful for programming in 2025

> Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so.

If your comment is not a strawman, show me where people actually claim what you say they do.
by arjie | 2025-12-20 22:54:15+00:00
It sort of makes sense. These guys were AI labs before they were ever web developers. They prompted me to switch to a business account, so I did but my business email is not my personal email and I promptly lost all the old chats. Well, all right then.

Perplexingly, this business account is as bad as a Google Workplace account. It has restrictions on it that I didn't have when I was on my own account. As an example, I can't share chats outside the organization. Fine, all right then.