MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ternus | 2025-12-08 03:06:41+00:00
This is still a concern in 2025. If your aircraft systems break, or if you don't want to be identified, there are surprisingly few ways of identifying you nonetheless.

It surprises many people to learn that we do not have full radar coverage of the continental United States, much less the oceans. Outside of the ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone), military bases, large airports, etc., planes are more or less tracked voluntarily by systems like ADS-B.

From the excellent Computers Are Bad newsletter, https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html :

""" It is a common misconception that the FAA, NORAD, or someone has complete information on aircraft in the skies. In reality, this is far from true. Primary radar is inherently limited in range and sensitivity, and the JSS is a compromise aimed mostly at providing safety of commercial air routes and surveillance off the coasts. Air traffic control and air defense radar is blind to small aircraft in many areas and even large aircraft in some portions of the US and Canada, and that's without any consideration of low-radar-profile or "stealth" technology. With limited exceptions such as the Air Defense Identification Zones off the coasts and the Washington DC region, neither NORAD nor the FAA expect to be able to identify aircraft in the air. Aircraft operating under visual flight rules routinely do so without filing any type of flight plan, and air traffic controllers outside of airport approach areas ignore these radar contacts unless asked to do otherwise.

There are incidents and accidents, hints and allegations, that suggest that this concern is not merely theoretical. In late 2017, air traffic controllers tracked an object on radar in northern California and southern Oregon. Multiple commercial air crews, asked to keep an eye out, saw the object and described it as, well, an airplane. It was flying at a speed and altitude consistent with a jetliner and made no strange maneuvers. It was really all very ordinary except that no one had any idea who or what it was. The inability to identify this airplane spooked air traffic controllers who engaged the military. Eventually fighter jets were dispatched from Portland, but by the time they were in the air controllers had lost radar contact with the object. The fighter pilots made an effort to locate the object, but unsurprisingly considering the limited range of the target acquisition radar onboard fighters, they were unsuccessful. One interpretation of this event is that everyone involved was either crazy or mistaken. Perhaps it had been swamp gas all along. Another interpretation is that someone flew a good sized jet aircraft into, over, and out of the United States without being identified or intercepted. Reporting around the incident suggests that the military both took it seriously and does not want to talk about it. """
by kami23 | 2025-12-08 03:06:59+00:00
I'm very fond of Puppy Linux, it's how I learned a lot of Linux skills as a preteen!

I had Puppy Linux on a USB stick when I was a kid. It was the first Linux flavor I used for an extended period of time for two very specific reasons. It was small, I didn't have much time to spend at the library waiting for downloads, and I couldn't afford a very large USB stick.

I had nuked the MBR on our family computer. I never figured out how I'd done it but that the fix was to restore it using a Windows recovery disk. But that took about 2 years of using Linux live CDs as a compute environment, eventually progressing my computer knowledge to trying to install Ubuntu to the hard drive so I could start saving files, and saw that the Windows partition existed on disk and did a bit more research with that knowledge to learn about MBRs and dual booting. The Tech Tv channel back in the 2000s was a great way for a 10 year old to learn about computers!

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, and for kicking off the acquisition of skills I've centered my career around!
by psviderski | 2025-12-08 03:07:36+00:00
> In fact could you not just cron the cli deployment command on the nodes and get an effective poor man's declarative layer to guard against node failures if your ok with a 1 min or 1 sec recovery objective?

Yeah, you absolutely could and someone on our Discord has written a 30-line bash script that essentially runs a reconciliation loop with the CLI.

Thanks for the point on underselling by calling it imperative rather than declarative!
by k310 | 2025-12-08 03:08:04+00:00
Well, it looks like the 90% plus of wealth hoarding just got a whole lot more unstable. Machines will do everything and the jobless have nothing to do but sever power lines.

Is nuclear power safe from assault? I dunno. Visit Chernobyl and see.

If an even greater concentration of wealth is to lead to mass destruction/revolution, I advise a more even distribution.

Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-08 03:09:36+00:00
Businesses have many aspects of their operation that are unpredictable: ask the legal team exactly what the result of a legal action will be, and when it will be completed by, and you'll get a fuzzy answer. Ask the marketing team exactly how many new signups will result from this new ad campaign and you'll get a fuzzy answer. Businesses can easily cope with unpredictability, this is not a problem.

The problem is that software development has not been treated as one of these unpredictable operations. It absolutely is unpredictable, we know this from decades of experience and all the academic research on the subject. But, probably because of history, politics and power imbalances, software dev teams have very rarely managed to convince executive teams that software development must be treated as unpredictable. As a result, software dev as a profession has a bad reputation for not delivering on their promises.

When we do manage to convince executive teams that software development is unpredictable, good things happen. The author's point that "tax software must be released at tax time" still happens, but the planning around the specific feature set takes into account that if the release date is fixed then the feature set in the release will not be. Again, it's not a problem to deal with the unpredictability, as long as everyone accepts that it is unpredictable.
by ghandni | 2025-12-08 03:10:25+00:00
> The Bermuda Triangle is basically what happens when three forces line up: the military's need to preserve reputation, the media's need for a compelling narrative, and the public's appetite for mystery over mundane failure.

I’d argue that skeptics have the easiest job in the world. They just have to provide a plausible and well-regarded answer to a mystery without providing adequate evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but ordinary claims don’t require much evidence at all.
by lubujackson | 2025-12-08 03:10:52+00:00
In whatever way this is true, it has very little to do with sticking it to "coders" but is about magically solving/automating processes of any kind. Replacing programmers is small potatoes, and ultimately not a good candidate for jobs to replace. Programmers are ideal future AI operators!

What AI usage has underlined is that we are forever bound by our ability to communicate precisely what we want the AI to do for us. Even if LLMs are perfect, if we give it squishy instructions we get squishy results. If we give it a well-crafted objective and appropriate context and all the rest, it can respond just about perfectly. Then again, that is a lot of what programming has always been about in the first place - translate human goals into actionable code. Only the interface and abstraction level has changed.
by ergocoder | 2025-12-08 03:10:55+00:00
You capture the root issue quite well.

Now every tool has to adapt to Scala 3. And you guess it? It will take time. Even IntelliJ still doesn't correctly highlight syntax on some parts that also exist in Scala 2. And this has been years after Scala 3 was launched. It's mind-boggling.

They could have improved upon Scala 2 and incrementally add more capabilities. It's obvious they don't care about Scala's industry success. They care mostly about the academic success. Nothing wrong with that, but that should be made very clear.

In Scala, they have a huge debate with zealots arguing against, for example, early return; they would describe how bad it will be blah blah blah e.g. https://tpolecat.github.io/2014/05/09/return.html, meanwhile Kotlin supports early return with absolutely no issue.
by throwaway150 | 2025-12-08 03:11:58+00:00
> You can’t make anything truly radical with it. By definition, LLMs are trained on what has come before. In addition to being already-discovered territory, existing code is buggy and broken and sloppy and, as anyone who has ever written code knows, absolutely embarrassing to look at.

I don't understand this argument. I mean the same applies for books. All books teach you what has come before. Nobody says "You can't make anything truly radical with books". Radical things are built by people after reading those books. Why can't people build radical things after learning or after being assisted by LLMs?
by lijenjin | 2025-12-08 03:12:35+00:00
The linked article at the end says: "First, using Hallucination Check together with GPTZero’s AI Detector allows users to check for AI-generated text and suspicious citations at the same time, and even use one result to verify the other. Second, Hallucination Check greatly reduces the time and labor necessary to verify a document’s sources by identifying flawed citations for a human to review."

On their site (https://gptzero.me/sources) it also says "GPTZero's Hallucination Detector automatically detects hallucinated sources and poorly supported claims in essays. Verify academic integrity with the most accurate hallucination detection tool for educators", so it does more than just identify invalid citations. Seems to do exactly what you're talking about.
by fs_software | 2025-12-08 03:14:47+00:00
If you know your team's velocity, this methodology has worked well for me in the past:

- ask enough questions about the scope of work to do a prototype

- build a prototype to identify constraints / complexity

- ask followup questions

- break the body of work down into a list of tickets (spike/discovery tickets included)

- use the PERT formula to estimate the total number of story points for the body of work

- take the total estimated points and divide by your team velocity for a duration of time (e.g. 100 total points / 40 points per 2 weeks = 2.5 weeks)
by Ukv | 2025-12-08 03:14:49+00:00
> can you confidently classify all mental activity that you experience as "predicting the next thing"? [...] On what do you base your confidence in their equivalence?

To my understanding, bloaf's claim was only that the ability to predict seems a requirement of acting intentionally and thus that LLMs may "end up being a component in a system which actually does think" - not necessarily that all thought is prediction or that an LLM would be the entire system.

I'd personally go further and claim that correctly generating the next token is already a sufficiently general task to embed pretty much any intellectual capability. To complete `2360 + 8352 * 4 = ` for unseen problems is to be capable of arithmetic, for instance.
by measurablefunc | 2025-12-08 03:14:56+00:00
Sound deductive rules of logic can not create novelty that exceeds the inherent limits of their foundational axiomatic assumptions. You can not expect novel results from neural networks that exceed the inherent information capacity of their training corpus & the inherent biases of the neural network (encoded by its architecture). So if the training corpus is semantically unsound & inconsistent then there is no reason to expect that it will produce logically sound & semantically coherent outputs (i.e. garbage inputs → garbage outputs).
by JSR_FDED | 2025-12-08 03:15:50+00:00
So this is supposedly Telecom Operators proposing to the government that location services on phones should be permanently on. They argue that more precise device-level coordinates will help law-enforcement agencies during investigations, since current cell-tower based data only gives an approximate area.

How bizarre is it that telcos are pushing something that is a law enforcement concern. They’re not also suggesting phones should automatically switch off at night on behalf of the department of education because students who sleep more have better academic outcomes, are they?

Wouldn’t a more likely explanation be that they can sell your location data for more money this way?
by satisfice | 2025-12-08 03:16:00+00:00
He literally says: "Our definition for vanity activity can be similar: something you do that seems more useful or virtuous than it really is."

And then he suggests that reading the news is a vanity activity.

My comment is perfectly on point. I think he is engaging in a vanity activity, by his own definition, when he suggests that reading the news is a vanity activity.

It's fine to have an opinion and a way of looking at the world. My objection is when a person claims that opinion is something more rational than it is-- while pissing on the choices other people make.
by epsteingpt | 2025-12-08 03:16:25+00:00
Yes, a cursory google search will show dozens of convictions at all sorts of sensitive technical labs, but I'll post them for HN: [1] Ji Wang convicted recently of stealing DARPA laser tech https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/fiber-laser-expert-convicted-... [2] Leon Ding indicted for stealing AI tech - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/chinese-national-res... [3] Pangang Companies ongoing and rejected appeals for stealing Titanium Dioxide production [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/22...]

Here's an umbrella doc from the USTR, and the good stuff: China used foreign ownership restrictions, such as joint venture (JV) requirements and foreign equity limitations, and various administrative review and licensing processes, to require or pressure technology transfer from U.S. companies. 2. China’s regime of technology regulations forced U.S. companies seeking to license technologies to Chinese entities to do so on non-market-based terms that favor Chinese recipients. 3. China directed and unfairly facilitated the systematic investment in, and acquisition of, U.S. companies and assets by Chinese companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies and IP and generate the transfer of technology to Chinese companies. 4. China conducted and supported unauthorized intrusions into, and theft from, the computer networks of U.S. companies to access their IP, including trade secrets, and confidential business information.

As mentioned - no one has claimed that DeepSeek in its entirety was stolen from the U.S.

It is almost a certainty based on decades of historical precedent of systematic theft that techniques, research, and other IP was also systematically stolen for this critical technology.

Don't close your eyes when the evidence, both rigorously proven and common sense, is staring you in the face.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 03:16:51+00:00
>You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.

That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed.

>You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that?

Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden.

>they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp

I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.

>what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp

Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user.

It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies.

> even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.

Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world.
by cgoggins | 2025-12-08 03:17:07+00:00
General Catalyst-backed Stealth AI Startup | Founding Engineer | Onsite (New York City) | Full-time

We’re building the AI operating system for engineering firms - automating the workflows behind the infrastructure America runs on.

Founded by engineers and operators from Citadel, Amazon AI, Stanford and Columbia. The team recently raised a large Seed round and is scaling quickly.

We're looking for exceptional engineers with strong backend development and systems engineering skills. Experience working with LLM-based systems at scale, building RAG pipelines, working with embeddings and vector stores, and building effective context management systems is strongly preferred.

You'll work directly with me (CTO / co-founder) to define the system architecture, take ownership of key product features, and build out the platform's core AI systems.

Our culture is simple: we move extremely fast, hold a high bar for exceptional talent, and pay people very well.

Reach out to me at cgoggins0@gmail.com to hear more.
by bloaf | 2025-12-08 03:18:19+00:00
> When you have a thought, are you "predicting the next thing"—can you confidently classify all mental activity that you experience as "predicting the next thing"?

So notice that my original claim was "prediction is fundamental to our ability to act with intent" and now your demand is to prove that "prediction is fundamental to all mental activity."

That's a subtle but dishonest rhetorical shift to make me have to defend a much broader claim, which I have no desire to do.

> Language and society constrains the way we use words, but when you speak, are you "predicting"?

Yes, and necessarily so. One of the main objections that dualists use to argue that our mental processes must be immaterial is this [0]:

* If our mental processes are physical, then there cannot be an ultimate metaphysical truth-of-the-matter about the meaning of those processes.

* If there is no ultimate metaphysical truth-of-the-matter about what those processes mean, then everything they do and produce are similarly devoid of meaning.

* Asserting a non-dualist mind therefore implies your words are meaningless, a self-defeating assertion.

The simple answer to this dualist argument is precisely captured by this concept of prediction. There is no need to assert some kind of underlying magical meaning to be able to communicate. Instead, we need only say that in the relevant circumstances, our minds are capable of predicting what impact words will have on the receiver and choosing them accordingly. Since we humans don't have access to each other's minds, we must not learn these impacts from some kind of psychic mind-to-mind sense, but simply from observing the impacts of the words we choose on other parties; something that LLMs are currently (at least somewhat) capable of observing.

[0] https://www.newdualism.org/papers/E.Feser/Feser-acpq_2013.pd...

If you read the above link you will see that they spell out 3 problems with our understanding of thought:

Consciousness, intentionality, and rationality.

Of these, I believe prediction is only necessary for intentionality, but it does have some roles to play in consciousness and rationality.
by ineedasername | 2025-12-08 03:18:23+00:00
>I'll bet 1 share...

I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants...

One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.
by bamboozled | 2025-12-08 03:19:35+00:00
I take a offence in the idea I’m “religiously downplaying LLMs”. I pay top dollar for access to the best models because I want the capabilities to be good / better. Just because I’m documenting my experience it doesn’t mean I have an Anti-ai agenda ? I pay because I find LLMs to be useful. Just not in the way suggested by the marketing teams.

I’m downplaying because I have honestly been burned by these tools when I’ve put trust in their ability to understand anything, provide a novel suggestion or even solve some basic bugs without causing other issues.?

I use all of the things you talk about extremely frequently and again, there is no “thinking” or consideration on display that suggests these things work like us, else why would we be having this conversation if they were ?
by SamBam | 2025-12-08 03:20:31+00:00
30 seconds is indeed the _original_ Aeropress recommended brew time. [1] You're supposed to mix the grounds and start plunging nearly immediately, finishing in about 30 seconds. So, indeed, much of the water passes through even before 30 seconds.

That was way too short. It looks like they've finally updated the instructions somewhat, now recommending 60 seconds before starting to plunge. [2]

It works because they also recommend a very fine grind, but that's still pretty short. It looks like Counter Culture recommends using regular pour-over grind and the inverted method and 2-3 minutes, [3] which happens to also be what I do. Though I'm not really particular, so long as it's somewhere between about 1.5 and 3.5 minutes. (Breakfast is a hectic time while also handling kids...)

1. https://www.seattlecoffeegear.com/pages/product-resource/aer...

2. https://aeropress.com/pages/how-to-use

3. https://counterculturecoffee.com/blogs/counter-culture-coffe...
by aninteger | 2025-12-08 03:20:41+00:00
The best example I can think of is the Win32 controls UI (user32/Create window/RegisterClass) in C. You likely can't read the source code for this but you can see how Wine did it or Wine alternatives (like NetBSD's PEACE runtime, now abandoned).

Actually the only toolkit that I know that sort of copied this style is Nakst's Luigi toolkit (also in C).

Neither really used inheritance and use composition with "message passing" sent to different controls.