MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 20:36:38+00:00
> it’s not “some people”, it’s practically everyone that doesn’t understand how these tools work, and even some people that do.

Again, true for most things. A lot of people are terrible drivers, terrible judge of their own character, and terrible recreational drug users. Does that mean we need to remove all those things that can be misused?

I much rather push back on shoddy work no matter what source. I don't care if the citations are from a robot or a human, if they suck, then you suck, because you're presenting this as your work. I don't care if your paralegal actually wrote the document, be responsible for the work you supposedly do.

> Humans were made to do things, not to verify things.

I'm glad you seemingly have some grand idea of what humans were meant to do, I certainly wouldn't claim I do so, but I'm also not religious. For me, humans do what humans do, and while we didn't used to mostly sit down and consume so much food and other things, now we do.
by evdubs | 2025-12-07 20:37:03+00:00
> Show me a convincing example of something that's simple/clear/elegant/superior in Lisp, and how difficult/complicated/ugly/impossible it would be to do the same thing in Java/C++/Ruby/Python.

Serialize and deserialize data. You're currently using something like XML or JSON for a human readable data serialization format in those languages. JSON and XML are not first class components of those languages. S-expressions are a better version of JSON and are first class components of Lisp.
by echelon | 2025-12-07 20:37:21+00:00
That's the problem! The code should not run if the types are wrong. Having an external tool is an antipattern.

Having to rely on process for validity is a recipe for bad. We already know how the greater python community has been with requirements.txt and dependencies. I've spent days fixing this garbage.

It's a tooling problem. Good tools make good habits part of the automation and stop you from having to think about it.
by ysnp | 2025-12-07 20:37:24+00:00
I don't think that is a consideration for the project. Their OEM partnership also includes supporting a current generation Snapdragon SoC which seems to feature an integrated modem.

>A component being on a separate chip is orthogonal to whether it's isolated. In order to be isolated, the drivers need to treat it as untrusted. If it has DMA access, that needs to be contained via IOMMU and the driver needs to treat the shared memory as untrusted, as it would do with data received another way.

from https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation
by MuffWarrior | 2025-12-07 20:37:24+00:00
I use https://getpublicip.com to deliver a public IP address to my home lab. I use them over Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale because I run a email server at home and I dont want encryption terminating in the cloud (as is the case with Cloudflare tunnels). Its also a TCP / UDP level solution which means I can host anything I want.
by johnfn | 2025-12-07 20:37:46+00:00
Context is king. The problem is that you are the one currently telling Claude how close it is and what to do next. But if you give it the tools to do that itself, it will make a world of difference.

Give Claude a way to iteratively poke at what it created (such as a playwright harness), and screenshot of what you want, and maybe a way to take a screenshot in Playwright and I think you will get much closer. You might even be able to one shot it.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if I gave it a screenshot and told it to iterate until the Playwright screenshot matched the mock screenshot, pixel perfect. I imagine it would go nuts, but after a few hours I think it would likely get it. (Either that or minor font discrepancies and rounding errors would cause it to give up…)
by securingsincity | 2025-12-07 20:37:58+00:00
Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.

"When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.

If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...

Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.
by hi_hi | 2025-12-07 20:38:35+00:00
I wonder how different the perception of these projects being late or (massively) over budget would be if we used different words. Bear with me here...

Words mean things. Estimate carries a certain weight. It's almost scientific sounding. Instead, we should use the word "guess".

It's exactly equivalent, but imagine the outcome if everyone in the chain, from the very serious people involved in thinking up the project, to funding the project, to prioritising and then delivering the project, all used the word "guess"

Now, when the project is millions of dollars over budget and many months/years late, no one is under any pretence that it was going to be anything else.

I tried this once. It turns out serious people don't like the idea of spending millions of dollars based on "guessing", or even letting developers "play" in order to better understand the guesses they are forced to make, even when it turns un-educated guesses into educated guesses.

Of course, none of this would improve the outcome, but at least it sets expectations appropriately.
by collinboler2 | 2025-12-07 20:39:23+00:00
Yup, it’s essentially a daily habit for many devs these days, I think they've added more gamification (streaks, badges, contests) combined with a UI update that makes it feel less like "prep." (example: https://leetcode.com/quest/)

> Fun how it goes the opposite compared to the real security implications.

You're spot on, it is pretty interesting. I suggested the extension purely to bridge that trust gap, especially if it's verified by the Chrome Web Store. If the extension is designed to strictly avoid calling any external APIs (other than leetcode graphql), it makes exfiltration impossible, ensuring the cookie never leaves the user's browser
by badlibrarian | 2025-12-07 20:40:02+00:00
The Fourier Transform isn't even Fourier's deepest insight. Unless we're now ranking scientific discoveries based on whether or not they get a post every weekend on HN.

The FFT is nifty but that's FINO. The Google boys also had a few O(N^2) to O(N log N) moments. Those seemed to move the needle a bit as well.

But even if we restrict to "things that made Nano Banana Pro possible" Shannon and Turing leapfrog Fourier.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-07 20:40:08+00:00
Since PCs became strong enough to analyse a few thousand rows of a spreadsheet, a lot of such observational (meta) analyses popped up linking an arbitrary environmental factor with a catchy target (death or well being). With such, they imply but never admit someone could hack his whole health status with a simple intervention, which obviously is not valid for any random subject. Such studies I categorise in click baity science, as they profoundly seek public attention.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-07 20:41:11+00:00
What's wild about software is we don't do 1/10th as much planning as "real" engineering projects do, and also find ways to create problems akin to the ones they run into from interfacing with an unpredictable real-world environment, by inventing ways for all our platforms and libraries and such to be insanely unstable.

If you're not subject to the batshit insanity of the broader software market, and you crank the planning up a little closer to what "real" engineering does, software delivery gets extremely predictable. See: NASA's Space Shuttle software development processes.

(There are actual, not self-inflicted, problems with software development that "real" engineering doesn't see, though—for one thing, you can't on a whim completely restructure a building that's already been built, and for another, you generally don't have to design real-world engineering projects to defend against the case of intentional sabotage by someone who's just e.g. using the bathroom—it may happen, but it's rare and short of wacky Mission Impossible type plans, busting a water pipe in the bathroom isn't going to get you access to super-secret documents or anything like that)
by pjmlp | 2025-12-07 20:41:20+00:00
Java 7 to Java 25 is a world apart, and then on which JVM?

Naturally it is a requirement, JetBrains and Google only care about the JVM as means to launch their Kotlin platform, pity that they aren't into making a KVM to show Kotlin greatness.

If it feels salty, I would have appreciated if Android team was honest about Java vs Kotlin, but they weren't and still aren't.

If they were, both languages would be supported and compete on merit, instead of sniffling one to push their own horse.

Even on their Podcast they reveal complete lack of knowledge where Java stands.
by nhaehnle | 2025-12-07 20:41:39+00:00
That's a fair and good interjection. The truth is probably that at society scale, both approaches are traditional.

The open sharing approach is traditional for research and academia, while the information restricting approach is traditional for business-oriented thinking.

So, a young field will typically start out fairly open and then get increasingly closed down. The long-term trajectory differs by field, and the modern open-source landscape shows that there can be a fair bit of oscillation.

We're seeing the same basic shape of story play out in generative AI.
by wpietri | 2025-12-07 20:41:51+00:00
And I'd add that the need for them is a sign they aren't worth doing.

As you say, worthwhile software is usually novel. And to justify our expense, it needs to be valuable. So to decide whether a project is worth doing, we're looking at some sort of estimate of return on investment.

That estimate will also, at least implicitly, have a range. That range is determined by both the I and the R. If you don't have a precise estimate of return, making your estimate of investment more precise doesn't help anything. And I've never seen an estimate of return both precise and accurate; business is even less certain than software.

In my opinion, effort put into careful estimates is almost always better put into early, iterative delivery and product management that maximizes the information gained. Shipping early and often buys much clearer information on both I and R than you can ever get in a conference room.

Of course all of this only matters if running an effective business is more important than managerial soap opera and office politics. Those often require estimates in much the same way they're required from Star Trek's engineers: so the people with main character syndrome have something to dramatically ignore or override to prove their dominance over the NPCs and material reality.
by drewg123 | 2025-12-07 20:42:10+00:00
My desktop progression has been 1989: twm 1995: ctwm 2000: kde 2022: lxde

I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch

Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with

Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university

I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
by jtrn | 2025-12-07 20:42:31+00:00
Here is my amateur understanding of the architecture: Fine-tune on the fly by using degrees of surprise to update a separate/new memory network that matches the base model, and just call that network for each token iteration.

So if we are viewing this through the needle in hey stack lens: The needle was very surprising for the base model, so going forward, when it see anything of the same nature, the memory module will not just give you hay, but the needle, because it made a special note of it when it went through the haystack 1 million tokens ago, because the needle was surprising.

The Transformer's normal attention mechanism is already secretly trying to be a long-term memory system. Every time it writes a new KV pair into the cache, it’s desperately trying to “remember” that token forever.

But it’s doing it in the dumbest possible way: by hoarding an ever-growing pile of raw vectors, then frantically dot-product searching through the pile every single step. It’s like a hoarder who never throws anything away and has to rummage through mountains of junk to find the one receipt they need. Of course it chokes at long contexts.

Titans/MIRAS looks at that mess and says: “Why store memory in a growing garbage pile of vectors? Store it in the weights of a deep neural network instead — and let that network keep training itself in real time, but only on the stuff that actually surprises it.” That’s literally it.

Using the Tim Cook Martian example: The model is cruising through boring financial numbers → attention is doing its normal thing, KV cache is growing, but nothing is really sticking.

Suddenly: “Tim Cook is a Martian.”

Normal attention would just add one more KV pair to the pile and pray it doesn’t get drowned out later.

Titans instead goes: “Holy shit, reconstruction error off the charts → this does NOT fit my current memory at all → massive gradient → actually rewrite huge chunks of the memory MLP’s weights right now so this fact is burned in forever.”

From that moment on, the memory MLP has physically changed its internal wiring. Any future query that even vaguely smells like “Tim Cook” or “Martian” will make the activations explode through the newly rewired paths and spit out a vector screaming “MARTIAN” at the frozen attention layers.

The frozen attention (which is still doing its normal job on the short window) suddenly sees this one extra “virtual token” in its context that is confidently yelling the surprising fact → it attends hard to it → the model answers as if the Martian revelation happened one token ago, even if it was 2 million tokens back.

It looks exactly like a super-attention mechanism that only “primes” or “locks in” the surprising needles and deliberately forgets or ignores the hay. And it is also a way to fine tune one the fly permanently for the current context.

I think…
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 20:42:59+00:00
> It has defended against several thousand drones in the last year.

The idea of shooting down thousands of cheap drones using the S400 sounds ... interesting, to put it mildly.

> It also successfully used by India in the latest spat and India is placing more orders after its proven success in Operation Sindoor

There's not exactly many options available to India if they want to have any kind of air defense. The S400 certainly isn't terrible, but India also has every reason to exaggerate it's performance. Not only that, but it's not like both sides of that particular conflict haven't already been caught in many blatant lies regarding their performance.

5 or so months after the war Indian Air Force started repeatedly falsely claiming that they downed at least five Pakistani fighter jets, and one AWACS aircraft. This claim is patently absurd and completely unsupported by any evidence, but propaganda is very important to the Modi government.

If India had evidence of them destroying a single Pakistani fighter, they'd absolutely be displaying that all over the place. They don't, because they likely did not hit any.
by bell-cot | 2025-12-07 20:43:09+00:00
Citations:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/grocery/shopping/2025/12/04/d...

https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-tree-raises-some-pric...

https://www.the-sun.com/money/14719523/dollar-tree-sneaky-co...
by arthurfirst | 2025-12-07 20:43:20+00:00
I'll play the devils advocate a bit:

IP is a form of thought control... Is that ethical?

Who holds who accountable? Is the one doing the holding accountable?

Like Stalin said -- it's not the votes that count but who counts the votes.

Bottom line is you are always required to accept someone's version of ethical -- whether it's obvious or not.
by Amezarak | 2025-12-07 20:43:22+00:00
We're talking in circles. The way you attract people into a field despite poor management and working conditions is higher wages. That's the basic foundational truth of labor economics.

Simply importing people who are desperate for even a below-market (in Germany) wage means that there is no economic incentive for conditions to improve or for wages to rise, and that your own pipeline will continue to dry up, leaving you totally dependent on foreign labor. Aside from any other issues with migrant labor, what happens when that dries up? This is an extremely foolish, shortsighted policy that can be solved by the simple expedient of paying people more.
by buu700 | 2025-12-07 20:43:48+00:00
Thanks for the recommendations. Regarding your other comment, Flutter is what I've landed on as well for my next cross-platform app project, and I'm currently in the middle of developing a spec for a fairly complex agentic system that I'm going to try having Codex two-shot (basic project setup + file stubs + exhaustive tests -> manual checkpoint -> TDD the rest).

I haven't tried Lovable, V0, or Jules, but I really like Replit for certain things. Having said that, based on my experience, I would characterize it as an amazing tool for rapid frontend iteration with prototype-level backend creation. I'm sure it's gotten better at one-shotting since I tried Agent 2 with Sonnet 3.7 in May, but would still be very (pleasantly) surprised to see that Agent 3 with current models could meet the incredibly high bar of wholly replacing a human dev team.

The fact that tools like Replit also include their own hosting environments is definitely neat, but not really what I was getting at as far as deployment. What I had in mind was managing arbitrary cloud platforms, setting up an optimal architecture for your anticipated scale and usage patterns — whether that's a single Hetzner instance with SQLite or horizontally scaled app servers behind an API gateway with Kafka, Valkey, and Spanner or ScyllaDB — and doing all the DevOps to handle that along with things like CI/CD.

I'm not downplaying how amazing these capabilities are. Being able to generate high-quality code from natural language feels like magic. But all the parts beyond narrow application code are half of the thing I described:

* I'm saying you should be able to send a single off-the-cuff drunk text to an AI and later find a complete production-ready SaaS startup that fully aligns with a reasonable interpretation of your message.

* The other half of the whole thing is >=human-level execution. If the AI can't autonomously deliver work comparable to what an experienced CTO would (given the same requirements, an arbitrarily large hiring budget, and a stipulation to never contact you again until the work was done), it's not there yet.

Again, none of this is to dunk on agentic coding. My point is that I set an absurdly high bar because I want it to one day be met. Just as a $100 storage budget today is equivalent to $100m a few decades ago, I want to live to see a $100 engineering budget reach equivalency with last decade's $100m.
by ysnp | 2025-12-07 20:44:01+00:00
Reducing waste is very important, but I think this is something you need to take up with the Android OEMs. GrapheneOS can't really do anything about the fact that Android OEMs stop supporting the device and allow vulnerabilities to go unaddressed. For context in this situation, GrapheneOS is also trying to provide a best-in-class privacy/security experience for people. There were other projects that are/were dedicated to supporting abandoned hardware.

A connected world full of devices with excessively vulnerable hardware & software is also something GrapheneOS are desperate to avoid.
by strcat | 2025-12-07 20:44:17+00:00
Android CTS and VTS are open source so we can and do use those. They're filled with flaky and badly made tests along with enforcing anti-privacy and anti-security design decisions though, so not everything is supposed to pass. Google likes to enforce that OEMs aren't allowed to make certain kinds of privacy and security improvements which could impact app compatibility until Google decides to do it themselves in new major Android versions with new API levels forcing app developers to deal with it.

They don't allow adding our Network and Sensors toggles which are detected as modifications to the permission model. They don't detect Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes but they might be considered Compatibility Definition Document violations. We don't worry about this, our focus is passing the tests which are actually relevant including the ones we've added for duress PIN, hardened_malloc, our more advanced hardware memory tagging integration that's always on, etc.

If we wanted to get access to the proprietary GTS for Google Mobile Services to see how much sandboxed Google Play passes, we could, but we focus on real world app compatibility.
by noodlesUK | 2025-12-07 20:44:53+00:00
It astonishes me that there would be so many cases of things like wrong authors. I began using a citation manager that extracted metadata automatically (zotero in my case) more than 15 years ago, and can’t imagine writing an academic paper without it or a similar tool.

How are the authors even submitting citations? Surely they could be required to send a .bib or similar file? It’s so easy to then quality control at least to verify that citations exist by looking up DOIs or similar.

I know it wouldn’t solve the human problem of relying on LLMs but I’m shocked we don’t even have this level of scrutiny.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-07 20:44:58+00:00
There's two things here that get overlooked.

First, people asking for estimates know they aren't going to get everything they want, and they are trying to prioritize which features to put on a roadmap based on the effort-to-business-value ratio. High impact with low effort wins over high impact high effort almost every time.

Second, there's a long tail of things that have to be coordinated in meat space as soon as possible after the software launches, but can take weeks or months to coordinate. Therefore, they need a reasonable date to pick- think ad spend, customer training, internal training, compliance paperwork etc.

"It is impossible to know" is only ever acceptable in pure science, and that is only for the outcome of the hypothesis, not the procedure of conducting the experiment.
by nhatcher | 2025-12-07 20:45:03+00:00
No, I don't think LibreOffice is the answer. And I am with you here, I would love to be wrong. One issue is that it doesn't really work well online. The folks from Collabora[1] have done an amazing job at wrapping LibreOffice for the web and maybe that is a way to go?

As a sibling comment says you don't need to implement absolutely everything Excel does to _disrupt_ Excel. But you do need to provide a fantastic tool that is easy to use and solves 99% of the problems. If governments start putting their money were their mouth is I am very convinced we can create tools that supersede Excel, Word,...

[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/