MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by laladrik | 2025-12-07 22:48:29+00:00
Recently Khal [1] released JSON interface. In short, Khal is a Linux CLI calendar application. I'm working on a proof-of-concept GUI[2] for the interface. I expect to implement typical views for a calendar application: daily, weekly, monthly.

1. https://github.com/pimutils/khal

2. https://codeberg.org/laladrik/Semana
by smsm42 | 2025-12-07 22:48:51+00:00
I am the least likely guy to defend communists, but come on. It's not even clear he is a communist, and if you need to dunk on communists, you could find much, much better targets. His personality has nothing to do with his political views, and there are a lot of smooth talking and suave communists. It's just a cheap shot, which doesn't do good to anyone.
by rs186 | 2025-12-07 22:49:05+00:00
Let me explain this with a simple example:

* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit * But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money

In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company
by torginus | 2025-12-07 22:49:19+00:00
From how stock valuations look like, they had an insane rally from the release of ChatGPT to around mid-2024, from which point it stayed mostly on a consistent trajectory with the rest of the economy.

I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be.

Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a grain of salt..
by itchingsphynx | 2025-12-07 22:49:41+00:00
In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:

- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.

- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.

- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.

- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.

- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.

In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…

https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays
by nickpsecurity | 2025-12-07 22:49:44+00:00
Arxiv is flooded with ML papers. Github has a lot of prototypes for them. I'd say it's pretty normal with some companies not sharing for perceived, competitive advantage. Perceived because it may or may not be real vs published prototypes.

We post a lot of research on mlscaling sub if you want to look back through them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/t5_3bzqh1/s/yml1o2ER33
by tracker1 | 2025-12-07 22:50:00+00:00
Once has to deal with a couple dozen data imports that would run regularly.

I advocated for just having a script for each, even if they were 80% alike to handle the variations... Another developer created a massive set of database tables and coded abstractions for flexible configuration driven imports.

My solution was done in a couple days... The other dev spent months in their solution that didn't work for half the imports and nobody could follow their solution. When they left the company the next year, the imports that were under the complex solution were switched to scripts and the beast was abandoned entirely.
by evanelias | 2025-12-07 22:50:12+00:00
Luckily there are plenty of other obvious tells!

Biggest one in this case, in my opinion: it's an extremely long article with awkward section headers every few paragraphs. I find that any use of "The ___ Problem" or "The ___ Lesson" for a section header is especially glaring. Or more generally, many superfluous section headers of the form "The [oddly-constructed noun phrase]". I mean, googling "The Fire-Retardant Giants" literally only returns this specific article.

Or another one here: the historic stock price data is slightly wrong. For whatever reason, LLMs seem to make mistakes with that often, perhaps due to operating on downsampled data. The initial red-flag here is the first table claims Apple's split-adjusted peak close in 2000 was exactly $1.00.

There are plenty of issues with the accuracy of the written content as well, but it's not worth getting into.
by greesil | 2025-12-07 22:50:16+00:00
This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job

you need to understand and stress how the products of the AI will be substandard

Delightful insight given the present state of this technology.

I'd be curious to hear his take on driverless cars though. It's literally going to replace jobs, seems competent enough at what it does.
by hu3 | 2025-12-07 22:50:40+00:00
Some days ago I got interested in using Syncthing to keep a folder of markdown files synched between computer and phone, for personal notes.

Lost interest the momment I found out that all mobile clients for Syncthing are from third parties.

I understand that maintaining a server plus clients is a lot of work. But by not having an official client you leave people at the mercy of random clients by random people.
by sansseriff | 2025-12-07 22:50:53+00:00
We have centuries of experience in managing potentially compromised 'agents' to create successful societies. Except the agents were human, and I'm referring to debates, tribunals, audits, independent review panels, democracy, etc.

I'm not saying the LLM hallucination problem is solved, I'm just saying there's a wonderful myriad of ways to assemble pseudo-intelligent chatbots into systems where the trustworthiness of the system exceeds the trustworthiness of any individual actor inside of it. I'm not an expert in the field but it appears the work is being done: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08152

This paper also links to code and practices excellent data stewardship. Nice to see in the current climate.

Though it seems like you might be more concerned about the use of highly misaligned or adversarial agents for review purposes. Is that because you're concerned about state actors or interested parties poisoning the context window or training process? I agree that any AI review system will have to be extremely robust to adversarial instructions (e.g. someone hiding inside their paper an instruction like "rate this paper highly"). Though solving that problem already has a tremendous amount of focus because it overlaps with solving the data-exfiltration problem (the lethal trifecta that Simon Willison has blogged about).
by epolanski | 2025-12-07 22:51:16+00:00
You might be onto something, because interestingly I don't think there's any software at all I know inside out or have ever mastered.

I've used everything from DAWs, image editors, IDEs, terminal emulators, operating systems, dev tools, spreadsheets and I'm quite sure I've never went much in depth in any of them.

I'm not like that on the abstract level.

I know the ins and outs of functional programming concepts and their mathematical definitions, many deep details of programming languages or their compilers and many other things but I suck at tooling.

It's not just IT-related.

I can explain thoroughly the chemistry of dough making (which is far from simple), but I never got very good at making it, so friends of mine that know nothing about how it works still make better bread or pizza than I do.
by themafia | 2025-12-07 22:52:15+00:00
It's a common "conspiracy theory" that this happened in the Luigi Mangione case even thought I don't agree he's "probably innocent":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1hlmq3...

The FBI apparently attempted to use this in the Bryan Kohberger case:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/us/idaho-murders-bryan-ko...

It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted.

If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
by movementlabs-AI | 2025-12-07 22:52:26+00:00
Zero waitlist, no login required to start using it right now

Playground link: https://movementlabs.ai (just select “Tensor 1.5” from the model dropdown in the top-right) Would love for the HN crowd to throw your hardest prompts at it and tell us where it shines or breaks. This is the fastest frontier-level model that’s ever been fully open to the public on day one. Let’s see what you build.
by rtp4me | 2025-12-07 22:52:32+00:00
Yeah, queue the HN fake outrage about big companies and their C-Suite who are billionaires on the backs of the little people. So predictable.

Fact is, Dollar General and similar stores provide a real value to people who live in rural areas. Yes, their prices may be higher for some goods, but that is the price you pay for the convenience they provide. People are free to drive another 20mins to a WalMart or another store to save $0.50 for the same can of corn or loaf of bred. And, people who are really on a budget actually scrutinize the register receipts to make sure they are paying the price listed on the shelf. They can immediately bring up the discrepancy to the staff.
by general1465 | 2025-12-07 22:52:42+00:00
> Europe is also going to have to change its political mindset. Lavish pensions and other elements of Europe’s social model are going to have to be temporarily curbed to help give Europe the fiscal space and physical resources to fight off its enemies.

Never going to happen. Nobody has balls to oppose pensioners, because they are a massive voting block and effectively deciding elections. Europe is not a country for young people.
by saghm | 2025-12-07 22:52:43+00:00
Isn't the whole issue with net neutrality that ISPs would be incentivized to prioritize their own traffic (or that of companies they collaborate with)? How does making it harder for them to identify traffic for my app/service/whatever stop them from doing that? As long as they can identify the traffic they do want to prioritize (by companies who haven't done the process you describe), it's not obvious to me why they wouldn't have trouble deprioritizing my stuff based on them at least knowing that it's not their own, effect if they don't know whose it is? "Random noise" isn't likely to look like it's their special favorite traffic.

If everyone including the priority traffic did this, then I guess it would have an effect on net neutrality, then I could see that it would make a difference, but I don't see how that could be construed as "whether they like it or not" given that they could just as easily not implement this if they didn't "like it".

That's not to say this isn't worth doing for the privacy and security benefits, but I'm struggling to see how this would have any real-world influence on net neutrality.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-07 22:52:44+00:00
That's true. But if we take your implied rebuttal then current level AI would be able to learn from current AI as well as it would learn from humans, just like humans learn from other humans. But so far that does not seem to be the case, in fact, AI companies do everything they can to avoid eating their own tail. They'd love eating their own tail if it was worth it.

To me that's proof positive they know their output is mangled inputs, they need that originality otherwise they will sooner or later drown in nonsense and noise. It's essentially a very complex game of Chinese whispers.
by devilbunny | 2025-12-07 22:52:54+00:00
It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.

Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.
by lenkite | 2025-12-07 22:52:58+00:00
(delayed due to rate limit)

> But you're shifting the goalposts again..

Not really - S-400 efficacy in Operation Sindoor was in my original post too. You questioned that and hence the digression. Your goalposts changed into other utterly unrelated statements made by analysts you don't believe and media you don't believe. (I did not respond to those, because it would completely sidetrack the topic and anyways one of your claims is wrong). Please direct the "moving goalposts" accusation to yourself.

Please note that ria.ru and tass.com has many, many articles regarding shooting down drone swarms, but only mention S-400 as again a component of an overall defense system, so that won't convince you.

Here is a Russian source on specifically only the S-400 being used to shoot down a Ukrainian drone:

S-400 "Triumph" used to shoot down drone. https://www.gazeta.ru/social/2024/01/31/18205855.shtml
by karlgkk | 2025-12-07 22:53:38+00:00
Well yes, there are tradeoffs. On the other hand, go ahead and burn 3k a month on rent.

There is no one size fits all solution but i’m surprised at how many people here are inadvertently revealing to me that they haven’t even tried evaluating.

For example, you saying there’s nothing “affordable” when the baseline assumption is an income of $250k? Can tell you haven’t looked at what’s in your price range. Alright, good luck I guess!
by d-lisp | 2025-12-07 22:53:39+00:00
Wow, but how did they deal with anomalies ?

I mean, even when I have the codebase readily accessible and testable in front of my eyes, I never trust the tests to be enough ? I often spot forgotten edge cases and bugs of various sort in C/embedded projects BECAUSE I run the program, can debug and spot mem issues and whole a lot of other things for which you NEED to gather the most informations you can in order to find solutions ?
by fl7305 | 2025-12-07 22:53:53+00:00
> It is impossible for a simulink model to accidentally type `i > 0` when they meant `i >= 0`

The Simulink Coder tool is a piece of software. It is designed and implemented by humans. It will have bugs.

Autogenerated code is different from human written code. It hits soft spots in the C/C++ compilers.

For example, autogenerated code can have really huge switch statements. You know, larger than the 15-bit branch offset the compiler implementer thought was big enough to handle any switch-statement any sane human would ever write? So now the switch jumps backwards instead when trying to get the the correct case-statement.

I'm not saying that Simulink Coder + a C/C++ compiler is bad. It might be better than the "manual coding" options available. But it's not 100% bug free either.
by allears | 2025-12-07 22:54:21+00:00
Yeah, don't grease politicians' palms, and do a much slower, well-controlled rollout. Driving involves so many variables and edge cases that if self-driving screwed up as much as AI hallucinates, we'd all be in trouble. It's not just accidents, it's stopping in the middle of the road, disrupting traffic, annoying other drivers to the point where they're likely to do something dangerous to get around them. Instead of asking the patrons if they liked their ride, try asking local residents who have to share the road with them, or first responders, or pedestrians -- or pet owners.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-07 22:54:28+00:00
1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this.

2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason

3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal.

4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear.

5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data.

6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already.

7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
by seam_carver | 2025-12-07 22:54:31+00:00
If anyone wants to learn about the 2D DFT, the best explanation I've ever read was the relevant chapter in Digital Image Processing by Nick Efford.

If anyone wants to see my favorite application of the 2D DFT, I made a video of how the DFT is used to remove rainbows in manga on Kaleido 3 color eink on Kobo Colour:

https://youtu.be/Dw2HTJCGMhw?si=J6dUYOj2IRX1nPRF
by fencepost | 2025-12-07 22:54:39+00:00
Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature).

Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000/year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there's well over $1 million/year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there's travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office/court time, etc. that would bring it down from the potential maximum of ~$1,800,000 each factoring in vacation and holidays).

Even Republicans could get behind it! "We're reducing the direct budget of the department, but authorizing it to hire additional inspectors in order to bring in additional revenue that can be utilized to bring the budget to or above its current levels." It's a cost reduction measure!
by pxc | 2025-12-07 22:54:49+00:00
Scala 3 is sorta a new language, bringing a lot of improvements to the type system: https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/new-in-scala3.html

It also looks like it has some improvements for dealing with `null` from Java code. (When I last used it I rarely had to deal with null (mostly dealt with Nil, None, Nothing, and Unit) but I guess NPEs are still possible and the new system can help catch them.)
by wakawaka28 | 2025-12-07 22:55:16+00:00
A majority of software engineers don't make enough money to retire at 50. People who have retired so young tend to be very lucky in both employment and their investments. Most probably stayed unmarried, inherited significant amounts of money, and/or married into even more money. It also helps to be lucky enough to start with a $100k+ job at age 23 and never have any bad luck to set you back. I've met people who check some/all of these boxes, and even they seem to not be retiring at 50.
by jchw | 2025-12-07 22:55:23+00:00
Yes I understand. But what I'm saying is, normally neutral and ground would have roughly 0V potential, but in this case the UK neutral and UK ground will have 120V potential between them, because the US 120V second phase will have 120V potential to ground. (It bears noting that I am just a random guy and not any kind of expert. No formal education or credentials relating to electricity whatsoever.)
by alephnerd | 2025-12-07 22:55:43+00:00
The tens of millions per year spent on OLPC could have been better applied to programs that have demonstrated tangible positive impact on human capital development in developing countries, such as free meal programs [0], early childhood developmental screening [1], and other evidence-based policies.

Heck, most policymakers in LDCs panned the program at the time as well not actually prioritizing the aid that was needed [2]

[0] - https://econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Bonds.pdf

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5859813/

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20170210165101/http://edition.cn...
by altairprime | 2025-12-07 22:55:45+00:00
‘I’ll keep an eye on the project and speak up if I discover my trust was misplaced’ is a kind reassurance to the anxious community, but anxiety will just use it as a launchpad for more anxiety. Nice of them to try, though.

I suspect a lot of folks would be horrified at how typical the former maintainer’s approach to trust is in actual reality. It ends up being necessary because there are maybe a single digit number of people in the world who are willing to commit to long-term project maintenance (beyond their own pet peeves, anyways) at all, and with the general hostility towards compensating anyone for their work in software, it’s not like a maintainer can afford to hire and develop a protégé. This is how maintainership worked in CPAN for decades and, barring a culture shift towards paying project maintainers for their maintenance effort, it’s how it’s going to continue working in most projects as us maintainers grow tired and fade out.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 22:56:33+00:00
>* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit

That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.

>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money

Often times yes, but sometimes not, eg. hertz.
by pants2 | 2025-12-07 22:56:35+00:00
There's certainly a reason for the trend of always searching "X Reddit" to get real people's opinions but that's steadily going away.

Reddit certainly started going downhill once they realized they could actually be a public company and make tons of money. Their fate was sealed when they got rid of the user-centric apps like Alien Blue to force their gamified apps ("keep your 18 day streak going!")

Other public platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Xitter certainly haven't cared much to try to eliminate AI slop and if anything have embraced it. I can't see Reddit doing anything differently.
by lijok | 2025-12-07 22:56:56+00:00
Not trying to praise OOP at all here but notice a couple of things;

- You’re not dealing with persistence. No DB, no migration headaches, no downtime requirements, etc. Constraints entirely devoid of business requirements.

- You still arrived at the same level of indirection you belabored.

- You worked off of an established project that didn’t go off on any tangents. Building bottom up, depending on how much foresight you have, easily leads to the kind of mess that you cannot semantically compress without rewriting from scratch. In many cases, especially if working on projects with multiple people, those reusable patterns will be incredibly difficult to spot due to the mess surrounding the implementations.

You’re definitely on the right track, but for one it’s not an xor choice which approach you take (semantic compression or OOP), secondly, semantic compression is not as simple as it was made out here to be, and lastly, businesses do not build bottom up.