MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-12-12 18:38:13+00:00
I think you're doing great, but I'll keep my response brief to avoid dragging you into a longer thread.

* I agree, Israel appears to me to be guilty of war crimes; quite a great many.

* We disagree about the black-letter genocidal intent Russia has exhibited in Ukraine. Organized mass kidnapping and coerced adoption of children is a per se genocidal action under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

* The US outclasses almost every armed service in the world to the same extent Israel outclassed Hamas (which no longer exists as a military force). That doesn't make US involvement in any given armed conflict genocidal or immoral.

* If your point was simply that Israel is capable of putting into practice genocidal intent, of course, I agree with that. They have a mechanical advantage in doing that, to the point where they shoulder additional burdens to avoid genocidal outcomes, and I preemptively agree they haven't satisfied those obligations. But flip it: Hamas has essentially no capability to successfully commit a genocide of Israelis. And yet their attack, under the Convention, was more clearly genocidal.

* I agree with you about the governance of Jordan! I think all the surrounding states share significant moral burden with regards to the Palestinian people,and launder it through Arab enmity towards Israel and Jewish ethnicity.

* I want to be very clear: I also believe the Palestinians have a moral claim to Gaza and the West Bank, and that there is no practical resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that won't involve two states on land Israel now controls. When I bring up the Jordan thing, I'm making a broader claim about the sustainability of Palestinian ethnic identity, not the "Palestinians should be remigrated into Jordan" argument the neo-Kahanists make. Kahanism is vile.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-12 18:38:42+00:00
Seriously, I love software but a geneticist/biologist would have been a fascinating career.

DNA, evolution, etc. is insanely powerful and you are kind of reverse-engineering and tweaking it to get different outcomes, but like you point out it is very slow. We just need to live for like 10,000 years and then a lifetimes work would become more exciting.
Show HN: SafeShell – reversible shell commands for local AI agents
by qhkm | 2025-12-12 18:39:16+00:00
As local AI agents increasingly run shell commands directly on developer machines, a single bad rm -rf can wipe out hours of work.

I built SafeShell, a small tool that makes destructive shell operations reversible.

Before a command runs, SafeShell creates a lightweight filesystem checkpoint. If the agent deletes or modifies the wrong files, you can roll back instantly.

Example:

rm -rf ./build safeshell rollback --last

Key details:

No sandbox, VM, or container

No root access required

Uses hard links (fast, no data copying)

Compressed snapshot history

Single Go binary (macOS & Linux)

MCP support for agent-driven checkpoints

It’s meant to be a native safety layer for local AI agents, not a restriction mechanism.

Repo: https://github.com/qhkm/safeshell

Curious how others are handling filesystem safety for local agents, especially outside of containers.
by cthalupa | 2025-12-12 18:39:26+00:00
Vaccines can cause myocarditis. This isn't new information, it's not specific to Covid vaccines or mRNA vaccines. It's a well known potential side effect of vaccines. We've known that flu vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis for a long, long, time.

But importantly, just like other flu vaccines, the Covid vaccines cause them at lower rates than getting infected while unvaccinated, and the actual severity is also lower.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-12 18:39:29+00:00
I am always amused when folks rediscover the bad idea that is `pthread_cancel()` — it’s amazing that it was ever part of the standard.

We knew it was a bad idea at the time it was standardized in the 1990s, but politics — and the inevitable allure of a very convenient sounding (but very bad) idea — meant that the bad idea won.

Funny enough, while Java has deprecated their version of thread cancellation for the same reasons, Haskell still has theirs. When you’re writing code in IO, you have to be prepared for async cancellation anywhere, at any time.

This leads to common bugs in the standard library that you really wouldn’t expect from a language like Haskell; e.g. https://github.com/haskell/process/issues/183 (withCreateProcess async exception safety)
by baobun | 2025-12-12 18:39:32+00:00
> I don't understand how a company like OpenAI could be so reckless with user data integrity and access

I don't understand how one can have such a rosy view of OpenAI at this point after all the dishonesty, subversiness and shadiness we have seen in public. Transitive trust is an insidious thing, I guess?

And this one doesn't even sound particularly egregious, I could hardly call this evil.

Either shift down expectations of this company considerably or be disappointed again.
by TallGuyShort | 2025-12-12 18:39:43+00:00
It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can arguably pass it now.
by didibus | 2025-12-12 18:39:59+00:00
I admit for a non-tech company I do not know, that's a blind spot for me.

I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.

For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:

The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.

They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.
by kakacik | 2025-12-12 18:40:04+00:00
Depends where you are, in startup world definitely yes. Elsewhere, not so much.

Companies couldn't care less about the underlying platform or language, they want reliability, stability and tons of easy to find people who can work with it from Day1. Java delivers all that, and will keep delivering for upcoming decades. Big businesses and big money love this (or hate the least out of IT stacks).
by dang | 2025-12-12 18:41:18+00:00
Your comments have been repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.

HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by estebank | 2025-12-12 18:41:32+00:00
Measuring success of a project against a bar that the project didn't set is like complaining that an F1 car is hard to park: that's not what it was meant to do.

Servo was meant to be a test-bed for new architectures that might or might not be usable by Firefox. It was never meant to become Firefox' new web renderer, and it wasn't until more recently and long after the Mozilla-pocalypse that a new team took over the project with a goal of productionalizing the project as a whole. Stylo, for example, was integrated into Firefox 57 and allowed for parallel CSS style calculation, an effort that was tried unsuccessfully multiple times in C++.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-12 18:42:22+00:00
https://xkcd.com/505/

You can replicate the entire universe with pen and paper (or a bunch of rocks). It would take an unimaginably long time, and we haven't discovered all the calculations you'd need to do yet, but presumably they exist and this could be done.

Does that actually make a universe? I don't know!

The comic is meant to be a joke, I think, but I find myself thinking about it all the time!!!
by jeffbee | 2025-12-12 18:42:22+00:00
Rust is not inherently slower but then again neither are C and C++, but in practice all of those tend to be less efficient than realistic Java systems. Rust is displacing C in contexts where Rust's less than amazing performance are not noticeable in contrast to C's also-not-amazing level of performance. And I also think there is a cognitive bias under which a developer will reach for Rust to supplant a legacy C program, because that developer reflexively dislikes managed language runtimes.
by cthalupa | 2025-12-12 18:42:26+00:00
The problem is that if you're criticizing the vaccine for this, you're at best uninformed, and quite often, doing so in bad faith.

As has been pointed out in the thread you're responding to, it causes these effects at lower rates and lower severities than just getting covid while unvaccinated. It's also just something we've known some flu vaccines to do for decades now. (And just the regular old flu can cause it, too)
by pegasus | 2025-12-12 18:42:44+00:00
But parent didn't try to apply "it's just maths" to humans. He said one could just as easily say, as some do: "Humans are just biology, hence they're not magic". Our understanding of mathematics, including the maths of transformer models is limited, just as our understanding of biology. Some behaviors of these models have taken researches by surprise, and future surprises are not at all excluded. We don't know exactly how far they will evolve.

As for applying the word thinking to AI systems, it's already in common usage and this won't change. We don't have any other candidate words, and this one is the closest existing word for referencing a computational process which, one must admit, is in many ways (but definitely not in all ways) analogous to human thought.
by dang | 2025-12-12 18:42:47+00:00
You also have been breaking the site guidelines badly by perpetuating this flamewar and by using HN primarily for political battle. That's not ok, and if you keep doing it we will have to ban your account.

HN's rules don't change based on how right you are or feel you are, or how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by olliepro | 2025-12-12 18:43:08+00:00
It feels like this should work, but the breadth of knowledge in these models is so vast. Everyone knows how to taste, but not everyone knows physics, biology, math, every language… poetry, etc. Enumerating the breadth of valuable human tasks is hard, so both approaches suffer from the scale of the models’ surface area.

An interesting problem since the creators of OLMO have mentioned that throughout training, they use 1/3 or their compute just doing evaluations.

Edit:

One nice thing about the “critic” approach is that the restaurant (or model provider) doesn’t have access to the benchmark to quasi-directly optimize against.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-12 18:43:26+00:00
A couple decades of chess programs nods knowingly: "First time?"

Uh huh. Good luck getting Stockfish to do your math homework while Leela works on your next waifu.

LLMs play chess poorly. Chess engines do nothing else at all. That's kind of a big difference, wouldn't you say?
by _heimdall | 2025-12-12 18:43:33+00:00
Sure, we agree there though I'd add that while the US regulates monopolies we don't always enforce that, we also allow state-sponsored monopolies for many regional utilities.

With Google and SEO I see it more in the monopoly camp though. The existence of other big tech companies doesn't break the monopoly Google has by owning search, ads, analytics, et al under the same umbrella.
by gilleain | 2025-12-12 18:43:33+00:00
Funny you should say that. I was reminded of Paracelcus who had the idea 'Only the dose makes the poison'. He was thinking that low doses of poisonous substances could be curative ... similar to this idea of using chlorine dioxide, with the crucial point here being the amount that is safe is tiny.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_dioxide#Safety_issues... the EPA "has set a maximum level of 0.8 mg/L for chlorine dioxide in drinking water", which is certainly much higher than the amounts in MMS.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement (for example) - "Following a May 2010 advisory which indicated that MMS exceeds tolerable levels of sodium chlorite by a factor of 200".

Summarising, the idea of toxicity of chemicals and dosage was first explored by an alchemist (Paracelcus) in the 1500s, which is the 16th C. - so yes, 17th C. medics might have been able to point out how crazy this all is, let alone 21st C. people of any kind.

It's been 500 years, people.
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-12 18:43:40+00:00
> Instead you had political figures, “experts” and tech sites suppress any and all discussion.

What's ironic here is the other responses - vehemently defending this authoritarian thought control; while for the last two weeks, we get daily posts reaching the HN front page criticizing EU chat control/age verification/VPN ban/etc.

It's true what they say - "you don't oppose the boot, you just want to be the one wearing it".
by palmotea | 2025-12-12 18:44:15+00:00
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.

Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.

Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-12 18:44:17+00:00
it’s a weird problem, in that (1) DNS is hard, and (2) you really need the upstream vendor to solve the problem, because correct applications want to use the system resolver.

If you don’t use the system resolver, you have to glue into the system’s configuration mechanism for resolvers somehow … which isn’t simple — for example, there’s a lot of complex logic on macOS around handling which resolver to use based on what connections, VPNs, etc, are present.

And the there’s nsswitch and other plugin systems that are meant to allow globally configured hooks plug into the name resolution path.
by jl6 | 2025-12-12 18:44:20+00:00
Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state.

What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle.

Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
by ipaddr | 2025-12-12 18:45:04+00:00
Many people share your viewpoint on the left and right. It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't. It's part of living in a left or right ghetto of thought.

Take a step back. The right is in power you are not allowed to speak your ideas. The left is in power you can say anything that supports their agenda.

What you can never do is speak against the government right or left

Why would you want that? Seems like the worst of all worlds.

Isn't the history you are trying to not repeat a history of controlled speech where the wrong party got elected or got in power? Why won't this happen again and again?
by arjie | 2025-12-12 18:45:18+00:00
I bought a couple of terabytes of RAM and now I feel like one of those crypto-whales haha. It's just sitting there in the corner. One was a lucky one, too, because I tried to negotiate a guy to sell me a system with less RAM but he wouldn't discount it much. Now it pays for most of the cost of the damn thing.

These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-12 18:45:20+00:00
And the counter argument is also exactly the same. Imagine you take one neuron from a brain and replace it with an artificial piece of electronics (e.g. some transistors) that only generates specific outputs based on inputs, exactly like the neuron does. Now replace another neuron. And another. Eventually, you will have the entire brain replaced with a huge set of fundamentally super simple transistors. I.e. a computer. If you believe that consciousness or the ability to think disappears somewhere during this process, then you are essentially believing in some religious meta-physics or soul-like component in our brains that can not be measured. But if it can not be measured, it fundamentally can not affect you in any way. So it doesn't matter for the experiment in the end, because the outcome would be exactly the same. The only reason you might think that you are conscious and the computer is not is because you believe so. But to an outsider observer, belief is all it is. Basically religion.
by pkphilip | 2025-12-12 18:45:37+00:00
It is not rare at all. Fact is, as more and more data comes out we are becoming more and more aware that the Covid vaccines have caused severe damage.

Here is the data collated from 125 countries: there were about 31 million excess deaths across the 2020-23 period.

Spatiotemporal variation of excess all-cause mortality in the world (125 countries) during the Covid period 2020-2023 regarding socio-economic factors and public-health and medical interventions https://hal.science/hal-05110349

Explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBkKBqpLjAk
by g947o | 2025-12-12 18:45:46+00:00
> ... without being sued again

I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.

And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
by fatbird | 2025-12-12 18:45:48+00:00
You have two applications you have to ensure are always in sync and consistent.

No, the point of the API is to loosely couple the frontend and backend with a contract. The frontend doesn't need to model the backend, and the backend doesn't need to know what's happening on the frontend, it just needs to respect the API output. Changes/additions in the API are handled by API versioning, allowing overlap between old and new.

Code is duplicated.

Not if the frontend isn't trying to model the internals of the backend.

Velocity decreases because in order to implement almost anything, you need buy-in from the backend AND frontend team(s).

Velocity increases because frontend works to a stable API, and backend doesn't need to co-ordinate changes that don't affect the API output. Also, changes involving both don't require simultaneous co-ordinated release: once the PM has approved a change, the backend implements, releases non-breaking API changes, and then frontend goes on its way.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-12 18:45:48+00:00
It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.

Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”
by hnfong | 2025-12-12 18:46:12+00:00
They do have a valid subtle point though.

If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"?

Being a functionalist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m... ) myself, I don't know the answer on the top of my head.
by gibralterwassel | 2025-12-12 18:46:46+00:00
With respect, I think that’s a stretch.

Scientific method is practical. Scientific fact is a belief system, not unlike religion. This doesn’t undermine science, it’s just stating what these things are. Scientific belief can be helpful.

These silly beliefs though can be harmful as is the case with Chlorine Dioxide and that horse deworming medicine they said would cure Covid.

Don’t confuse or try to link these things together. The reason that the government is now full of idiots is that people voted those idiots in. It wasn’t due to clarity that science is part belief system.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-12 18:46:53+00:00
A lot of the drama here is due to the ambiguity of what the word 'think' is supposed to mean. One camp associates 'thinking' to consciousness, another does not. I personally believe it is possible to create an animal-like or human-like intelligence, without consciousness existing in the system. I personally would still describe whatever processing that system is doing as 'thinking'. Others believe in "substrate independence"; they think any such system must be consciousness.

(Sneaking a bit of belief in here, to me "substrate independence" is a more extreme position than the idea that a system could be made which is intelligent but not conscious, hence I find it implausible.)
by GeekyBear | 2025-12-12 18:47:05+00:00
> CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees”

He seems to be ignoring the part of the ruling finding that Apple is entitled to "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property.

> The appeals court recommends that the district court calculate a commission that is based on the costs that are necessary for its coordination of external links for linked-out purchases, along with "some compensation" for the use of its intellectual property. Costs should not include commission for security and privacy.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/11/apple-app-store-fees-ex...

Apple wanted 27% and Epic thinks it should be 0%. The lower court will have to pick a number in between the two.
by cluckindan | 2025-12-12 18:47:59+00:00
The issue with nested flexboxes is that flexbox containers size their content to match the container.

Therefore, to calculate the size of an item, the sizes of other items need to be known. Now, if one of the items is a flexbox, its item sizes cannot be known until the previous flexbox is laid out.

Of course, properly using flex-grow and flex-shrink can optimize that calculation, but what about deeper nested flexboxes?