MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jjkaczor | 2025-12-22 15:28:38+00:00
Have a new laptop arriving shortly with enough RAM and storage, that - me being a historically "Windows as primary OS" kind-of-person, with the enshitification of their adding CoPilot to everything and turning Windows 11 into an "agentic" OS, my installation will be Linux-first, and then run Windows via LKVM (hopefully with proper pass-through for TPM + GPU).

Yes - I have "noodled" with Linux in VM's and Raspberry Pi's - but it has never been my primary OS.

Thanks to Microsoft, that is about to change...
by jawns | 2025-12-22 15:28:43+00:00
Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs.

When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
by threemux | 2025-12-22 15:29:58+00:00
Oh please. "The law" is a Kafkaesque patchwork that delegates authority to local officials and has enough complexity and wiggle room to make anything possible. We're not talking about a speed limit sign here. Show me the [company], I'll show you the crime.

I've been assured by people in this thread and others that, for example, if you "don't spy on users", you don't need cookie banners, and yet official EU sites have them.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 15:29:59+00:00
> no year goes by without Italy imposing random >100m€ fines for 2-3 american tech companies. whenever they need money

Since you apparently know, how large would a 100M EUR injection into the Italian budget for 2026 actually be, relatively to the other things?

You're saying they're doing this because they need money, but wouldn't changing the tax rates be more effective at this? 100M feels like a piss in the ocean, when you talk about a country's budget, but since you seem to imply Italy is doing this survive, would be nice to know what ratio this fine represents of their budget, which I'm guessing you have in front of you already?
by buppermint | 2025-12-22 15:30:00+00:00
From a quick read, this is cool but maybe a little overstated. From Figure 3, completely suppressing these neurons only reduces hallucinations by like ~5% compared to their normal state.

Table 1 is even more odd, H-neurons predicts hallucination ~75% of the time but a similar % of random neurons predict hallucinations ~60% of the time, which doesn't seem like a huge difference to me.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-22 15:30:07+00:00
> LLMs don't "hallucinate" or "lie." They have no intent.

You're just arguing about semantics. It doesn't matter in any substantial way. Ultimately, we need a word to distinguish factual output from confidently asserted erroneous output. We use the word "hallucinate". If we used a different word, it wouldn't make any difference -- the observable difference remains the same. "Hallucinate" is the word that has emerged, and it is now by overwhelming consensus the correct word.

> Whenever they get something "right," it's literally by accident.

This is obviously false. A great deal of training goes into making sure they usually get things right. If an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters get something right, that's by accident. Not LLM's.
Show HN: Extract diagrams from PDF to SVG
by mbrukman | 2025-12-22 15:30:26+00:00
I've noticed that many blog posts about papers (which are in PDF) use raster screenshots (JPG, PNG, etc.) of key diagrams, which makes it hard to zoom in on the details (e.g., on mobile) because they pixelate and turn blurry, unless the screenshot was taken at a much higher resolution than the space on the page, which enables some zooming in without much degradation.

I wondered why they don't use SVG (since the original source in the PDF is usually a vector diagram), and when I went to try to extract diagrams as SVG from a PDF, I wasn't able to find an easy way to do that, even when trying SVG editors which have support for importing PDFs such as Inkscape.

So I built a small GUI tool which lets you open a PDF and view it, visually select a rectangular region (which you can drag to reposition), and save the region to an SVG.

It uses the Poppler CLI tools to do the PDF rendering and extraction, but it would be difficult to specify the necessary flags (especially the coordinates) to these tools manually without a GUI tool like this.

Please try it out and see if it's helpful! Feature requests and bug reports are welcome, including any issues with installation or usage.

Thanks for taking a look.
by zugi | 2025-12-22 15:31:13+00:00
I suspect the data from 50 or 150 years ago would be similarly distorted. "Old person dies of old person disease" does not make the news.

Also the idea that homicide rates were much higher a century ago is colored by media and entertainment. The graph on the second page of https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/1435670/pdf/p... (PDF) shows homicide rates in the 1970s exceeding that of the prohibition era, which itself was a huge spike over pre-prohibition rates.
Show HN: Physical snow metamorphosis model
by richhwang | 2025-12-22 15:31:21+00:00
Alpine Intelligence is a numerical weather model that forecasts snow surface conditions in mountainous environments.

It combines a physical world model with terrain-adjusted weather and a snow metamorphosis engine to predict for every point on the mountain the surface state of the snowpack, across time. Think of a simulated snow globe, where we've accounted for sun, wind, temperatures, precipitation, and more.

It's been fun working on non-LLM-"AI" (whatever that means nowadays) - just good ol' GIS, meteorology, and physics. The model is cool - while I have pretty good spatial reasoning abilities, I suppose it's not unsuspected that running this rigorous computation returns results that I would not have otherwise thought about.

Hope it's an interesting read, and would love any thoughts and feedback.
by guntis_dev | 2025-12-22 15:31:37+00:00
Like the simplicity approach - single-file tools are underrated.

One thing to note: if you ever want "install as app" functionality,
you'd need to host them (even on GitHub Pages). File:// URLs don't
support service workers, which means:

- Can't properly "Add to Home Screen" as a PWA

- Can't use Cache API for offline-first functionality

- Limited to localStorage (~5MB) instead of IndexedDB

- CORS restrictions prevent fetching from external APIs/CDNs

But if your tools work fine with localStorage and file:// access,
no need to overcomplicate. The current approach is valid too.
by robotbikes | 2025-12-22 15:31:37+00:00
Ohio was populated with numerous earthworks, the Hopewell Earthworks finally being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage spot after being preserved for years by being used as a golf course. Unfortunately many of these have been lost as European settlers destroyed many of them. This continues to this day as Google is building a data center in central Ohio a top of land that was home to numerous native american burial mounds - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-breaks-gro...
by bilater | 2025-12-22 15:32:00+00:00
If you are using local models for coding you are midwiting this. Your code should be worth more than a subscription.

The only legit use case for local models is privacy.

I don't know why anyone would want to code with an intern level model when they can get a senior engineer level model for a couple of bucks more.

It DOESN'T MATTER if you're writing a simple hello world function or building out a complex feature. Just use the f*ing best model.
by next_xibalba | 2025-12-22 15:32:07+00:00
This, I think, is the real answer why this is happening. The motivation behind these huge fines on large U.S. tech companies by EU countries is actually "we need revenue", not "we must protect our users". I would expect this to become another source of strain between the EU and the US as the EU economy continues to atrophy. Especially so if the U.S. economy weakens, too.
by gbil | 2025-12-22 15:32:44+00:00
Personal anecdotes from my early mid teen years

1. Touching the circuit board on the back of the CRT tube by mistake trying to troubleshoot image issues, “fortunately” it was a “low” voltage as it was a B&W monitor….

2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.

CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!

EDIT: I meant to reply to the other thread with the dangers of CRTs
by _wire_ | 2025-12-22 15:32:53+00:00
This is a very generation-AI exercise:

I asked to perform a computation, but is the answer what I expect?

If you already know the answer, what's the point of performing the computation? And if you don't already know the answer, what's the basis of your confidence in the result.

The opening sentence captures this dissonance of certainty vs. uncertainty dramatically:

"wc -l is pretty good at counting lines"

wc is not "pretty good" at it, it's perfect. If you don't understand the limits of this perfection in context, what business do you have integrating your work into any application where anything of value is at stake... including your own time.

But this drama represents a generational shift: the programmer is no longer interested in programming. He is a conductor or orchestrator of an AI that barfs up code, and which he then visually inspects.

The hazards of this approach are as grotesque as they are obvious: humans second guessing the outputs of programs they don't understand using a method of inspection of correctness about which humans have very sharp limits.

It's a very important distinction of expectations between understanding the utility of a command and second guessing it.

The exercise as presented distorts sampling commands to see what they do in principle into a development process of second-guessing a pernicious uncertainty that the word-counter actually counts all the words and a blooming confusion over what it means to count.

This leads towards a perverse proof of program correctness by direct inspection of arbitrary outputs: "I ran wc -l and it was right again". Maybe I should cross check it with cat -n except what do I do with all this output?!

Systems built using these methods will end is disaster. Gridlocked Waymos and commercial airliners that drop out of the sky.

I can't fault the author for the disturbance in thinking because it's pervasive. Today the term "software engineer" means someone who is practiced at marshaling computation beyond the point of uncertainty in correctness. It's a bragging point. And these days all the "engineers" (a title that has lost all meaning in business) are relegating their roles to checking whether AIs produce believable results for starkly ambiguous commands, where the only reasonable potential of the AI to produce useful results is due to its inference engine having crystallized previous "solutions".

Prior art is being rendered into gobbledygook without even an apostolic line of priests with sufficient vigilance to guard the flame of understanding.

I for one do not welcome robot overloads.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 15:33:02+00:00
> Show me the [company], I'll show you the crime.

Yeah, maybe that floats the people's boat wherever you live, but in other countries where people's health and well-being go above corporate interests, it is not common for companies to break the law.

> for example, if you "don't spy on users", you don't need cookie banners, and yet official EU sites have them.

Which is true, and you can understand that yourself by not relying on others, but reading the regulation yourself. It's actually pretty simple, and I think even someone who don't like regulations would be able to get through it if you apply yourself.

And yeah, even official EU sites could avoid it if they'd chose to not use tracking cookies. Not sure what the gotcha is supposed to be here? There is no inconsistency here.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-22 15:33:11+00:00
The EU moved to fining on the basis of global revenues a long time ago to avoid companies using accounting to hide local revenues and avoid fines.

Then again, it could be seen as a tit for tat move regarding how the US applied its laws extraterritorialy using the dollar as a medium so it's bit harsh to complain about the EU when the US started the whole thing.
by Scubabear68 | 2025-12-22 15:33:20+00:00
When I was about 12 I got an old TV in my room which I of course decided to take apart to figure out how it worked.

I was VERY smart and of course unplugged the TV before doing anything.

My flat head screwdriver brushed against the wrong terminal in the back, I was literally thrown across the room several feet, and my flat head screw driver was no longer usable as the tip had deformed and slightly melted.

I later found an electronics book that had a footnote mentioning grounding out the tube before going near it…
by paddleon | 2025-12-22 15:33:39+00:00
Odd that the debate here is all around what is in "the news", vs what is in the other tv shows people are watching.

The amount of violence in the stories we watch is astounding; I wonder if that doesn't influence peoples perceptions much more than the news does.

try counting how many times in the last week you saw a gun being drawn (on TV/Netflix/hulu).
by orlp | 2025-12-22 15:35:04+00:00
I work in a 400k+ LOC codebase in Rust for my day job. Besides compile times being suboptimal, Rust makes working in a large codebase a breeze with good tooling and strong typechecking.

I almost never even think about the borrow checker. If you have a long-lived shared reference you just Arc it. If it's a circular ownership structure like a graph you use a SlotMap. It by no means is any harder for this codebase than for small ones.
by frereubu | 2025-12-22 15:35:17+00:00
For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-22 15:35:23+00:00
The common asrep roast kerberos etype I see now is aes/18 (https://www.iana.org/assignments/kerberos-parameters/kerbero...).

I was looking at this guy's benchmark here: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...

Etype 23 (rc4-hmac) gets ~3500 kH/s, 18 (aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96) gets roughly 2500 kH/s. Big difference, but somehow I thought it would be much bigger? 2.5M guesses/second is still not so bad.

I've done kerberoasting and aseproasting a handful of times only, but from what I recall, RC4 can be cracked within reasonable time regardless of your password complexity. But with AES if you have a long and complex service account password, it will take decades/centuries to crack. But (!!) it is still quite common to use relatively weak passwords for service accounts, a lot of times the purpose of the service is included in the password so it makes guessing a bit easier.

My criticism is that Kerberos (as far as I'm aware) does not provide modern PBKDFs (keyed argon2?) that have memory-hardness in place. That might be asking too much, so why doesn't Microsoft alert directory administrators (and security teams) when someone is dumping tickets for kerberoasting by default? It's not common for any user or service to request for tickets for literally all your service accounts. Lastly, Microsoft has azure-keyvault in the cloud, but they're so focused on cloud, they don't have an on-prem keyvault solution. If a service account is compromised, you still have to find everything that uses it and change the password one by one. Where if there was a keyvault-like setup, you could more easily change passwords without causing outages.

Rotating the KDC/krbtgt credential is also still a nightmare.

From what bits I've heard, Microsoft expects its users to be using EntraId instead of on-prem domains (computers joined directly to entra-id instead of domain controllers). That's a nice dream, but in reality 20 years from know there will still be domain controllers on enterprise networks.
by lambdaone | 2025-12-22 15:35:40+00:00
"Hallucinate" is a term of art, and does not imply a philosophical commitment to whether LLMs have minds. "Confabulation" might be a more appropriate term.

What is indisputable is that LLMs, even though they are 'just' word generators, are remarkably good at generating factual statements and accurate answers to problems, yet also regrettably inclined to generating apparenly equally confident counterfactual statements and bogus answers. That's all that 'hallucination' means in this context.

If this work can be replicated, it may offer a way to greatly improve the signal-to-bullshit ratio of LLMs, and that will be both impressive and very useful if true.
by mdhb | 2025-12-22 15:35:42+00:00
This story is actually much wilder than people yelling “polygraphs are dumb lol” (which is partly true in that they measure stress not lying).

But just to be clear this is a scenario where CISA's new director, hand-picked by Kristi Noem, asked to be "read in" to highly sensitive, compartmentalized intelligence shared with a select few people in the civilian agency by the NSA or CIA.

It was so sensitive that his predecessor had never asked to see the raw intel.

When a CISA security official asked for documentation of Noem appointee's need-to-know basis, the standard for controlled access programs, the official was suspended.

Noem's flunkie insisted again, officials asked him to take a polygraph. He failed it.

Then the those officials were also suspended.

For all of you who’ve never taken a counterintelligence polygraph it’s not at all like what I think you’re imagining (which is maybe the lifestyle one). It’s like 3 questions that are very simple yes or no questions and they have no licence to go off on a fishing expedition unless you give them a reason to do so. I think the questions from memory are basically:

1. Are you working for any organisation beyond this one?

2. Did anyone direct you to ask for these files?

3. Have you told anyone else about your plans with these files.

For whatever issues you may have with the limitations of a polygraph I promise you this is a big deal and incredibly unusual.
by tsumnia | 2025-12-22 15:36:33+00:00
> You're just arguing about semantics. It doesn't matter in any substantial way.

While I agree for many general aspects of LLMs, I do disagree in terms of some of the meta-terms used when describing LLM behavior. For example, the idea that AI has "bias" is problematic because neural networks literally have a variable called "bias", thus of course AI will always have "bias". Plus, a biases AI is literally the purpose behind classification algorithms.

But these terms, "bias" and "hallucinations", are co-opted to spin a narrative of no longer trusting AI.

How in the world did creating an overly confident chatbot completely 180 years of AI progress and sentiment?
by skeeter2020 | 2025-12-22 15:36:43+00:00
Do people actually perform a random walk though? All terrain - both metaphorically and physically - is not equal, so wouldn't a more accurate description be 1. float on the water and go where the current/tides take you, or 2. decide when you're going to paddle against it towards the lighthouse? or more simply, "most people walk downhill"?
by 2026iknewit | 2025-12-22 15:37:21+00:00
This is still not true.

"Whenever they get something "right," it's literally by accident." "the random word generator"

First of, the input is not random at all which allows the question how random the output is.

Second, it compresses data which has an impact on that data. Probably cleaning or adjustment which should reduce 'random' even more. It compresses data from us into concepts. A high level concept is more robust than 'random'.

Thinking or reasoning models are also finetuning the response by walking the hyperspace and basically collecting and strengthening data.

We as humans do very similiar things and no one is calling us just random word predictors...

And because of this, "hallucinations -- plausible but factually incorrect outputs" is an absolut accurate description of what an LLM does when it response with a low probability output.

Humans also do this often enough btw.

Please stop saying an LLM is just a random word predictor.
by uecker | 2025-12-22 15:37:22+00:00
This is basically what many functional programming languages do. This always came with plausibly sounding claims that this allows so much better optimizations that this soon will surpass imperative programs in performance, but this never materialized (it still did not - even though Rust fans now adopted this claim, it still isn't quite true). Also control over explicit memory layout is still more important.
by nospice | 2025-12-22 15:37:58+00:00
If you design your career, you will almost certainly get the same outcome too.

I've managed people for decades and this has been a common pattern. I'd have people come to me with their plans to be in the C-suite in five or ten years, based precisely on self-help advice like that. None of them ended up there. But several of the people who never had a plan did in fact end up as VPs, CTOs, etc.

I don't want to say that thinking about your career doesn't matter. It's definitely easy to self-sabotage it by sticking to your comfort zone for life. But turn-by-turn plans are not useful because a lot of it is a product of chance. In a corporate setting, the best advice is just: get in the habit of solving tough problems for the people who matter, and find low-key ways to let them know about the good work you're doing. The rest, more or less, follows from that.
by lukeinator42 | 2025-12-22 15:38:29+00:00
It is fairly well established that neurons in these artificial neural networks are polysemantic and information is represented in directions in the activation embedding space rather than neurons independently representing information (which is why anthropic is doing things like training sparse autoencoders). I haven't read the paper in depth but it seems like it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about neurons in ANNs vs the brain.