MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by riedel | 2025-12-20 11:03:44+00:00
Actually interesting to think about what UTC actually means and there is seems to be no absolute source of truth [0]. I guess the worry is not that much about the NTP servers (for which people anyways should configure fail overs) but the clocks themselves.

[0] https://www.septentrio.com/en/learn-more/insights/how-gps-br...
by nosianu | 2025-12-20 11:04:02+00:00
I don't get it. I'm still programming, AI use or not? It's just that I can (finally - when it works) concentrate on the big picture, instead of syntax or API intricacies that I don't really care about. I always formulated my algorithms in human language first anyway, wrote my thoughts what a module should do as a long comment at the top of a module before writing the code.

I once, very long ago, edited an 8 bit word processor written in (Z80) assembly manually to make it run on a newer modle of the (GDR, KC 85/4) computer. I never complained about the loss of control over individual memory cells and registers when switching to higher languages, and I certainly won't complain now. For higher level apps, like everything I need in business.

When having to solve with higher level problems, having to think low-level is a distraction. Being able to concentrate more on higher level architecture and algorithm formulation looks like an improvement to me. I just hope the rate of improvement continues, it's still a bit rough and random. I use it mostly for small tasks, not to write some large code base where the context and hallucination issues really start becoming a problem with current AI.

It is sad if the new tech lets jobs disappear in several fields where current AI is already "good enough", but on the other hand, that's always been the case since the industrial revolution.

Pure software development jobs may be impacted the hardest, from AI and more so from outsourcing. I switched from the IT industry to working for an IT-using company, and I concentrate on solving the concrete business problems using whatever means, instead of programming some software product.

About the article:

I think the chosen example and prompt are very unfortunate. They used a well-known app as basis which has tons of code examples from people who tried their hands on remaking it (see https://github.com/topics/minesweeper).

It would have been much better, albeit a lot more work, to develop something fresh from detailed prompts.
Show HN: Schema Gateway – type‑safe API gateway with schema‑driven validation
by iCeGaming | 2025-12-20 11:04:09+00:00
Hi HN!

I’m excited to share Schema Gateway, an API gateway built around type schemas that drive routing, validation, and contracts.

Instead of manually wiring endpoints and validators, you define your API surface with schemas — and the gateway handles:

Automatic routing based on schema definitions

Type‑safe request/response validation

Consistent API contracts across services

Easy integration with existing backend services

It’s especially useful for teams that want to keep strong guarantees around API behavior without writing repetitive boilerplate.

Features

Schema‑first API design

Plug‑in middleware support

Extensible validation pipelines

Clear separation of contract vs implementation

Useful for

Teams designing APIs with strict typing

Microservice environments

Backends that need unified validation and routing

Anyone who wants less boilerplate and stronger API contracts

Repo: https://github.com/AncientiCe/schema-gateway

Happy to answer questions or hear feedback!
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-20 11:04:22+00:00
AAA is never going back to 10 people in a garage making Sim City. Nor funding a team that does this. The market, tech, and expectations of a game are too drastic for that to be the norm ever again.

As for the indie scene, AI isn't going to solve the problems on why they don't sell well. It's not assets nor tech that holds the scene back at the moment.
by sigalor | 2025-12-20 11:04:37+00:00
So of course great kudos to the developers of Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf, OpenCode and all the other editors. I’m personally using Cursor daily. But already for many months, I have been frustrated why they still operate on the level of lines of code. That seems so “last millennium” to me. Now that we have all these amazing data structures in computing, why are we not doing anything with them? Why are coding editors still working on the level of text instead of syntax trees? Or even more abstractly, couldn’t they work on the level of a cross-language notation?
by rsynnott | 2025-12-20 11:04:54+00:00
> "The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. The first group is shipping faster, taking on bigger challenges. The second group is… not."

This is kind of the core belief of the AI enthusiast, but there's really very little evidence that it is the case. I mean, it's all very well to state it as an argument of faith, but without hard evidence (not lines of code, please; we are not 1980s IBM) the claim is really quite difficult to take seriously.
by barnabee | 2025-12-20 11:04:57+00:00
Even where they are not directly using LLMs to write the most critical or core code, nearly every skeptic I know has started using LLMs at very least to do things like write tests, build tools, write glue code, help to debug or refactor, etc.

Your statement suffers not only from also coming only from your brain, with no evidence that you've actually tried to learn to use these tools, but it also goes against the weight of evidence that I see both in my professional network and online.
by raddan | 2025-12-20 11:06:10+00:00
Assuming your fact is true, that corn merely uses an order of magnitude or two more water than AI is surprising, given the utility of corn. It feeds the entire US (hundreds of millions of people), is used as animal feed (thus also feeding us), and is widely exported to feed other people. I the spirit of the “I think”s and “I believe”s of this blog post, I think that corn has a lot more utility than AI.
by bojangleslover | 2025-12-20 11:06:21+00:00
We have about 1000 cores right now.

We're really excited for the AMD EPYC Venice — 256 physical cores each -> 512 vCPUs -> 1024 vCPUS on a single board with dual-socket. It will probably be about $40k per machine with these RAM prices but we're definitely going to buy a few. A full data center on a single motherboard!

So we're limited on capacity since we own all our own hardware. Please do not use us for auto-scaling just yet. Our software would have no issue with us linking up other cloud machines such as AWS EC2 to our fleet and offering it there, which could help with auto-scaling, but we would not make any money on that and it would be a lot of engineering effort for us right now.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-20 11:06:28+00:00
> I write “brought about” advisedly. What distinguishes the Gaza genocide is the West’s direct responsibility.

Paid for by US tax dollars and executed with US weapons. Most Americans look at the recent genocides in Darfur and Myanmar as a billion miles away and fully unrelated to American statecraft.

Then we look at numerous photos and videos of mutilated Gaza children and hundreds of assassinated journalists knowing that Americans are directly responsible for this with our taxes and praise from most of our politicians. It’s no surprise that so many Americans feel shame and disgust. Simultaneously, Americans are also watching enablers trying to purchase our media enterprise while the most senior Israeli politicians make incendiary racist statements praising the murder of thousands of small children.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-12-20 11:06:37+00:00
Both the parent and you can be right in this case.

The parent rightly suggested that there is the obvious intention to exploit these devices:

> This is so bad that it must be intentional, right? Even though these are dirt cheap, they couldn't come up with $100,000 to check for run-of-the-mill vulnerabilities?

You explained that there could be an economic reason for the appalling absence of security:

> The only way these ultra-cheap products are getting shipped at these prices is by doing the absolute bare minimum of software development.

But the parent's point is more convincing, based on the observable evidence and the very clear patterns of state-sponsored exploitation.

The vendors could set default passwords to be robust. The vendors could configure defaults to block upstream access. But maybe the vendors in this particular supply chain are more like the purveyors of shovels in a Gold Rush.

A less-charitable metaphor is possible where state-sponsored motives are unambiguously known.
by DamonHD | 2025-12-20 11:07:09+00:00
So far I think I'm still seeing one of them in my peers list for my public-ish NTP server:

remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter ============================================================================== +time-e-b.nist.g .NIST. 1 u 372 1024 377 125.260 1.314 0.280
by Iulioh | 2025-12-20 11:07:33+00:00
Personally I always hated the minimalistic style of these menus, the descriptions are never enough and I was often underwhelmed by the final result of a 5 word description.

I get the appeal of the "mystery" and leaving the art to the artist but I honestly prefer the Chinese menus with pictures of food they personally took of the dishes they made.
by SirFatty | 2025-12-20 11:07:51+00:00
"Comments from computer chief Ellie Gillespie, who was angry but not enough to determine whether if they were just fooling around or actually committing a crime, and Lt. John Ryle of the Chicago Police Department, who estimates DePaul's loss from this to be around $22,000 and that their extortion demand in and of itself was a crime."
by qsort | 2025-12-20 11:07:56+00:00
One of the mental frameworks that convinced me is how much of a "free action" it is. Have the LLM (or the agent) churn on some problem and do something else. Come back and review the result. If you had to put significant effort into each query, I agree it wouldn't be worth it, but you can just type something into the textbox and wait.
by abc123abc123 | 2025-12-20 11:08:04+00:00
True. For 99% of the people mining it yourself of demanding getting paid in crypto is not viable. That means you go to an exchange, and all you do is then logged at this government regulated exchange.

I suppose you could engage in some cloak and dagger exchange at night, but again, the 99% won't do that. The ones who do, are most likely capable of setting up their own services, anonymously, so they don't need to have a commercial, for-profit as their middleman.
by pona-a | 2025-12-20 11:08:05+00:00
> in-house _modified_ _mainstream_ encryption algorithm

Why would a company without cryptographic expertise modifying an existing algorithm without any particular goal in mind just to be different, produce something more secure than the winning solution in an open cryptographic competition?

> directory names

And file structure too, preferably. Incremental sync could be done with XTS mode.
by NGRhodes | 2025-12-20 11:08:49+00:00
"I have nothing to hide" only makes sense if privacy and disclosure are treated as a binary. In reality, both exist on a spectrum: privacy is controlled disclosure, shaped by what is shared, with whom, at what level of detail, and under what power asymmetry.

Large surveillance systems inevitably build baselines. They don't just detect crimes; they detect patterns and anomalies relative to whatever becomes "normal".

The problem with "nothing to hide" is that it defaults to maximal disclosure. Data is persistent, aggregatable, and reinterpretable as norms and regimes change. The data doesn't.

This isn't purely individual. Your disclosures can expose others through contact graphs and inference, regardless of intent. And it doesn't matter whether the collector is the state or a company; aggregation and reuse work the same way.
by f1shy | 2025-12-20 11:09:04+00:00
This trope with CERN/EU created the WWW is just chauvinism. That contribution to the internet is just infinitesimal small. Just stop repeating it as it was the cornerstone of today’s world.

Is just one little stone in a gigantic castle made in the united states. I’m European, and I think is just silly to look who “invented” each thing, trying to feel patriotic about that. Every invention is based on other inventions, research, ideas and necessities around the world. Trying to put flags on it, is just stupid.
by oersted | 2025-12-20 11:09:19+00:00
I don't think that's true. Consider that the "reasoning" behaviour trained with Reinforcement Learning in the last generation of "thinking" LLMs is trained on quite narrow datasets of olympiad math / programming problems and various science exams, since exact unambiguous answers are needed to have a good reward signal, and you want to exercise it on problems that require non-trivial logical derivation or calculation. Then this reasoning behaviour gets generalised very effectively to a myriad of contexts the user asks about that have nothing to do with that training data. That's just one recent example.

Generally, I use LLMs routinely on queries definitely no-one has written about. Are there similar texts out there that the LLM can put together and get the answer by analogy? Sure, to a degree, but at what point are we gonna start calling that intelligent? If that's not generalisation I'm not sure what is.

To what degree can you claim as a human that you are not just imitating knowledge patterns or problem-solving patterns, abstract or concrete, that you (or your ancestors) have seen before? Either via general observation or through intentional trial-and-error. It may be a conscious or unconscious process, many such patterns get backed into what we call intuition.

Are LLMs as good as humans at this? No, of course, sometimes they get close. But that's a question of degree, it's no argument to claim that they are somehow qualitatively lesser.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-20 11:09:33+00:00
Do you need to be informed to know what kind of things in a game you personally like? This isn't some comprehensive survey to determine "what is AI?" The questions are literally framed as "what's your attiude". AKA "how do you feel?".

Given how little time a modern game has to advertise itself (without millions in an ad campaign), those gut feelings are key to landing a sale.
by dist-epoch | 2025-12-20 11:11:56+00:00
Yeah, well known marketing trick that Big Companies do.

Oil companies: we are causing global warming with all this carbon emissions, are you scared yet? so buy our stock

Pharma companies: our drugs are unsafe, full of side effects, and kill a lot of people, are you scared yet? so buy our stock

Software companies: our software is full of bugs, will corrupt your files and make you lose money, are you scared yet? so buy our stock

Classic marketing tactics, very effective.
by 0dayz | 2025-12-20 11:12:44+00:00
It remains to be seen to be fair.

But if this does happen it will be in my opinion the start of a slow death of the democratization of tech.

At best it means we're going to be relegated to last tech if even that, as this isn't a case of SAS vs s-ata or u.2 vs m.2, but the very raw tech (chips).
by dash2 | 2025-12-20 11:12:55+00:00
I find it helpful to, let's call it "vibe-check" the headline statements in articles like this. Essentially I'm using the llm as a glorified search engine, and also hoping it will have, not zero bias, but less bias than I have.

Here, I asked:

"The international Court of Justice, all the major historians of genocide, the United Nations, all the major human rights organisations, the mainstream Hollywood star Jennifer Lawrence and even a former Israeli Prime Minister all call the Gaza “war” a genocide." Please check and provide sources.

Highlights from its responses:

"The ICJ has not ruled that genocide occurred. What it has done in South Africa v. Israel is issue provisional measures (interim orders) and state that at least some rights claimed under the Genocide Convention are “plausible” and need urgent protection—this is not a final finding that genocide is happening."

Sourced to https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447?utm_source=chatgpt.com, which indeed says "At the present stage of the proceedings, the Court is not required to ascertain whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred."

"some UN bodies and UN-appointed experts have used genocide language, but it’s not the same as “the UN” as a single institution making a binding legal determination (only a competent court can do that)."

Indeed, it cites 3 bodies. To me this seems "close enough", with due respect to the size and complexity of the UN bundle of institutions.

For human rights organizations it commented: "Overstated. Some major ones have used genocide language; not all have framed it that way" and similarly for historians. This is a fair point but doesn't have much empirical evidence, e.g. of any major HROs or historians who explicitly denied it was genocide.

It sourced the claim about Jennifer Lawrence, and it says of "the Israeli PM": "The most commonly cited former PM here is Ehud Olmert. He has very publicly accused Israel of war crimes and condemned specific plans/actions. But there are also interviews/articles noting that he stops short of calling it genocide." The last claim is accurately sourced to https://www.arabnews.com/node/2612893/middle-east.

I found this check helpful because it swiftly established that a key opening claim of the article is strongly overstated. If the author can't be trusted to fairly represent quite basic, public facts, then I have correspondingly less trust in what else they are going to argue, and less interest in spending my attention on it.

My meta-point is that when used with care, llms can swiftly source supporting evidence and/or rebuttals to other people's arguments.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-20 11:12:58+00:00
Maybe this is the disaster plan: There's not a smouldering hole where NIST's Boulder facility used to be, and it will be operational again soon enough.

There's no present need for important hard-to-replace sciencey-dudes to go into the shop (which is probably both cold, and dark, and may have other problems that make it unsafe: it's deliberately closed) to futz around with the the time machines.

We still have other NTP clocks. Spooky-accurate clocks that the public can get to, even, like just up the road at NIST in Fort Collins (where WWVB lives, and which is currently up), and in Maryland.

This is just one set.

And beyond that, we've also got clocks in GPS satellites orbiting, and a whole world of low-stratum NTP servers that distribute that time on the network. (I have one such GPS-backed NTP server on the shelf behind me; there's not much to it.)

And the orbital GPS clocks are controlled by the US Navy, not NIST.

So there's redundancy in distribution, and also control, and some of the clocks aren't even on the Earth.

Some people may be bit by this if their systems rely on only one NTP server, or only on the subset of them that are down.

And if we're following section 3.2 of RFC 8633 and using multiple diverse NTP sources for our important stuff, then this event (while certainly interesting!) is not presently an issue at all.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-20 11:13:16+00:00
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-20 11:14:15+00:00
Yes, exactly, that's what I'm talking about. Imagine a world where it's completely acceptable to post poop on Instagram, and people who don't want to look at it simply tick "don't display poop". The thing is, the "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear" argument IS true, under assumption that others would be understanding and compassionate to your intentions. Which is exactly the opposite of the legal/societal system we currently have.

What I'm trying to say is that the core issue is "people aren't trustworthy" and "we need privacy" is a bandaid on the former problem. If we manage to create a society where people are trustworthy, the need of privacy will disappear.
by atoav | 2025-12-20 11:14:31+00:00
Hannah Arendt in her most famous television interview after the Eichman process said what shocked her in 1933 when the Nazis came to power wasn't that the Nazis came to power, it was how many of the people she preceived as friends and allies, especially in the intellectual space would convince themselves with fantastical theories about why Hitler being in power might be a good thing actually.

The truth is that many people are cowards and even more people are just small-minded. The problem of the "I have nothing to hide"-excuse is that it shows thst this person has no concept about how their small personal ideas would affect the world once you roll them out in scale. Not only that but it shows that they haven't understood how power is organized in their democratic societies.

Let's say we would have nothing to hide and we give up our rights to the people we as the voters are meant to hold accountable. Even if it is a benevolent government filled with honest actors, large scale surveillance has the problem that there will be false positives. Surveil 360 million people each day and with an totally utopic accuracy of 99% and you still get 3.6 million false positives a day. In reality however these processes are much less accurate and the people who use those powers much less benevolent and honest, e.g. it is not uncommon that police look up their exes, spouses, people they personally hate etc.

The biggest problem however is that we have a division of power for a reason in democracies, and the people who vote giving up power in order to give more to a government is bad actually. Democracies need to be designed in such way they can survive one or two governments that try to abolish that system. Giving them a "spy on everybody" -power coupled with let's say secret courts is a good way to risk that form of government for generations who then have to fight bloody civil wars and revolutions to get the power back.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-20 11:14:45+00:00
The problem is the unsubstantiated logical leap from "weather modification is possible" to "contrails behind commercial aircraft are secretly dispersing chemicals in order to control weather".

If I was an evil government figure trying to secretly control weather, there are better ways of doing that (e.g. drones, rockets) than orchestrating a conspiracy that requires hundreds of thousands of people to stay quiet for decades.
by metalman | 2025-12-20 11:15:27+00:00
governments have always collected "data*", and use it for power/controll, any company doing so is actualy hoping that the government like's the stink of there particular shit, but now as forever, false positives/negatives will undermine and destroy a career. The true "nothing to hide" good honest decent folks, will almost certainly leave a convoluted trail of there meandering through life that can and will lead anywhere, but as the author points out, that other relentlessly "perfect" demographic is likely to be dangerous competition, rather than a general danger, and so will be assesed as to potential threat/uses, almost like a job interview...potentialy usefull idiots