MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bender | 2025-12-18 19:29:54+00:00
- An entirely self contained DNA analyzer that has no ability to communicate with anything except for a USB thumb drive that it writes plain text files to. It must have more self contained knowledge than all the commercial test sites combined. Bonus if it understands all known human genetic defects. Extra bonus if it also understands all the minerals, vitamins, enzymes, hormones and how those effect the epigenome. Extra Extra bonus if it has a camera that can "see" all the electro-chemical bonds in tissues to detect cellular errors before they are otherwise detectable. Yes, a tri-corder except better than the fictional tri-corder.

- A bog-standard ARM or x86_64 cell phone that loads all its kernel modules from a bog standard Linux installation any distro, standard LTS kernel and every module including that which drives the modem has been reviewed and approved by Linus without ever once tempting him to raise the middle finger or start writing an email. Bonus if the modules are all written in Rust and written good enough to impress all the developers. Extra bonus if the powered on standby time is 3 months. Extra extra bonus if most of the parts are user serviceable, especially the battery and modem so that phone can evolve with the LTE and Wifi standards.

- An electric car that has 100% user serviceable parts, no dial home upgrades done via USB and prompted by owner, no surprises. It must not be much more complicated than a golf cart and yet passes all regulations. 20 year bumper to bumper guarantee backed by the local government in case the business goes under. 2000 mile range 3D printed solid state battery with battery swap stores all over every country. Call it the Ford Model E=mc^2.

- User programmable nannites that can be swallowed without stomach acid harming them and they repair all forms of damage known to science, continuously for 1000 years. Programmable function include the ability to remove genetic defects and add new genetic traits. Easter egg functions include forcing the user to pass gnarly gas when they are around someone they dislike.

- A "sleeve" that can back up a human similar to the movie Altered Carbon and restore them to a new body when their body takes too much damage. If the person has a trait that conflicts with societal laws, they can choose to have that trait stripped from the backup at a super-genius store. Traits and knowledge can also be added for a cost, of course.
by like_any_other | 2025-12-18 19:30:21+00:00
We have, broadly speaking, two groups deciding which books to make available to children using taxpayer money - the voters/parents/elected officials, and unelected librarians. If one of those groups decides to withhold a book from schoolchildren, it's fine and not a ban. But if another does the same, then it's a ban.

Or am I completely wrong, and Jared Taylor's "White Identity" is available in every school library, explaining its absence from "banned" book lists?
by vablings | 2025-12-18 19:30:41+00:00
It wasn't a blackmail scenario specifically Jagex got punished either way because the fraud was enabled by their platform. I don't have the time to check but I believe this was mentioned by the one of the Gower brothers in the runescape documentary. My broader point is that even if they cracked down on fraud which was absolutely not the fault of Jagex because of the poor security options at the time from Credit Card companies, they still had the issue of people buying gold from RunescapeGoldSeller.com and chargebacks
by beoberha | 2025-12-18 19:30:42+00:00
It’s a fast moving field. People aren’t coming up with new ideas to be performative. They see issues with the state of the art and make something that may or may not advance things forward. MCP is huge for getting agents to do things in the “real world”. However, it’s costly! Skills is a cheap way to fill that gap for many cases. People are finding immediate value in both of these. Try not to be so pessimistic.
by placebo | 2025-12-18 19:30:49+00:00
This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-12-18 19:30:51+00:00
I have the impression that there's a dashboard that the admins use for "second chance" to allow them to schedule stories they think didn't do as well as expected, to give those stories a second (third?) bite at the cherry.

One sometimes sees suggestions from @dang to resubmit, and/or comments about giving stories another go around if they did worse than expected.

The only other manual intervention at that level I've heard of is to promote Ycombinator companies; but I'm not sure what complexion that takes.

There's possibly some manual actions around vouchs/flags, to revive comments that got flagged and have now been vouched for. Maybe it's all automated but I suspect there's judgement applied there; just based on how the site is run in general.

No particular insight, just been around here for ~15 years (eek!).
by umanwizard | 2025-12-18 19:30:57+00:00
There are no "banned books" in the US. Using that term is inaccurate, and IMO a bit of an insult to people living in countries that actually do ban books.

What there actually are, are books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries because they don't think the content is appropriate for children. I would assume this happens in every country.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-18 19:30:57+00:00
That's part of the issue. With Idaho it's black and white. Under 18, these books are banned.

I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.

What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.
by bccdee | 2025-12-18 19:31:07+00:00
I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?

And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work.

High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing. Apartment blocks are cheap. It's bad zoning, NIMBYs, and a slow pace of construction due to disproportionate focus on luxury units that cause housing supply issues.

> The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household.

Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places? They're in exurbs of Arizona, a thousand miles from anything. During the housing bubble, we built a bunch of homes in unlivable areas and now we're dealing with the fact that they're functionally useless.
by newsoftheday | 2025-12-18 19:31:57+00:00
Princess Bride, small excerpt, "Vizzini: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you." and the dialog goes on with Vizzini dominating it and arguing with himself. In the end, it came down to a coin toss, he picked up a goblet, drank and died.

Anyone who allows a 10K LOC LLM generated PR to be merged without reviewing every single line, is doing the same thing, a coin toss.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-18 19:31:58+00:00
> Like, do you run a proper experiment where you hand the same task to multiple models several times and compare the results?

This is what I do. I have a little TUI that fires off Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Qwen Coder and AMP in separate containers for most task I do (although I've started to use AMP less and less), and either returns the last message of what they replied and/or a git diff of what exactly they did. Then I compare them side by side. If all of them got something wrong, I update the prompt, fire them off again. Always starting from zero, and always include the full context of what you're doing with the first message, they're all non-interactive sessions.

Sometimes I do 3x Codex instead of different agents, just to double-check that all of them would do the same thing. If they go off and do different things from each other, I know the initial prompt isn't specific/strict enough, and again iterate.
by Stevvo | 2025-12-18 19:31:58+00:00
There is one puzzle piece that you can't reach early in the game; to get it you have to bring a later piece back to the puzzle, put it in its place, then jump on the platform that is drawn on the puzzle piece. But most people just give up in frustration trying to reach the piece because the game hasn't given you enough information to know you need come back for it later.
by jmsgwd | 2025-12-18 19:32:12+00:00
>Huh interesting, how does that work? I thought the way yubikeys operate the keys are generated on-device and are impossible to remove, and also come in limited number.

I wasn't referring to hardware keys (like YubiKeys), but rather on-device secure enclaves, TEEs, or TPMs.

Also I said "protecting a key using the secure enclave", which is perhaps a bit of a sleight of hand :-)

By that I mean a key that is wrapped (encrypted) using a parent key stored in the secure enclave. The key itself is not stored in the SE. But since it is wrapped using a parent key that is stored in the SE, that means it can only be decrypted in the SE. I believe this is how iCloud Keychain works, for example.

Digging into this further, it looks like I might have been wrong to imply that a credential manager app can instruct the SE itself to perform the proof of possession calculations needed for passkey authentication using a private key that is "protected" in this sense. When the app asks the SE to decrypt a passkey private key, it looks like the SE might return the passkey private key in plaintext to the app, and then the app itself performs the proof of possession calculation transiently outside the SE. I'm not sure about that, but I'd love to know.

> How do the decryption keys for the encrypted passkeys get shared between devices?

They get established as part of the device enrolment process. I suspect this simply adds another layer to the key hierarchy, so that your passkey private keys are encrypted under a sync key (parent) which is encrypted under a SE key (grandparent).

In that case, you could still claim that your passkeys are "protected by the SE" since they are encrypted at rest and in transit, and they cannot be decrypted anywhere except in the SEs of your enrolled devices.
by nickff | 2025-12-18 19:32:18+00:00
I am not a proponent of any of these bans, but it seems like someone needs to decide which books are featured at schools, and these 'bans' are just vetoes of certain books enacted by parents or school boards. I am not sure why a librarian or some school administrator should have complete authority to select any books they may prefer. This seems similar to a curriculum, in that the citizens and/or school board direct the educators what they should be (and should not be) teaching.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-18 19:32:23+00:00
Wen gemma4? :)

But on a serious note, I'm happy to see more research going into vSLMs (very small...) My "dream" scenario is to have the "agentic" stuff run locally, and call into the "big guns" as needed. Being able to finetune these small models on consumer cards is awesome, and can open up a lot of niche stuff for local / private use.
by dblohm7 | 2025-12-18 19:32:45+00:00
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.

Like the one described in the subsequent toot?

> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500918701463
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-18 19:32:53+00:00
A few days ago I implemented IComparable in .Net / C#, and copilot "read my mind" and made a suggestion. It saved me 2-3 minutes of typing.

It took me about an hour of debugging to realize that copilot swapped a variable prefixed with "x" and a different one prefixed with "y".

If I wrote it myself, I wouldn't have made that mistake. But, otherwise copilot wrote the exact code that I was going to write.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-18 19:32:56+00:00
It's the gaming version of Galaxy Quest: a parody that is not only great when it stands by itself, but is satirical in a way that shows they are genuinely big fans of the source material.

(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)
by enraged_camel | 2025-12-18 19:33:00+00:00
Last night I gave one of the flaky tests in our test suite to three different models, using the exact same prompt.

Gemini 3 and Gemini 3 Flash identified the root cause and nailed the fix. GPT 5.1 Codex misdiagnosed the issue and attempted a weird fix despite my prompt saying “don’t write code, simply investigate.”

I run these tests regularly, and Codex has not impressed me. Not even once. At best it’s on par, but most of the time it just fails miserably.

Languages: JavaScript, Elixir, Python
by seg_lol | 2025-12-18 19:33:02+00:00
The reason to ban books is so that people that wouldn't normally cross paths with that book will never be affected by it.

Book bans are not designed to stop people that know about these books and the ideas they contain. They know that those people will still find them and read them.

> I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.

Lots of kids didn't and they don't know they didn't and that is the point.
by pks016 | 2025-12-18 19:33:47+00:00
Open access paradox. As an author, I hate gold open access journals. My supervisor doesn't have money (~3000 CAD nowadays) to pay for publishing. He says he would rather pay for my or other grad students' summer salary

Each time I spent hours searching an appropriate journal for my research. As time goes on, I feel like research is only for very wealthy people.
by mort96 | 2025-12-18 19:33:58+00:00
I strongly disagree, firewall-cmd is way too complicated. I mean it's probably fine if your main job is being a firewall administrator, but for us who just need to punch a hole in a firewall as a tiny necessary prerequisite for what we actually want to do, it's just too much.

On ufw systems, I know what to do: if a port I need open is blocked, I run 'ufw allow'. It's dead simple, even I can remember it. And if I don't, I run 'ufw --help' and it tells me to run 'ufw allow'.

Firewall-cmd though? Any time I need to punch a hole in the firewall on a Fedora system, I spend way too long reading the extremely over-complicated output of 'firewall-cmd --help' and the monstrous man page, before I eventually give up and run 'sudo systemctl disable --now firewalld'. This has happened multiple times.

If firewalld/firewall-cmd works for you, great. But I think it's an absolutely terrible solution for anyone whose needs are, "default deny all incoming traffic, open these specific ports, on this computer". And it's wild that it's the default firewall on Fedora Workstation.
by rdtsc | 2025-12-18 19:34:42+00:00
> There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.

That's great idea, many stores have them!

This is not about bookstores but about school. So then, would you put that bookshelf in a second grade class. How early do kids need to hear about "Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love". I mean, a lot of those kids still believe in Santa maybe telling them about teenage prostitutes is a bit early.
by isp | 2025-12-18 19:34:47+00:00
Broadly-defined "hostile acts" in UK national security law

Reasoning:

* Original report behind the article: "State Threats Legislation in 2024" [0], i.e., UK national security law

* Article focuses on an example from section 6.17 where developing an encrypted messenger app is given to show how broad the definition of "hostile act" is

* Snippets from the article:

> In his independent review of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act and the newly implemented National Security Act, Hall KC highlights the incredibly broad scope of powers granted to authorities. > > He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of "hostile activity" simply because their technology "make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications."

[0] Original report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69411a3eadb57...
by stuffn | 2025-12-18 19:34:48+00:00
This list is very obviously politically motivated. None of these are banned. I can find them trivially on Amazon. My benchmark for "ban" would be a black out from common resellers.

There are common themes among all of them. All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school. This list is more like "what should/shouldn't be acceptable for kids and teens". This is hardly a ban. It's at best parental control. But selling it as a ban is key to outrage culture and delivering their opinions about the current administration. Nothing is stopping a parent from purchasing these books for their child. Nothing is stopping them from finding them as a PDF, or at a local or online reseller. Pretending this is "taboo" information is an extremely poor attempt to hide political bikeshedding.
by arcfour | 2025-12-18 19:34:50+00:00
If Google bans 100,000 bot accounts a day, and even 1% of those "users" request a human appeal, you are demanding 1,000 hearings every 24 hours. Who pays for this? Magic? If the cost of providing a "free" email account includes the potential for a $500 human-led legal adjudication, free accounts will simply cease to exist.

Further, the current court system is already backlogged by months or years for serious crimes and property disputes. You are suggesting we socialize the cost of private customer service disputes. Why should taxpayers fund a judge to decide if a "common sense" decision was made about someone's banned World of Warcraft account?!

I'm sorry but this idea is very obviously not congruent with reality as we know it, as nice as it may sound.
by vernrVingingIt | 2025-12-18 19:35:20+00:00
You all really believe PhDs and principle hardware engineers at Samsung, nVidia, etc have not worked around any abstract problem you all can come up with?

We need a layer of abstraction not endless layers.

Nothing says unearned wisdom than script kiddies who intentionally had money thrown at them to reinforce belief their mastery of RoR CRUD app dev is genius beyond all comprehension. Zomg you know Linux admin? Here's $10 million dollars!

This thread is nothing but appeals to banal social conservatism. The disruptors on the verge of being the disrupted lashing out; wait, I was the job killer! Now you say my job is dead! So unfair!

Us hardware engineers been having a good laugh at SWEs easily manipulated the last 20 years by Wall Street hype of copy-paste SaaS products constantly reimplemented in the latest JS framework.

Throwing money at you all was intentional manipulation of primate biology. Juice your egos, get you to fall in line with desired agency control goals of the political and old money cohort.
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-12-18 19:35:31+00:00
Now you have me getting misty eyed a bit! I remember when my dad had a Cyrix PC and later an AMD K6 II+ whitebox build. :)

At any rate, you do have a point. I can't argue that Nvidia has an inferior product; yet I just wish Nvidia wasn't abusing their position so much.
by MPSFounder | 2025-12-18 19:35:40+00:00
So I am an idiot for not accepting our complicit media (like the NYTimes, run by a Zio--t or Bari Weiss's Free Press) and questioning whether the nation that molested underage women on American soil to blackmail our congress, took out someone? I mean they blow up the limbs off children in Ghaza, so anyone putting it above a nation actively committing a genocide on another people is drinking the cool aid. I would argue you are a consumer of our media, and lack the critical reasoning to see the full picture. Look at who runs our congress. Look at who our billionaires are, and where the money is sent. That is the full story. It is a rabbit hole which the willing ignorant ignores. ALSO, I am asking questions because it is my AMERICAN right to know who is benefiting from my taxes, and who took out someone on my soil. You don't get to call me an idiot for pointing out who is an enemy of my country. You can choose to be ignorant and weak. it is always interesting how amongst the Russians or Iranians, only Hasbara comes after you. That tells you all you need to know :) You are free to be ignorant, for we live in a free country. I am free to not accept the propaganda fed by that nation and its loyal followers. Both Is--l and Iran are enemies of the United States. But the difference is Is--l has religious followers in positions of power, that provide it with an exemption to everything (from AIPAC not registering as a foreign entity, to our media willingly refusing to cover its active genocide (in Is--l's own elected officials' words), to getting our congress to welcome war criminals like Mileikowsky (per the ICJ)).
by negzero7 | 2025-12-18 19:35:52+00:00
You don't need to as they aren't banned and your local bookstore likely already has a shelf right up front of all of these books for purchase.

I am against the banning of books from purchase or from public libraries, however banning books in schools is not that. It is gatekeeping this information from young and impressionable minds, just like we do with movies, games, drugs, all sorts of things. Things that may have negative consequences on developing minds.

You may disagree with what books are banned or why, but allowing unsupervised exposure of elementary aged children to sexually explicit and graphically depicted books such as Gender Queer is not appropriate. If a child wants access to this, their parent or adult can buy it for them or rent it from the public library.
by macintux | 2025-12-18 19:36:44+00:00
Florida bill 1069 allows parents to challenge the inclusion of books in the library, but only explicitly identifies books related to sexual preferences/conduct/etc.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1069/BillText/er/...

The bill is all about pronouns, heterosexuality, abstinence, and getting books out of libraries on those grounds.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-12-18 19:37:01+00:00
There are two things to note here:

1. Pocket/etc is not even ancient history,

2. At this point I don’t think Firefox or Mozilla ought to be taken without a truck of salt.

A bonus third :D

3. People bleeding their hearts out for Mozilla and calling others out for constantly criticising Mozilla — it’s history baby, history!
by ink_13 | 2025-12-18 19:37:08+00:00
Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.

It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."