MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martythemaniak | 2025-12-12 18:11:13+00:00
I'm sorry to be a pedantic about this, but we are absolutely not living through Idiocracy. In the movie, the President wants to better the material conditions of his people, then seeks and listens to the advice of the smartest person in the world, who successfully delivers.

If you want a movie, we are actually living in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-12 18:11:33+00:00
It's just provencial nonsense, there's no sound reasoning to it. Reductionism being taken and used as a form of refutation is a pretty common cargo culting behavior I've found.

Overwhelmingly, I just don't think the majority of human beings have the mental toolset to work with ambiguous philosophical contexts. They'll still try though, and what you get out of that is a 4th order baudrillardian simulation of reason.
by mike_d | 2025-12-12 18:11:37+00:00
There’s a Best Buy a few miles from my house. Why aren't I allowed to put my own products on their shelves, or set up a little folding table next to the phone accessories to sell my own cases?

It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.

And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?

Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.
by immibis | 2025-12-12 18:11:48+00:00
That is not what happened to the Graphene project recently.

Basically, there have been a string of anonymous secure phones designed and marketed directly to high-ups in organised crime. Encrochat, Sky ECC, Anom, Phantom Secure, probably more. Their plausible deniability is thin - an undercover government agent goes to the creators and basically says "I'd like to buy 30 of these for my drug-dealing empire" and the creator says "Sure, that'll be $2000 each." Later the agent calls them up and goes "Hey this guy cooking meth was busted by the cops, can you erase his phone?" and the creator goes "Sure." and erases the phone. That's not merely selling secure phones - that's joining organised crime (as the guy who makes the phones).

Someone in the French government basically said that if Graphene is another Phantom Secure, they should suffer the same consequences as Phantom Secure. That's what the comment was. It doesn't seem like Graphene is another Phantom Secure, but they're sure acting suspicious by running away from France because of this comment.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 18:12:01+00:00
The simulation isn't an operating brain. It's a description of one. What it "means" is imposed by us, what it actually is, is a shitload of graphite marks on paper or relays flipping around or rocks on sand or (pick your medium).

An arbitrarily-perfect simulation of a burning candle will never, ever melt wax.

An LLM is always a description. An LLM operating on a computer is identical to a description of it operating on paper (if much faster).
by socalgal2 | 2025-12-12 18:12:04+00:00
Sony and Nintendo only sell games. They don't gate access to banks, investments, health insurance, auto insurance, news, movies, social media, car control apps, appliance apps, grocery stores, e-commerce, etc...

That's not to say Sony and Nintendo shouldn't be opened too but their impact is much smaller (game devs) than Apple (nearly all businesses)
by RobotToaster | 2025-12-12 18:12:05+00:00
Trying to ban these people always seems like a terrible idea, it just leads to the inevitable claims that they must be right because the government is after them.

In the case of ivermectin, because it's relatively safe (In human doses, not horse doses) it would have been interesting to see how conspiracy theorists reacted if the government just gave it to anyone that requested it.
by throwaway-11-1 | 2025-12-12 18:12:05+00:00
I'm a consumer too and I despise having 20 different logins for each vendor to extract data from and the resulting increased exposure to identity theft. I'm grateful for Steam's dominance in the gaming space, my Playstation Sony account was hacked and was a nightmare cleaning up. It is not my job to care about developer margins, all the apps I care about are able to stay in business regardless of Apple's fees and if they cannot then they should charge more. I also dread the idea of having to spend time cleaning spammy "Patriot.Eagle App Store" from my elderly parent's devices if the walled garden is fully removed in the future, I know that shit is coming.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-12 18:12:37+00:00
If you're talking about "the freedom to escape one's surroundings and move away", the book has been widely criticized for that assertion, as Graeber is extremely ideologically motivated.

If you left your tribe without being accepted into another (whether through marriage or some kinds of previous personal alliances you'd made), life would be pretty rough if you survived at all.

Sure tribes would split sometimes when they got too big or disagreements split them. But that's not about the individual level. That's akin to nation-state secession today.

There's no evidence that people were just regularly packing things up and going off and joining whatever neighboring tribe they wanted to, whenever they wanted to. And this is the type of thing where the book has come under such heavy criticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#Methodo...
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-12 18:12:59+00:00
You and your parent are talking about slightly different things. You are both correct in different ways.

Your parent is saying that, while what you say is true for Rust and Go code themselves, in practice, it is less true for Rust, because Rust code tends to call into C code more than Go code does, and Rust doesn't always statically link to that C code by default.
by ciferkey | 2025-12-12 18:13:16+00:00
Adding another data point from my own experience. I had a very similar case with my own blog which I detailed here: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/i-dont-want-to-play-the-seo...

Gone through everything I can find, but nothing has made a difference for months now. Would love to hear any thoughts people have that aren't the usual checklist items.

Good news is I still get some visitors through Kagi, DDG, and Bing.
by tclancy | 2025-12-12 18:13:21+00:00
> “They’re throwing up and vomiting and having diarrhea and rashes,” Eaton said … Some adherents advise parents that the disturbing effects indicate that the treatment is working, ridding the body of impurities

A time traveler from the 17th Century would be familiar with this sort of quackery. I guess not everyone can sell alchemy, so some make do with other branches of “science”.
by mbreese | 2025-12-12 18:14:10+00:00
I think this is a good idea in general, but perhaps a bit too simple. It looks like this only works for static sites, right? It then performs a JS fetch to pull in the html code and then converts it (in a quick and dirty manner) to markdown.

I know this is pointing to the GH repo, but I’d love to know more about why the author chose to build it this way. I suspect it keeps costs low/free. But why CF workers? How much processing can you get done for free here?

I’m not sure how you could do much more in a CF worker, but this might be too simple to be useful on many sites.

Example: I had to pull in a docs site that was built for a project I’m working on. We wanted an LLM to be able to use the docs in their responses. However, the site was based on VitePress. I didn’t have access to the source markdown files, so I wrote an MCP fetcher that uses a dockerized headless chrome instance to load the page. I then pull the innerHTML directly from the processed DOM. It’s probably overkill, but an example of when this tool might not work.

But — if you have a static site, this tool could be a very simple way to configure MCP access. It’s a nice idea!
by m-s-y | 2025-12-12 18:15:12+00:00
A high school classmate of mine (many many years ago) was unexpectedly and brazenly pulled out of a school-wide assembly by local police one morning.

It was the talk of the school. Rumors spread like wildfire. Consensus was that whatever she did, it must have been terrible.

She had driven past a stopped school bus.

If this reaction is acceptable when a person does it, a $1 fine for a company is a slap in the face to law-abiding citizens.
by csnover | 2025-12-12 18:15:31+00:00
> - cannot wrap text

This is possible, but only in the stupid way of using a `<foreignObject>` to embed HTML in your SVG (which obviously only works if your SVG renderer also supports at least a subset of HTML). SVG 2 fixes this by adding support for `inline-size`[0], so now UAs just need to… support that.

> - cannot embed font glyphs - your SVG might be unreadable if the user doesn't have the font installed. You can convert letters to curves, but then you won't be able to select and edit text. It's such an obvious problem, yet nobody thought of it, how?

Somebody did think of it. SVG 1.1 added the `<font>` element[1]; SVG 2.0 replaced this with mandatory WOFF support.[2] A WOFF is both subsettable and embeddable using a data URI, and is supported by all the browser UAs already, so it’s obvious why this was changed, but embeddable SVG fonts have existed for a long time (I don’t know why/how they got memory holed).

> - browsers do not publish, which version and features they support

It should be possible to use CSS `@supports` for most of this and hide/show parts of the SVG accordingly in most places.[3] The SVG spec itself includes its own mechanism for feature detection[4], but since it is for “capabilities within a user agent that go beyond the feature set defined in this specification”, it’s essentially worthless.

There are obvious unsolved problems with SVG text, but they are more subtle. For example, many things one might want to render with SVG (like graphs) make more sense with an origin at the bottom-left. This is trivial using a global transform `scaleY(-100%)`, except for text. There is no “baseline” transform origin, nor any CSS unit for the ascent or descent of the line box, nor any supported `vector-effect` keyword to make the transformation apply only to the position and not the rendering. So unless the text is all the same size, and/or you know the font metrics in advance and can hard-code the correct translations, it is impossible to do the trivial thing.

There are other issues in a similar vein where scaling control is just ludicrously inadequate. Would you like to have a shape with a pattern fill that dynamically resizes itself to fill the SVG, but doesn’t distort the pattern, like how HTML elements and CSS `background` work? Good luck! (It’s possible, but much like the situation with text wrapping, requires egregious hacks.)

Some of the new `vector-effect` keywords in SVG 2 seem like they could address at least some of this, but those are “at risk” features which are not supported by UAs and may still be dropped from the final SVG 2 spec.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/text.html#InlineSizeProperty

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/fonts.html

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/changes.html#fonts

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/struct.html#ConditionalProcessing...
by Linguist6514 | 2025-12-12 18:15:45+00:00
Censoring nudity is perfectly reasonable. There are people on Facebook for whom nudity is not appropriate. There are also those who just don't want to see nudity. Should everyone who wants to avoid nudity abstain entirely from using Meta apps? The purpose of Facebook was to connect people. It's SOCIAL media, not SEXUAL media. Nudity is not a requirement for connecting with people. Last time I checked, Messenger allows nudity to be sent in private messages and in message groups. It doesn't need to be, and should not be, on Facebook proper.

And to answer your question, "they" is referring to the people who were starkly in favor of censorship of right-wing opinions, and shadow banning and banning people who post right-wing content, or just generally anything that doesn't fall in line with any of the left-wing's billions of ephemeral and mutable narrative goal posts. I used "they" so as to avoid sounding snarky or antagonistic toward any group in particular, but you asked, so...
by phantasmish | 2025-12-12 18:15:45+00:00
Our brains actually do something, may be the difference. They're a thing happening, not a description of a thing happening.

Whatever that something that it actually does in the real, physical world is produces the cogito in cogito, ergo sum and I doubt you can get it just by describing what all the subatomic particles are doing, any more than a computer or pen-and-paper simulated hurricane can knock your house down, no matter how perfectly simulated.
by qsort | 2025-12-12 18:15:49+00:00
I agree saying "they don't think" and leaving it at that isn't particularly useful or insightful, it's like saying "submarines don't swim" and refusing to elaborate further. It can be useful if you extend it to "they don't think like you do". Concepts like finite context windows, or the fact that the model is "frozen" and stateless, or the idea that you can transfer conversations between models are trivial if you know a bit about how LLMs work, but extremely baffling otherwise.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-12-12 18:15:54+00:00
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props,

No, it's everything. Modern big budget movies could have 800-1200 vfx shots. You aren't able to guess at what is photography in every shot in a few seconds 800 times during a movie. You can make that claim, but even people who have been doing vfx for decades can't do it. People say these things because they want to believe it and they know they won't be tested to prove it.

I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.

The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over

You say this but again, you don't know how every shot was done and every shot is different. This mostly comes from people wanting to think they are never 'fooled' and 'old ways are better'. This has been going on and repeated since the 90s.

The truth is that you aren't in a position to judge what is 'best' because you don't know how every shot was done in the first place.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-12 18:16:07+00:00
Java is one of the giants and there are tons of existing and new projects that use it. Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts. Look at QuestDB, or Netflix, as current examples of projects choosing Java.

The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN like Rust, Go, and OCaml are way down in a tier of languages that get a lot of blog posts but enjoy relatively little traction in reality.
by simlevesque | 2025-12-12 18:16:31+00:00
Jean-Louis Gassée's Monday Notes about tech and Apple. He's been in the business since the 60's, worked at Apple in the 80's, founded BeOS: https://mondaynote.com/

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing. He's an engineer at Microsoft that has been blogging about maintaining legacy systems, Windows and MS-DOS for over 2 decades. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Hackaday is a good blog too, there's many authors so it can be hit or miss but it's full of curious folks. https://hackaday.com/
by retrac | 2025-12-12 18:16:57+00:00
It's akin to a compiler unrolling a loop. Uses more RAM (area) but fewer cycles to execute. Hardware synthesis uses many of the same techniques as compilers use to optimize code.

It's a common pitfall for those learning hardware description languages like Verilog, when they think about them like programming languages. If you go "if (calc) res <= a * b;" If res is 32 bits wide then you have instantiated a 32 bit fast multiplier circuit dedicated just to that one operation. This is often not what was intended.

Despite how leaning on the analogy too closely can mislead in that way, the analogy between hardware and software is not a shallow one. A combinatorial circuit is akin to the pure function of functional programming. Anything that can be described as a pure function working on fixed integers or floating point or other discrete data types, can be transformed into a combinatorial circuit. And there are algorithms to do so automatically and often with reasonable efficiency.

Free software synthesis has come a long way in recent years, by the way. There's even several hobbyist projects that can take VHDL or Verilog and produce layouts using TTL chips or even discrete transistor logic with automatic circuit board layout. You can now compile your code directly to circuit board copper masks and a part list.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-12 18:16:58+00:00
Today, Tor doesn't move QUIC so you'd have to do TCP, but that's not actually a design requirement of Tor, a future Tor could actually deliver QUIC instead. QUIC is encrypted with TLS 1.3 so your first packet as the client is that Hello packet, there's no TCP layer.

QUIC really wants to do discovery to figure out a better way to move the data and of course Tor doesn't want discovery that's the whole point, so these features are in tension, but that's not hard to resolve in Tor's favour from what I can see.
by dgarrett | 2025-12-12 18:17:29+00:00
> Mercedes Drive Pilot is classified as L3 which is better than Tesla or Rivian.

"DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone." [0]

[0]: https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot#2
Ask HN: Who is honestly evaluating AI outputs and how?
by toddmorey | 2025-12-12 18:17:37+00:00
Especially with multimodal AI conversations, evaluating and benchmarking these models is an increasingly complex topic, but a frustrating interaction with AI can really leave customers feeling sour about your whole product / service.

For an in-product AI assistant (with grounding, doc retrieval, and tool calling) I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to evaluate and monitor its success with customer interactions, prompt adherence, correctness and appropriateness, etc.

Any tips or resources that have been helpful to folks investing this challenge? Would love to learn. What does your stack / process look like?
by yjdiquhf | 2025-12-12 18:18:01+00:00
I am confused by this comment on the project page.

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti

> (So far, it's a not-very-complete client. But watch this space!)

Is that comment outdated? The blog post gave me a different impression. If Arti is not ready yet, shouldn't that have been made clear in the blog post and in the various posts here? Not directing it at you, amelius.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-12 18:18:11+00:00
R U sure/serious?

There is the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_(policing) and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Combine that with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geofence_warrant and enjoy the possible hassle of being 'by-catch'.
by estearum | 2025-12-12 18:18:12+00:00
Lol, no they're not.

This is an extremely rare event that was nonetheless detected by scientists who then nonetheless updated dosing guidelines to mitigate it as early as February 2022.

This has been an active area of focus since before the drugs were even released which is why such events were in fact tracked closely during the 30,000+ participant clinical trials.

Those gigantic clinical trials (some of the largest RCTs ever conducted) didn't detect this issue because of its extreme rarity.

This is exactly the drug development and post-market surveillance process working correctly. At every point (and even still) the risk calculus is heavily weighted toward vaccination for nearly everyone, and slightly weighted toward vaccination for the most SAE-prone group (young men).

And that's all assuming COVID doesn't have latent systemic effects like many viruses do (chickenpox, ebola, or measles come to mind).

The skeptics have been wrong at every turn. It's even too generous to say a broken clock is right twice a day.
by landr0id | 2025-12-12 18:18:19+00:00
Apple relaxed these rules shortly after the initial Epic vs Apple lawsuit: https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/tech/apple-app-store-changes-...

Apologies for being unable to find a better source at the moment, but it links to this press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/09/japan-fair-trade-comm...
by csnover | 2025-12-12 18:18:35+00:00
> Also, allowing CSS inside SVG is not a great idea because the SVG renderer needs to include full CSS parser, and for example, will Inkscape work correctly when there is embedded CSS with base64 fonts? Not sure.

For better or worse, CSS parsing and WOFF support are both mandatory in SVG 2.[0][1] Time will tell whether this makes it a dead spec!

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/styling.html#StylingUsingCSS

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/text.html#FontsGlyphs
by palmotea | 2025-12-12 18:18:41+00:00
> You can simulate a human brain on pen and paper too.

That's an assumption, though. A plausible assumption, but still an assumption.

We know you can execute an LLM on pen and paper, because people built them and they're understood well enough that we could list the calculations you'd need to do. We don't know enough about the human brain to create a similar list, so I don't think you can reasonably make a stronger statement than "you could probably simulate..." without getting ahead of yourself.
by tgv | 2025-12-12 18:18:43+00:00
> The bet is that the effect size (if any) will be large enough to be informative despite the noise.

But you have no grounds to ascribe it to the posited difference. Finding no effect might yield more information, but that's hard: given the amount of noise, you're bound to find a great many effects.

> Have you seen this done?

Not in LLMs, but there have been experiments with regularizing languages, and getting people to learn them in Second Language Acquisition (L2) studies. But what I've seen is inconclusive and sometimes outright contradictory.

I think people have also looked via information theory at this. Probably using Markov models.

> Fedorenko's own comparison to "early LLMs" suggests she thinks the analogy has some merit.

I don't think she can seriously entertain that thought. We simply know practically nothing about language processes in the brain. What we know about the hardware is very different from LLMs, early or not.

Just to give an indication of how much we don't know: the Stroop effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect) is almost 100 years old. We have no idea what causes it. There's no working model of word recognition. There are only vague suggestions about the origin of the delay. We have no clue how the visual signals for the color and the letters are separated, where they join again, and how that's related to linguistic knowledge. And that's almost 100 years of very, very much research. IF you go to Google Scholar and type "Stroop task", you'll get 197.000 (!) hits. That's nearly 200k articles etc. resulting in no knowledge whatsoever about a very simple, artificial task.