MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpbryan | 2025-12-18 21:36:31+00:00
Diffing the XML is a complete nonstarter. I've spent years working with the OpenXML format and can assure you it is very complex even for a professional software engineer with 10 years of experience.

The diff of the document (referred to as a "redline") is what lawyers send to the client and their counterparties. It's essential that the redline is legible for all parties and reflects their professionalism.

Moreover, it is not enough to see the structural changes between the versions. A lawyer needs to see the formatting changes between the versions as well which cannot be accomplished by diffing XML files.
by mindslight | 2025-12-18 21:36:39+00:00
No, that's the problem - it's not good advocacy. The destructionist movement is more appropriately seen as arbitraging away existing concern about the issues they claim to take up. Their politicians' main use for reformist political causes are as cudgels for threatening businesses with, after which they back off once their own pockets get lined. As a libertarian who cares about many of the causes of individual freedom they dishonestly champion, I'm well acquainted with their abuse of ideals.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-18 21:36:53+00:00
It's funny how so many posters seem to attribute it to just "free money, yeah".

There are plenty of complaints on HN how increased buerocratic burdens/tasks, in particular when they seem pointless or unrelated, leads to low job satisfaction, burn out and mental health issues. But somehow when it comes to the unemployed the same thing does not apply?

I certainly can relate that the more tasks pile up the more stressed I become (and being unemployed certainly can feel stressful). Adding some pointless administrative tasks that don't help with my actual goals can often be enough to push me over the edge so I just want to quit.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-18 21:37:43+00:00
I second the documentary.

Also a very notable statistic/anecdote at the end. I don't know how wide the scope (only one university?), but about a third of the incoming neurology students chose the field because of Oliver Sacks.

I always found the bulk of the criticism leveled against him to be faulty. However, if he did indeed fabricate a lot of details - it is concerning.
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 21:37:53+00:00
I don't think it's fair to hold them to the same, or higher standard. at all this is literally a project being maintained by one individual. I'm sure if they were given $5 million in seed money they could probably provide 1000x value for the industry writ large if they could hire a dedicated team for the product like all those other companies with 100,000x the budget.
by tastyface | 2025-12-18 21:38:35+00:00
London is a melting pot and a global city. Always has been, always will be. The "natives" have no more of a right to it than British nationals with familial roots outside the UK. (Who, by the way, are not "immigrants" or "foreigners". Many are second or third generation Brits.) If the "natives" don't like it, they can self-deport to a more cloistered town. Good bye.

And this type of nativist is never, ever consistent. Ask them how they feel about, for example, Native Americans' claim to the US and they'll invariably say, "well, the colonials won, tough luck." Somehow, whites always come out on top. Funny how that works...

Anyway, since this is clearly not a case of white nationalism, feel free to drop the sockpuppet and own your words! But I don't think you're being honest. The subtext in DHH's post is blatantly, blaringly obvious to anyone with an ounce of reading comprehension: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
by jonahbenton | 2025-12-18 21:39:17+00:00
It isn't between llm and skill, it's between agent and skill. Orgs that invest in skills will duplicate what they could do once in an agent. Orgs that "buy" skills from a provider will need to endlessly tweak them. Multiskill workflows will have semantic layer mismatches.

Skill is a great sleight of hand for Anthropic to get people to think Claude Code is a platform. There is no there there. Orgs will figure this out.

Cheers.
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-18 21:39:34+00:00
This is exactly the kind of boring, unsexy feature that actually builds trust. It’s the opposite of the usual “surprise, here’s an AI sidebar you didn’t ask for and can’t fully disable” pattern. If they want people to try this stuff, the path is pretty simple: ship a browser that treats AI like any other power feature. Off by default, clearly explained, reversible, and preferably shippable as an extension. You can always market your way into more usage; you can’t market your way back into credibility once you blow it.
by mothballed | 2025-12-18 21:39:36+00:00
>4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?

Steve Lookner?

authorities believe Brown University shooter used rented vehicle that is same make and model of car connected to killing of MIT professor"

https://x.com/lookner/status/2001763177185579260
by hajrice | 2025-12-18 21:39:53+00:00
- SaaS prices will start dropping.

- Current LLMs being seen more and more like commodities

- We'll start see a LOT more companies making their own LLM

- Capital stops pretending everything is fine & we finally see the stock market reflect what's been slowly bubbling up socially (people 'feeling poorer', trust declining, consumption becoming more cynical)
by mrinterweb | 2025-12-18 21:40:28+00:00
I have lost track of the number of times I have heard that argument, and implemented the API only to never have other API clients, or the API clients that do come later have very different needs and I need to create another API for that. I don't think API re-use is a strong argument unless the other client will be consuming the API imminently. I've heard the of "course we will have a native mobile app" argument enough times to often identify it as wishful thinking. Many clients are often satisfied with with a good web app.
by gkoberger | 2025-12-18 21:40:42+00:00
I run a product similar to Mintlify.

We've made different product decisions than them. We don't support this, nor do we request access to codebases for Git sync. Both are security issues waiting to happen, no matter how much customers want them.

The reason people want it, though, is for SEO: whether it's true or outdated voodoo, almost everyone believes having their documentation on a subdomain hurts the parent domain. Google says it's not true, SEO experts say it is.

I wish Mintlify the best here – it's stressful to let customers down like this.
by rainonmoon | 2025-12-18 21:40:53+00:00
And to my earlier point, none of that is in the writeup here to support the enormous claims made in framing the finding. This is good work, and congratulations on the bounty. I hope you have a long career in security ahead. Obviously you communicated your findings to Discord clearly enough for them to understand the impact. I look forward to reading more research from you all in the future and I hope the technical details will accompany it.
by lrvick | 2025-12-18 21:40:56+00:00
If we put out our own tar of all the sources, who is to say we did not tamper with them? This is a bit of a lose/lose but we have a solution we are working on with other distros to have a shared repository for all these, often legacy, sources and a universal swhid identifier for each one we can pin in stagex so they are highly tamper evident.

For shorter term we are starting to archive at archive.org and CERN and hope to have the fetch script be able to fail over to those soon.

The GNU servers are the worst, and unreliable for hours at a time, and have lots of rate limiting.

At the moment collecting all the sources directly from upstreams, while great for trust building, is the biggest pain point. Sorry about that!

For the super short term join #stagex:matrix.org and anyone would be happy to wormhole you their "fetch" directory.
by wiether | 2025-12-18 21:41:49+00:00
That's a bit simplistic.

If you sign a contract with a "hacker", then you are expecting results. Otherwise how do you decide to renew the contract next year? How do you decide to raise it next year? What if, during this contract, a vulnerability that this individual didn't found is exploited? You get rid of them?

So you're putting pressure on a person who is a researcher, not a producer. Which is wrong.

And also there's the scale. Sure, here you have one guy who exploited a vulnerability. But how long it took them to get there? There's probably dozens of vulnerabilities yet to be exploited, requiring skills that differ so much from the ones used by this person that they won't find them. Even if you pay them for a full-time position.

Whereas, if you set up a bug bounty program, you are basically crowdsourcing your vulnerabilities: not only you probably have thousands of people actively trying to exploit vulnerabilities in your system, but also, you only give money to the ones that do manage to exploit one. You're only paying on result.

Obviously, if the reward is not big enough, they could be tempted to sell them to someone else or use them themselves. But the risk is here no matter how you decide to handle this topic.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-18 21:42:22+00:00
> When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

I'm also now imagining my GPU whirring into life and the accompanying sound of a jetplane getting ready for takeoff, as my battery suddenly starts draining visibly.

Local LLMs for are a pipe dream, the technology fundamentally requires far too much computation for any true intelligence to ever make sense with current computing technologies.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-12-18 21:42:33+00:00
As a teenager in the 90's, I bicycled 20+ miles away into the mountains onto steep fire roads and ridge trails. In middle school at either 12- or 13-years-old, I went on a 2 day 72 mile (roundtrip) road cycling and camping school trip from San Jose to Mt Madonna; granted that was chaperoned but not by anyone my parents knew. I couldn't afford a car until college. If I wanted to get anywhere, it was on a bicycle or maybe the occasional city bus or light rail for somewhere far away. Mom was working a full-time job and taking night classes to finish an accounting degree.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-12-18 21:42:47+00:00
In Java world logging in libraries is effectively a no-op unless explicitly enabled by user, so side effects are negligible. And it actually does make sense, e.g. when a library is offering a convenient abstraction level over i/o, parsing or other stuff with initially unknown failure modes, where some logs may help clarifying the picture beyond handling an exception or error code. The way logging is done there is the art of good software design, which has never been lost (it may have not reached other platforms though). So I disagree with you and some other commenters: strict Verbot is dogmatic, and good design is never dogmatic.
by 0x457 | 2025-12-18 21:42:55+00:00
They still distribute runtime(s). Proton runs inside one of those runtimes. You're talking about 1.0 version, 2.0 was based on debian 10, and 3.0 is based on debian 11.

It still has some assumptions about host system, though, but that's a problem for those who package steam. For example, my non-FHS NixOS provides everything required, and it works out-of-the-box.
by bmitch3020 | 2025-12-18 21:43:12+00:00
This doesn't give a lot of hope for what's happening in America. But for those outside of the US, there's already a push to avoid US tech businesses. They prefer local clouds, ideally those run by non-US companies. And there's a lot of effort to shift to Linux on their government machines. While that hurts the US soft power, it improves their resilience from monopolies in the US, and I'm all for that.
by trinix912 | 2025-12-18 21:43:13+00:00
It's also not nearly as scriptable as Word is. Word has had macros ("fields") since its first Windows versions, VBA for over 20 years now, it's easy to develop complex add-ons - where I live we've had one for grammar checking for decades now (speaking of that, Google Docs' language features for less popular languages are far behind Word's). Various software supports export to Word and some programs even import from it. You'd be surprised what levels of automation has been achieved with Word.

Files are also easily shared (on physical media, email, no need for anyone to have a Google account to edit and send them back), encrypted, burned onto a CD for storage. DOC/DOCX are ubiquitous and stable file formats. No worries about data leaks in the cloud as it's all local by default...
by jstimpfle | 2025-12-18 21:43:36+00:00
I for one have said that sentence you're discussing a lot, and you'll just have to take my word that I'm far from being a fascist. I even draw conclusions from that sentence, but I'm trying hard to not draw any conclusions about specific members of any given sex.

I of course get where you're coming from, but don't you think it is intellectually dishonest to try and police certain "obviously true statements"? Isn't it similar to banning kitchen knifes because they can be used to kill? Doesn't it put under suspicion a lot of people who are simply following their intellectual curiosity?

I would argue that the ideas you seem to be advertising can lead to similar societal catastrophes as the ones you're trying to prevent from reoccurring.

For sure, the misguided idea that men and women are absolutely, 100% the same, and that any other outcome than some equal distribution between males and females means there must be mysoginy and patriarchy at work (which I don't say you're proclaiming directly), has lead to a lot of real problems in the past decades. And that includes aggressive propaganda against males in general, and against some actually valuable male virtues as well as female virtues, in some circles.
by thethingundone | 2025-12-18 21:43:43+00:00
I own a forum which currently has 23k online users, all of them bots. The last new post in that forum is from _2019_. Its topic is also very niche. Why are so many bots there? This site should have basically been scraped a million times by now, yet those bots seem to fetch the stuff live, on the fly? I don’t get it.
by MalikTerm | 2025-12-18 21:44:15+00:00
I thought the countries you listed as maintaining book bans was a little short, given that basically every Western/First World/Global North country has previously banned or continues to ban books. For instance, Belgium, Finland, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, and the United States have all banned the sale and publication of books within recent memory, with restrictions on the importation of books and potential detention and fines for people importing them, and there may have been legal challenges made to the authors and publishers of books.

The definition you gave for banning books does narrow it down a bit though. Restriction on the publication, sale, or importation isn't a ban, but possession is. Ah. I guess a book is only banned if you face legal consequences for owning it after purchase during the very limited window that it may appear on bookshelves. In that case, I can't say for certain that Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand bans books, but I can say that I would not want to be in possession of certain types of books in these countries. The definition of 'banned books' gets a little murky here though, is the inevitable police detention and interrogation due to the possession of the books themselves or rather obscenity/hate speech/Nazism/terrorism/drug laws? Does it count if the detention and interrogation occurs after an unrelated search of your property? Is a book only banned if it is confiscated from your possession? Does it count if you win your court case?

Which leaves the only Western nations that fit such a definition as being Austria and the United Kingdom, which do objectively criminalise the possession of banned books.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-18 21:44:30+00:00
> "Why are we wasting so much time on abstractions like .. objects?"

Aside: earlier this year Casey Muratori did a 2.5 hour conference talk on this topic - why we are using objects in the way they are implemented in C++ et al with class hierarchies and inheritance and objects representing individual entities? "The Big OOPs: anatomy of a 35 year mistake"[1].

He traces programming history back to Stroustrup learning from Simula and Kirstan Nygaard, back to C.A.R. Hoare's paper on records, back to the Algol 68 design committee, back to Douglas T. Ross's work in the 1950's. From Ross at MIT in 1960 to Ivan Sutherland working on Sketchpad at MIT in 1963, and both chains influencing Alan Kay and Smalltalk. Where the different ideas in OOP came from, how they came together through which programming languages, who was working on what, and when, and why. It's interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI
by RossBencina | 2025-12-18 21:44:37+00:00
> journals should not be the arbiters of quality

It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
by mothballed | 2025-12-18 21:44:43+00:00
Well maybe they should have been a bit more open to "conspiracies" since they're now saying they think they're connected and that they found a link of the same make/model car at both. Seeing as the "homeless guy" who remembered the plate was seemingly ignored for 5 days, he should have just blasted it on X.

Fortunately at least one person on reddit posted about the car 2 days ago ( https://old.reddit.com/r/providence/comments/1pnkwoq/fbi_pos... ) posted it, since it seems to be one of the few ways to get heard.
by a24venka | 2025-12-18 21:44:50+00:00
There is a heavy emphasis on testing the code as the way to provide guarantees that it works. While this is a helpful tool, I often find that the best engineers are ones who take a more first principles approach to the code and can reason about why the solution is comprehensive (covers all edge cases) and clean (easy for humans and LLMs to build on).

It often takes discipline to think and completely map out solutions before you build. This is where experience and knowing common patterns can also help.

When you have the experience of having manually written or read a lot of code it helps at the very least quickly understand what the LLMs are writing and reason about it later even if not at the beginning.
by adolph | 2025-12-18 21:44:54+00:00
A sibling comment says "just use Pi-hole" which kind of works and is also inadequate. A similar system is Ad Guard Home. These work at the DNS level with preset lists of bad domains. They aren't necessarily going to catch your TV calling out to notanadserver.samsung.com because that domain name is not recorded in the list of naughty domains. They are definitely not going to help if your device reaches out via IP.

Another approach is to disallow all DNS or only allow *.netflix.com for the TV. In my experience attempting to only allow certain domains is a game of whackamole where everyone in the house complains their stuff is broken because it needs undocumentedrandomdomain.com.
by hopelite | 2025-12-18 21:44:55+00:00
It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of.

Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly.

Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.
by andrewaylett | 2025-12-18 21:44:58+00:00
Similarly. I have over 20 years of professional experience. I've worked on embedded systems, and with mainframes. I've done (amongst other things) kernel development, compiler (& RTL) development, line-of-business, mobile, server, and web. Code I've written has a MAU on the order of 1% of humanity. Ask me about being a "full stack" developer :).

I've seen a lot. But the more I see, the more I find to see.
by bee_rider | 2025-12-18 21:45:03+00:00
I think it is hard to say to what extent there actually is even borderline deception. The internet amplifies random and funny things. In this article (which, we should note, is even-handed but leaning skeptical toward the garish reconstructions), it is noted that the images that have spread are the ugliest of the exhibit. If the exhibit tells the full story, and the internet just amplified the silt bits, that’s not deception on the part of the exhibit.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-12-18 21:45:04+00:00
So that's what this wording means:

> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related content freely available expresses ACM’s commitment to open access publication and represents another milestone in our transition to full open access within the next five years.

( from https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b... )

I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize "freely available" to a "source available" license that they took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition seems on track as planned.
by josho | 2025-12-18 21:45:16+00:00
The problem is that consumers are not savvy. They go to the store, and compare TVs based on features presented. Colors, refresh rate, size, etc.

Its only when they get home (and likely not even right away) that they discover their TV is spying on them and serving ads.

This is a perfect situation where government regulation is required. Ideally, something that protects our privacy. But, minimally something like a required 'nutrition label' on any product that sends our data off device.