MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gusgus01 | 2025-12-19 05:54:41+00:00
While I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for.

While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.

Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.

Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-19 05:55:53+00:00
"The IAB strongly endorses the view of the Division Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation Division of Network, Communications Research and Infrastructure which, in paraphrase, characterized as unethical and unacceptable any activity which purposely:

. . .

(e) compromises the privacy of users."

Compromising the privacy of internet users was unethical and unacceptable

Now, for companies that have popular websites but nothing to sell, it's a "business model"
by yanhangyhy | 2025-12-19 05:56:08+00:00
Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything.

There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent projects were quite serious, which undermined the Chinese government’s confidence in these efforts. A few years ago, there was even a so-called “transparent computing” scam project that was awarded a national-level prize.

Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.

In fact, aside from high-end chips, China already dominates the mid- and low-end chip segments.
by itissid | 2025-12-19 05:56:10+00:00
Isn't atleast part of that GH issue something that this https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/introduction/what-is-baml is also trying to solve? LLM inputs and outputs must be functions with defined functions. That was their starting point.

IIUC their most recent arc focuses on prompt optimization[0] where you can optimize — using DSPy and an optimization algo GEPA [1] — using relative weights on different things like errors, token usage, complexity.

[0] https://docs.boundaryml.com/guide/baml-advanced/prompt-optim... [1] https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa?tab=readme-ov-file
by array_key_first | 2025-12-19 05:56:18+00:00
> Now you need the exact same data but displayed differently. Boom, another 100 lines of code? Multiply by the number of times you need that same data? Boom indeed, it just blew up.

It isn't 2004 anymore - all of the server-side frameworks have components.

Except, now instead of using serialization and JSON, it's a real API. In code. I can click and go to definition.

> Just ... write an endpoint returning the data you need, as JSON? But write it once, instead of once per view variant?

What you just said directly contradicts itself.

If each view variant needs slightly different data, or ordering, or whatever, we now need to make N APIs. Or we don't. And now we're back at square one and everything I said is valid.

The more modular and reusable your API is, the less performant it will be and the more bugs it will introduce. I'm all for the God API that has 1 million endpoints each doing one specific thing. But it seems nobody else is, so instead we get the fucked ass RESTful APIs that are so bad and lead to such overly complex code were pushed to write critical CVEs to avoid them (looking at you, NEXT)
by a1j9o94 | 2025-12-19 05:57:03+00:00
Not the person you're responding to, but I think there's a non trivial argument to make that our thoughts are just auto complete. What is the next most likely word based on what you're seeing. Ever watched a movie and guessed the plot? Or read a comment and know where it was going to go by the end?

And I know not everyone thinks in a literal stream of words all the time (I do) but I would argue that those people's brains are just using a different "token"
by array_key_first | 2025-12-19 05:58:38+00:00
> You could see that 20 years ago too, unless you manually stored the state of the form somewhere

See, that's my point - it's NOT manual, it's explicit. There's a difference. A form submission and page refresh is just that. It's very clear WHEN the sync happens and WHAT we are syncing.

With a SPA, you throw that all away and you have to do it yourself. And it's almost always done poorly and inconsistently.
by majormajor | 2025-12-19 05:59:18+00:00
"Test the tests" is a big ask for many complex software projects.

Most human-driven coding + testing takes heavy advantage of being white-box testing.

For open-ended complex-systems development turning everything into black-box testing is hard. The LLMs, as noted in the post, are good at trying a lot of shit and inadvertently discovering stuff that passes incomplete tests without fully working. Or if you're in straight-up yolo mode, fucking up your test because it misunderstood the assignment, my personal favorite.

We already know it's very hard to have exhaustive coverage for unexpected input edge cases, for instance. The stuff of a million security bugs.

So as the combinatorial surface of "all possible actions that can be taken in the system in all possible orders" increases because you build more stuff into your system, so does the difficulty of relying on LLMs looping over prompts until tests go green.
by morby | 2025-12-19 06:00:16+00:00
This isn’t being realistic. The major benefit of these is peer review. You aren’t going to have enough people to peer review the work of a massively open and public publication system.

On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in the stream.

Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important science.
by neom | 2025-12-19 06:02:28+00:00
We'll hear "emergent" a lot.

Maybe too obvious but more and more interesting new robots will hit the market and robotics as space will become considerably legible.

Probably going to start to understand how different types of models scaled capabilities will play off of each other when architected together (MOE+).

Non-tech people are going to start having the model welfare conversation more generally.
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-19 06:03:00+00:00
The problem with this line is that there are populations that live very similar lifestyles but have massively different obesity rates. The rate on obesity in Tonga is much larger than the one in the USA, which is itself much larger than France - and yet all three are modern industrialized nations where the vast majority of the population lead mostly sedentary lifestyles.

Even within these places, there are often huge disparities in obesity rate. For example, Colorado has half the rate of obesity as the USA: are people in Colorado leading such hugely different lives from the rest of the nation? And are people in Colorado leading lifestyles more similar to those in California than those in Kentucky?

To me, the much more plausible explanation is that there is some aspect of modern life (most likely some element in our food, but very possibly in our enviroment as well) that is causing metabolic issues that lead to this huge increase in appetite that in turn leads almost inexorably to obesity.
by majormajor | 2025-12-19 06:03:13+00:00
>Do you ever need a website you're visiting translated?

This feature doesn't seem like it needs a "first class agent mode."

>Have you ever not understood a term or phrase on a website and had to go to wikipedia/urbandictionary/google to explain it?

I already have right-click for that the old-fashioned way. Not sure how an "AI mode" would make it meaningfully better.

>Have you ever wanted to do a 'fuzzy search' of a 300 page document (where you don't know the exact string of text to ctrl-f, but want to see where they talk about a particular topic)?

This feature is the most usefully novel of the bunch but again doesn't seem like it needs a "first-class-citizen agent mode."

I have a hunch that the "first-class-citizen AI features" that instead will be pushed on us will be the ones that help Google sell ads or pump up KPIs for investors; Firefox doesn't need to jump on that hype train today.

Agent mode feels more like "Let the agent mode place your food delivery order for you?" No thanks, I don't think that's actually gonna give me my first choice, or the cheapest option...
by Glant | 2025-12-19 06:04:19+00:00
I live in the area. Crazy how many helicopters and drones showed up so quick and how many police there were. For several hours more and more police and FBI vehicles kept arriving. Probably ended up with close to 100 officers on scene. Salem NH PD, Methuen MA PD, Providence RI PD, NH state police, MA state police, FBI, and US Marshal service were the ones I saw.

I think it's the biggest response I've personally seen since the Boston Marathon Bombing.
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-19 06:04:39+00:00
At least in my experience, most of the poor UX can be explained by the fact that LG shipped underpowered hardware for the OS and apps that are expected to run on it. I bought my TV a year ago and it lags or loses input on the main menu, and it's even worse in apps. Forget it if you want to use the overlay menu to change a setting lol

If you remember Palm/HP webOS, it had Preware homebrew that didn't require exploits to run, it was supported by default and was amazing. LG patched the one vuln that would have let me at least root the TV.

The Android TV devices I bought from reputable retailers are at least beefy enough to handle input without lag, and I can run whatever APK I want on them.
by itissid | 2025-12-19 06:05:02+00:00
One thing that is interesting to think about is given a skill which is just "pre-context", how can it be _evolved_ to create prompts given _my_ context? e.g. here is their web artifact skill builder from desktop app:

``` web-artifacts-builder

Suite of tools for creating elaborate, multi-component claude.ai HTML artifacts using modern frontend web technologies (React, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui). Use for complex artifacts requiring state management, routing, or shadcn/ui components - not for simple single-file HTML/JSX artifacts. ```

Say I want to build a landing page with some relatively static content — I don't know it yet but its just gonna be bootstrap CSS, no SPA/React(ish), it'll be fine with templated server side thing. But I don't know how to express this in words. Could the skill _evolve_ based on what my preferences are and what is possible for a relative novice to grok and construct?

This is a simple example, but it could extend to say using sqlite+litestream instead of postgres or using Gradient boosted trees instead of an expensive transformer based classifier.
by happymellon | 2025-12-19 06:07:28+00:00
As in

> manufacturers can't replace Explorer with a desktop similar to Steam Decks GameScope.

You have to use Microsoft's OOB experience. Improved with "handheld mode", but still not as slick and you are not allowed to improve it.

You can have a "full screen launcher", but you have to boot to Explorer and then run your Big Picture Mode.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-19 06:07:28+00:00
We did not try to eliminate all risk. That is a lie. We increased risk by allowing criminals to go on the street and then criminalized permitting your child to be a victim.

The risk remains. We just added another risk.

If I let my 6 year old daughter cross King St in San Francisco and a car illegally turning right while she is in the crosswalk kills her, who will society prosecute harder? Me or the driver? I think I know.

If a sex offender who has been repeatedly released from jail by a judge who feels that “this time, his fourth time, it’ll be different” assaults my daughter society will judge me not him.

I might lose any surviving children, presumably for willful neglect. And you will go out and say that incarceration is bad or whatever. Don’t give me this bullshit. “Try to eliminate all risk”? No.

You just decided you want to punish the risk-takers. That’s very different. “Crime is because of poverty”. Yeah, dude, the reason that Bill Gene Hobbs goes around touching little girls is because he’s poor. Give me a break. “Try to eliminate all risk”. Pull the other one. Obviously the crime rates look great, you don’t convict anyone anymore. No crimes committed.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-19 06:07:30+00:00
Once again, congrats to the R4L team! It's a big milestone and I'm looking forwards to future developments!.

There was a lot of interesting discussion on the previous post [0], but one thing I didn't see was much discussion about this bit:

> The DRM (graphics) subsystem has been an early adopter of the Rust language. It was still perhaps surprising, though, when Airlie (the DRM maintainer) said that the subsystem is only "about a year away" from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust.

I was a bit surprised when I first read this. Is this meant to be read in a way that is more just a description of the state of Rust bindings (e.g., the DRM subsystem is about a year away from being able to require the use of Rust, but isn't actually planning on doing so), or it is describing actual plans (e.g., the DRM subsystem is about a year away from actually requiring the use of Rust)? I was originally more inclined to go for the former interpretation, but this other bit:

> With regard to adding core-kernel dependencies on Rust code, Airlie said that it shouldn't happen for another year or two.

Makes me think that perhaps the devs are actually considering the latter. Is anyone more in-the-know able to comment on this?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46213585
by qsort | 2025-12-19 06:08:04+00:00
I got nerd sniped and tried to reconstruct the games. The notation is weird and they aren't using modern conventions (a1 is dark, queens on the d-file, kings on the e-file, white goes first.)

Also, as the article mentions there are a few errors. With a bit of deduction this is my best attempt at reconstructing the first one:

https://lichess.org/HzzfuyWv

In keeping with the theme of exciting new technology, I tried giving the problem to Opus 4.5 but it seems to hallucinate badly: https://claude.ai/share/299fb10e-8465-41b3-bad5-85500291ed67
by aadv1k | 2025-12-19 06:08:25+00:00
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I mean, we have SRE, which is a whole set of skillsets in itself and it does involve around maintaining "CRUD-apps"; Heck there is the cybersec industry as well, ensuring CRUD-apps aren't exploited. My para was certainly a bit more 2D, I was speaking more from what I might benefit learning now, to get a job, say end of 2026. I have observed many roles like SRE etc, require certain experience which is hard to get by working on your own projects without much traction; similiar case for cybersec but to a lesser extent.

It's this paradox where in order to become a senior engineer, you must get hired as a junior engineer, to learn and observe how production software works, but that is pretty hard these days.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-19 06:08:29+00:00
glancing at that map, an interesting (to an American mostly just cuz we think we know our own geography) trivia factoid came to mind:

Q: Where in the US are you closest to Africa?

I'll explain the answer key at the bottom so you don't see them sooo readily if you want to think about it... but whatevs

an entirely different interesting factoid, the Catskill Mountains in NY State, which seem to be part of the Appalachian Range, are in fact not mountains at all. What appear to be mountains is actually erosion of a high plateau, leaving mountainous appearing hills https://static1.thetravelimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl... (they are however connected to the Appalachians, they just aren't mountains)

.

Wrong Answer: adirolf

A: eniam

I wrote the words backward
by sofixa | 2025-12-19 06:09:00+00:00
Not really comparable.

With Intel's confusing socket naming, you can buy a CPU that doesn't fit the socket.

With USB, the physical connection is very clearly the first part of the name. You cannot get it wrong. Yeah, the names aren't the most logical or consistent, but USB C or A or Micro USB all mean specific things and are clearly visibly different. The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.
by bloppe | 2025-12-19 06:09:25+00:00
They call it laundering because it takes "dirty" money and makes it "clean". That's not what happened here. The money was perfectly clean to begin with.

Which law do you think was being broken? I think the person is pretty clearly not defrauding the bank. Maybe the credit card company doesn't like it, but they almost certainly don't have that in writing because if they'd considered this possibility, they wouldn't have allowed it to be possible in the first place.
by friendzis | 2025-12-19 06:09:47+00:00
> Similarly how capital gains tax has 0 effect on billionaires and just rip off investors (aka the poorest).

Capital gains tax has zero effect on billionaires precisely because it is not levied on them in most cases. When one's total wealth hits high tens of millions suddenly they get access to instruments to use their wealth without triggering "taxable events". Probably the most well-known example are loans against shares.

This eliminates [some of] downward pressure on some asset prices, triggering positive feedback loop on price and thus wealth transfer.
by zephen | 2025-12-19 06:10:01+00:00
> Losing all stale unprocessed data and leaving a ready empty buffer behind is often the desired outcome.

Yeah, the Type 3 example could conceivably make it so that you intermix old and new data if you overflow, rather than just dumping a whole buffer.

Especially when your full() function checks for exact equality, like the one in the article does.

And if you remove the asserts, and then somehow underflow? God help you. You'll be pulling 4 billion entries you never actually stored out of the buffer, just repeating previously stored garbage over and over.

> Type 3 is probably banned on most codebases because of the integer overflow.

Not only this, but the purported code reduction benefits associated with type 3 are only superficial, and won't actually appear in any assembly listing.
by amluto | 2025-12-19 06:10:08+00:00
This is a totally different technology.

A free electron laser (FEL) uses free electrons (electrons not attached to a nucleus) as a lasing medium to produce light. The light would shine through a mask and expose photoresist more or less just like the light from ASML’s tin plasma contraption, minus the tin plasma. FELs, in principle, can produce light over a very wide range of wavelengths, including EUV and even shorter.

That DARPA thing is a maskless electron beam lithography system: the photoresist is exposed by hitting it directly with electrons.

Electrons have lots of advantages: they have mass, so much less kinetic energy is needed to achieve short wavelengths. They have charge, so they can be accelerated electrically and they can be steered electrically or magnetically. And there are quite a few maskless designs, which saves the enormous expense of producing a mask. (And maskless lithography would let a factory make chips that are different in different wafers, which no one currently does. And you need a maskless technique to make masks in the first place.) There were direct-write electron-beam research fabs, making actual chips, with resolution comparable to or better than the current generation of ASML gear, 20-30 years ago, built at costs that were accessible to research universities.

But electrons have a huge, enormous disadvantage: because they are charged, they repel each other. So a bright electron beam naturally spreads out, and multiple parallel beams will deflect each other. And electrons will get stuck in electrically nonconductive photoresists, causing the photoresist to (hopefully temporarily) build up a surface charge, interfering with future electron beams.

All of that causes e-beam lithography to be slow. Which is why those research fabs from the nineties weren’t mass-producing supercomputers.
by dash2 | 2025-12-19 06:10:50+00:00
Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have loads of highly paid people designing and creating beautiful UIs. A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. But that would put most of their employees out of work. So instead they are going to milk and lock in their user base, and hope rivals don't get traction.
by anonzzzies | 2025-12-19 06:11:22+00:00
I am in a hospital ward on a ward floor: everyone, every single person, every age, is scrolling 30s AI 'funny and cute' videos 247. It is quite eye opening as I never saw this close enough to actually see what they are doing. I asked why: they say it is funny, entertaining and if there has been no humans involved, they don't care as it is entertaining and fun: they rather have more different than more original/human.

I saw my neighbour here watching shorts about fat americans abusing all you can eat restaurants, generated by AI, for 7 days in a row now, whenever he is awake. He is 45 years old and wants to show me the funniest ones.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-12-19 06:11:37+00:00
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.

Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.

You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
by onion2k | 2025-12-19 06:12:13+00:00
So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them.

Unscrupulous AI scrapers will not be using a genuine UA string. They'll be using Google. You'll need to do reverse DNS check instead - https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
by hollerith | 2025-12-19 06:12:58+00:00
There is kind of software that is created using techniques very different from the techniques used to create the vast majority of socioeconomically-important software until about 4 years ago. We need a name for this thing that definitely exists in reality and definitely differs from software created the traditional way. That name is AI. We're probably going to keep on calling it that even if lots of people protest that having "intelligence" in the name is misleading or erroneous.