MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saschabuehrle | 2025-12-16 16:54:24+00:00
Good question, these are the two metrics we obsess over: False accepts (bad response passed as good): <1% on benchmarks, ~2-3% in production pilots. This is the one that matters, we tune aggressively to keep it low. Every validator errs on the side of escalation.

False escalations (good response unnecessarily escalated): ~7-10% depending on domain. Costs you tokens, but doesn't hurt quality. The self-learning engine reduces this over time as it learns your traffic patterns.

The tradeoff is intentional: we'd rather waste some spend than serve bad answers. In practice, even with the conservative tuning, customers still see 30-60% cost reduction because the baseline.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-12-16 16:54:30+00:00
I think overspending usually is indeed trying to reduce some other negative feeling without solving the underlying problem that caused it.

I don't think though the same mechanism is at play with the feeling of lust for some person, as seems to be implied. The lust is in our DNA for good reasons. 'Overconsumption' or over indulging into it, is what we should avoid indeed, but that doesn't make lust a vice.

I would promote the feeling of love - in the broad meaning of the word. Love is what we truly desire, that is what can provide as well to our fellow people. We can do that without overspending, simply showing care can go a long way.
by jollyllama | 2025-12-16 16:54:31+00:00
In general I agree.The list of non-inevitable things at the end is interesting.

Broadly speaking, I would bin them into two categories. The first category contains things like this:

> Tiktok is not inevitable.

Things like this become widespread without coercion. I don't use TikTok or any short-form video and there's nothing forcing me to. For a while, Facebook fed me reels, and I fell for it once or twice, but recognized how awful it was and quit. However, the Tiktok and junk food are appealing to many people even though they are slop. The dark truth is that many people walking around just like slop, and unless there's any restraint imposed from external actors, they'll consume as much as is shoveled into their troughs.

But, at the end of the day, you can live your life without using Tiktok at all.

The other category would be things that become widespread on the back of coercion, to varying degrees.

> Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable.

This is much trickier to do than living without Tiktok. It's harder to get through airports or even rent a parking space now. Your alternative options will be removed by others.
by djinnrutger | 2025-12-16 16:54:40+00:00
I am still working on my helpdesk. An easy to use self-hosted IT Helpdesk system for small IT teams. Vibe coding it with VSCode and CoPilot. I started this project when I needed my own helpdesk and didnt want to pay a fortune online providers. It runs on Python with Flask and Sqalchemy. It can be ran from the python files, or the executable is portable and can be ran from any windows computer. It stays in the network but I run with a ZeroTier connection so I can access it from anywhere without the risk of it being live on the internet.

Features I have implemented so far: Ticketing (duh), Email va MS Graph for MS office, Documents for info/repeat answers, Purchasing, Inventory, Projects -group of tickets)

New features I just added in the last month is Ticket Approvals if you need a managers approval for purchasing something or assigning a licenses to someone.

https://github.com/DjinnRutger/HelpDesk-Public/tree/main

https://helpfuldjinn.com/
Ask HN: What makes you contribute to small open source projects?
by chrilleweb | 2025-12-16 16:54:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been curious about this as I recently started maintaining my open source project.

I’m trying to understand what actually makes people decide to contribute to projects in particular — not the big, well-known ones.

For context: I’ve tried to do the “obvious” things — writing a clear README, keeping the scope focused, adding tests and CI, and labeling a few issues as beginner-friendly.

Still, it feels like there’s a big gap between using an open source tool and taking the step to contribute.

I’ve also tried posting about it here, but it feels like people don’t really like self-promotion — or maybe I’m just doing it wrong.

Have you worked on open source projects before? And how did you find the project you contributed to?
by turnsout | 2025-12-16 16:55:09+00:00
Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"

With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI. A lot of companies will over invest, just as they did during the dot-com bubble. But some of those investments will actually pay off, because this technology is not going anywhere.
by sandeep_kamble | 2025-12-16 16:55:12+00:00
A few days ago, a research team disclosed GeminiJack, a prompt-injection vulnerability affecting LLM-powered applications.

I recreated the same class of vulnerability as an interactive challenge to demonstrate how subtle prompt injection flaws can bypass guardrails, alter model behavior, and lead to unintended actions in real systems.

This is not a write-up, but a hands-on challenge. If you’re working with LLM apps, RAG pipelines, or AI agents, you can try breaking it yourself and see where traditional controls fail.

Happy to discuss the technical details, threat model, and mitigations in the comments.
by jsmith45 | 2025-12-16 16:55:23+00:00
Sure but the real concern of the article that if passed "gid://moneymaker/Invoice/22ecb3fd-5e25-462c-ad2b-cafed9435d16" the global id locator will effectively locate "gid://moneymaker/Invoice/22". Which is to say, that what is supposed to be a system-generated id which has no need for de-slugification, uses the same lookup method as is normally used for URLs which attempts to de-slugify.

Obviously, this means that first gid was bogus anyway, as it was trying to look up via the wrong key, but the fact that it doesn't fail, and will instead return the record with primary key "22" can certainly be surprising.
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-16 16:55:25+00:00
Apple dropping this is interesting. They've been quiet on the flashy AI stuff while everyone else is yelling about transformers, but 3D reconstruction from single images is actually useful hardware integration stuff.

What's weird is we're getting better at faking 3D from 2D than we are at just... capturing actual 3D data. Like we have LiDAR in phones already, but it's easier to neural-net your way around it than deal with the sensor data properly.

Five years from now we'll probably look back at this as the moment spatial computing stopped being about hardware and became mostly inference. Not sure if that's good or bad tbh.

Will include this one in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
by Y_Y | 2025-12-16 16:55:51+00:00
> At the end of the day the code's writer can choose if and how people are allowed to use it.

If it's free software then I can modify and use it as I please. What's limited is redistributing the modified code (and offering a service to users over a network for Afferro).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#fs-definition
by ArkhamMirror | 2025-12-16 16:55:54+00:00
I'm sure if the right evidence were submitted and run against the right hypotheses a different frontrunner could emerge. Remember - this is a tool to help you investigate better and figure out what to look for, not a tool that tells you the answer. It helps you eliminate unlikely answers more than it ever points at the "right" answer, and even the most unlikely answers can still be the "right" ones! Hang in there
by Loughla | 2025-12-16 16:56:15+00:00
I hide any thread that deals with education, education funding, or teaching in general for that specific reason. It really saddens me to see that this place is full of so much misinformation and anecdotes made into data (and usually with much more self-confidence than other forums, which is interesting to me).

It's why I generally only ask questions, or ask for clarification instead of directly challenging something I think might be wrong now in threads that aren't related to something I have deeeeep personal knowledge of. I know when I'm out of my area, and don't want to add to the ignorance.
by fatty_patty89 | 2025-12-16 16:56:18+00:00
Genuine question, you make it seem as this is a limitation and they're all in the same bucket but how was Java for example able to scale all the enterprises while having multi threading and good ffi, same with .net.

My impression is that the go ffi is with big overhead because of the specific choices made to not care about ffi because it would benefit the go code more?

My point was that there's other gc languages/envorionments that have good ffi and were somehow able all these decades to create scalable multithreaded applications.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-12-16 16:56:31+00:00
Because the people who buy Rivian aren't people who would buy an F-150 even if electric.

And the current F-150 owners aren't going to switch to an EV version for cultural, ideological or practical reasons related to their particular use (i.e., towing in rural areas).

So, who is the F-150 Lightening target market?
by pm215 | 2025-12-16 16:56:35+00:00
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.

You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
by desireco42 | 2025-12-16 16:56:54+00:00
From my perspective, Firefox, a while back, just stopped working on issues that matter. They got into politics, they tried to do everything, but not as good.

If they just focused to produce a good browser, they would be way ahead. And time when you could get $100Ms from Google are slowly coming to an end. Money attracts grifters and this is what brought them down from my perspective.

Now, just to be honest, I wish they find a way. We always could use alternatives. Just don't expect this alternative to come from Mozilla.
by TehCorwiz | 2025-12-16 16:56:56+00:00
The whole "anonymous bureaucrat" shtick doesn't land anymore. The purpose of having long-term non-political staff is so that operations don't change on a whim when some rogue director comes in and wants a second Ferrari. The reason government spends more AND is paradoxically more efficient is because most of the work of those bureaucrats is tracking, reporting, and reconciliation. That's the whole deal. Congress passes laws and in those laws is usually an obscene and near impossible amount of auditing.

I trust government staff far more than the decision of unregulated, greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money from whatever process they're trying to sell you.
by square_usual | 2025-12-16 16:57:42+00:00
Yeah, it's marginally above average for DC, but that doesn't mean they're "raking it in". The average (which is a bad metric for income) is dragged up by the wealthy in DC balancing out the poor in DC, not hordes of Federal Workers (most of whom live outside DC in Maryland/Virginia, FWIW) making $120k.
by estebank | 2025-12-16 16:57:42+00:00
Would output along the following lines be an improvement?

error[E0597]: `buffer` does not live long enough --> src/main.rs:63:21 | 59 | let report = { | ------ borrow later stored here 60 | let mut buffer = Vec::new(); | ---------- binding `buffer` declared here 61 | let ctx = Context { 62 | config: &config, | ------ this field and `buffer` are required by `Context` to have the same lifetime 63 | buffer: &mut buffer, | ^^^^^^^^^^^ borrowed value does not live long enough ... 68 | }; | - `buffer` dropped here while still borrowed help: consider making different fields in `Context` have independent lifetimes | 4 | struct Context<'a> { | ^^ 5 | config: &'a Config, | ^^ 6 | buffer: &'a mut Vec<u8>, | ^^ 7 | }
by afspear | 2025-12-16 16:57:48+00:00
At this point, I'm not so concerned about the interface (claude code vs github copilot, etc, etc.) Sometimes I need to use one over the other because of...reasons. But I do seem to be coming back to the Anthropic models in particular. My rule of thumb is turning out to be:

1)How long is this taking? 2)Was it the right solution?

The first is pretty easy to get a feel for. The second is also a feeling I'm developing over time, but I am starting to trust the Anthropic models for all my coding.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-16 16:57:58+00:00
Hello, author here :)

I've been thinking of doing a series of blogs on the journey but .. it's been a journey, which is a lot to write about in full. In short, a few places where I've been able to prefer simplicity:

1. Allocators are all pretty much as simple as you can get. Most memory in the program is bump/arena allocated. There is a buddy-style heap allocator for things that are annoying to arena allocate (strings that can be edited, for example). I make heavy use of temp memory and freelists.

2. Containers are all very straight-forward, and it's definitely a feature. The example I always give here is std::map from C++. On paper, it looks great; it has very good looking properties. In practice, the implementation is a nightmare; it's slow, and has a comically large rebalancing-shaped performance cliff. My containers strive to be simple, with reasonable average and worst-case performance.

3. I wrote my own metaprogramming language instead of using C++ template metaprogramming. Writing an entire programming language sounds like the antithesis of simplicity, but in reality, having a good metaprogramming layer makes your life immeasurably easier in the long run. With strong metaprogramming capabilities, stuff like realtime debug UI and state serialization becomes nearly trivial. Once you start doing versioned data serialization in C++, you quickly realize you need a better compiler (see: protobuf, cap'n proto)
by mannanj | 2025-12-16 16:58:00+00:00
I want instead of being told “here’s what I think you want to see, now look at it”, “what do you want to see?” And be shown that.

Yes yes we claim the user doesn’t know what they want. I think that’s largely used as an excuse to avoid rethinking how things should meet the users needs and keep status quo where people are made to rely on systems and walled gardens. The goal of this article is UIs should work better for the user. What better way then to let them imagine (or even nudge them with example actions, buttons, text to click to render specific views) in the UI! I’ve been wanting to build something where I just ask in English from options I know I have or otherwise play and hit edges to discover what’s possible and not.

Anyone else thinking along this direction or think I’m missing something obvious here?
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-16 16:58:10+00:00
So we're reinventing SOAP but for AI agents. Not saying that's bad - sometimes you need to remake old mistakes before you figure out what actually works.

The real question: do UIs even make sense for agents? Like the whole point of a UI is to expose functionality to humans with constraints (screens, mice, attention). Agents don't have those constraints. They can read JSON, call APIs directly, parse docs. Why are we building them middleware to click buttons?

I think this makes sense as a transition layer while we figure out what agent-native architecture looks like. But long-term it's probably training wheels.

Will include this in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
by api | 2025-12-16 16:58:16+00:00
Pop science guru-ing is a giant flashing red sign for me. I am never even a little surprised when the latest “sense maker” or pop science guru comes out as a complete loon or is consumed by some kind of scandal.

Influencers in general are always suspect. The things that get you an audience fast are trolling or tabloid-ish tactics like conspiracism.

There are good ones but you have to be discerning.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-16 16:58:22+00:00
Emergency Medicaid for undocumented immigrants made up only 0.4% of total Medicaid spending in 2022, a new study finds. - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/emergency-medicaid-undocumente... - October 9th, 2025

As the very piece we're discussing mentions, the care in question for children is not emergency care. I assert America is evil, because these are active healthcare policy choices. We could fix this today with enough Congressional votes, it is a choice not to.
by throw0101d | 2025-12-16 16:58:34+00:00
>> I hope that the association makes protectionism politically taboo for decades to come.

> That is waaaay too black and white.

We're talking about Trump here: of course it's black and white.

> Free trade and globalization has failed most of the world in pretty serious ways (though it's been great for the much of the elite, floating on top of big piles of capital).

I don't know: extreme poverty has been driven down quite effectively AFAICT:

* https://www.gapminder.org/questions/gms1-3/

* https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/epovrate/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China

Wealth inequality dropped after the Gilded Age and post-WW2 until the 1970s (in the US); nothing said it couldn't have been kept down (say, if Reagan was not elected). There's nothing inherent to free trade and globalization that should lead to it if are willing to redistribution (e.g., through taxation and social programs).
by goku12 | 2025-12-16 16:58:58+00:00
That works if you can convince everyone to follow your advice. I try to do that by doling out advises, making a fool of myself at every opportunity. But the companies are much better at gaslighting the consumers into submission.

For example, remember how a shadow organization funded by auto manufacturers tried to get people to vote no on opening up the vehicle diagnostics bus to the owners and 3rd party repair shops? They pushed the narrative that opening it up would make you an easy target for sex predators! They ran a bunch of very scary ads based on that plot. They were playing with the people's emotions and insecurities. I think it failed because a massive lobby of ordinary people including Louis Rossmann did a much better job of convincing the people of the truth. However, it was a tough job and they'll have to repeat it endlessly against the attempts by the much wealthier industrialists.

The fact is it's a losing game for us, simply because of the disparity in wealth between us and them. I wish we had more power on our side. I don't know what to do without it.
by theologic | 2025-12-16 16:59:08+00:00
Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.

However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.

In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.

As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.
by dbspin | 2025-12-16 16:59:08+00:00
> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously.

Running this paragraph through Gemini, returns a list of the fallacies employed, including - Attacking the Motive - "Even if the artists are motivated by self-interest, this does not automatically make their arguments about AI's negative impacts factually incorrect or "bad."

Just as a poor person is more aware through direct observation and experience, of the consequences of corporate capitalism and financialisation; an artist at the coal face of the restructuring of the creative economy by massive 'IP owners' and IP Pirates (i.e.: the companies training on their creative work without permission) is likely far more in touch the the consequences of actually existing AI than a tech worker who is financially incentivised to view them benignly.

> The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me.

This is a strange kind of anti-naturalistic fallacy. A paradigm shift (or indeed a revolution) is not in itself a good thing. One paradigm shift that has occurred for example in recent goepolitics is the normalisation of state murder - i.e.: extrajudicial assassination in the drone war or the current US govts use of missile attacks on alleged drug traffickers. One can generate countless other negative paradigm shifts.

> if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter?

1) You haven't produced it.

2) Such a thing - a beautiful product of AI that is not identifiably artificial - does not yet, and may never exist.

3) Scare quotes around intellectual property theft aren't an argument. We can abandon IP rights - in which case hurrah, tech companies have none - or we can in law at least, respect them. Anything else is legally and morally incoherent self justification.

4) Do you actually know anything about the history of art, any genre of it whatsoever? Because suggesting originality is impossible and 'efficiency' of production is the only form of artistic progress suggests otherwise.
by an0malous | 2025-12-16 16:59:12+00:00
> Apple has said it will roll out new App Store terms in January 2026, but developers say the company has provided no clarity on what those changes will involve or whether they will actually comply with the DMA.

> "We have seen this playbook before in Europe and beyond," the signatories warn, adding that they suspect any new terms will continue to impose fees that would violate the law.

So the complaint is that they might violate the law next month?
by loire280 | 2025-12-16 17:00:22+00:00
I read this comment as implying a similar kind of exceptionalism for technology, but expressing a different set of values. It reminds me of the frustration I’ve heard for years from software engineers who work at companies where the product isn’t software and they’re not given the time and resources to do their best work because their bosses and nontechnical peers don’t understand the value of their work.