MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I built a free Chrome extension security scanner now Fortune 500 teams use it
by jensec | 2025-12-29 22:01:53+00:00
Built this to speed up my own bug bounty workflow. Got tired of manually pulling apart .crx files to check what permissions extensions were asking for and why.

Paste a Chrome Web Store URL, it analyzes the extension and flags sketchy stuff. Added an LLM layer that catches things grep can't.

Made it free, mass awareness helps find more vulns. 20k+ people use it now, then random enterprise security teams started showing up. Still wrapping my head around that one.

https://crxplorer.com

Feedback welcome.
by 9dev | 2025-12-29 22:02:07+00:00
That is a naive assumption. Or rather multiple naive assumptions: Developers mostly don’t move over to AI development, but integrate it into their workflow. Many of them will stay intellectually curious and thus focus their attention elsewhere; I’m not convinced they will just suddenly all stagnate.

Also, training data isn’t just crawled text from the internet anymore, but also sourced from interactions of millions of developers with coding agents, manually provided sample sessions, deliberately generated code, and more—there is a massive amount of money and research involved here, so that’s another bet I wouldn’t be willing to make.
by wyldfire | 2025-12-29 22:02:11+00:00
I love the concept of cryptocoins. But in practice, there are some enormous hazards that make it not worthwhile IMO. This is just one such hazard, but by now we've seen several flavors of "this custody/storage mechanism failed to securely store some wealth." If securing it yourself, it's so easy to mishandle and either destroy your wealth or have it stolen. If delegating it to an "expert" you risk the custodial agent falling victim to theft/exit scam/ineptitude. Does any third party insure these agents?

Having a government-insured bank deposit means that I've never had to think about this in my lifetime. It's a problem that I don't need.
by Enginerrrd | 2025-12-29 22:02:11+00:00
You can still order them with the spacetime interval compared to a reference event, even for space like separated events.

It allows for differing elements of the set to share the same value but so does using time alone. It just also allows every observer to agree on the ordering.

Bc Assigning a distance function to elements of a set is a common way to do that in fact. It doesn’t work with just a time coordinate or space coordinate, because that’s effectively a Euclidean metric.

You just have to contend with a few nonintuitive aspects but it’s not so bad.
by spit2wind | 2025-12-29 22:02:20+00:00
This is an interesting observation. One could argue that some AI generated or driven things does have utility, and thus qualifies as "slop" (although not for those on the receiving end). For example, when used to drive clicks and generate revenue, to troll, or to spread propaganda. You get the idea.

In this instance however, I agree, barf is more accurate.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-29 22:02:33+00:00
> Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.

Reddit is very hit or miss depending on your target audience.

Depending on your Reddit target audience, a lot of people could have adblock installed. They might be loyal to communities that have approved vendor lists where everyone parrots the same vendor recommendations back and forth in every thread, so not being part of that game means you're left out. In some niches, the subreddit moderators have a financial relationship with vendors and they'll put their weight into swaying every conversation away from competitors.

For other niches, none of this applies and Reddit can be a good ad destination. It really depends
by tialaramex | 2025-12-29 22:02:36+00:00
Yeah, I don't see it. I looked at a few cases where there's close overlap in the work and mostly what I see is that the ITU doesn't want me looking at the draft stages of documents, which I guess isn't crucial for your implementation work. I couldn't see any particular higher quality though I suppose if you like PDFs and hate text that might go in the ITU's favour.
by djtango | 2025-12-29 22:02:49+00:00
Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.

Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.

Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
by dataviz1000 | 2025-12-29 22:03:12+00:00
I was a chef in Michelin-starred restaurants for 11 years. One of my favorite positions was washing dishes. The goal was always to keep the machine running on its 5-minute cycle. It was about getting the dishes into racks, rinsing them, and having them ready and waiting for the previous cycle to end—so you could push them into the machine immediately—then getting them dried and put away after the cycle, making sure the quality was there and no spot was missed. If the machine stopped, the goal was to get another batch into it, putting everything else on hold. Keeping the machine running was the only way to prevent dishes from piling up, which would end with the towers falling over and breaking plates. This work requires moving lightning fast with dexterity.

AI coding agents are analogous to the machine. My job is to get the prompts written, and to do quality control and housekeeping after it runs a cycle. Nonetheless, like all automation, humans are still needed... for now.
by mindslight | 2025-12-29 22:03:23+00:00
There is a lot to chew on here and while I generally appreciate that, you completely missed where I am coming from. I had tried to acknowledge enough in my previous comment that you'd see I wasn't fresh to the larger topic, but I guess that didn't work.

I had never voted for either major party in a national election until 2020, when I consider myself having voted for the conservative option of Biden. I completely understood why people voted for Trump in 2016 - I was the one telling my aghast blue tribe friends that he was speaking to people's longstanding frustrations and had a good chance of winning.

I do constantly examine whether I've reverted to my latent tribe or have become caught in a filter bubble, but I still do not think so. I've always been allergic to groupthink, and the Trumpist groupthink is still overwhelming at this point, whereas the opposition groupthink is much more narrowly-scoped. (and I hate it as well, as it makes for poor opposition)

So back to the main argument -

I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.

To me, it often does comes across this way. Note how the comment I initially responded to put "madness" in square quotes, as if we're supposed to believe the concerns are just all in our heads.

It's adjacent to the Trumpist talking point that everything being done isn't any worse than what "the left" already did, which is clearly coming from a place of wanting to downplay. And there is a long pattern of Trumpists abusing appeals to lofty ideals and liberty in general to get people to support the openly fascist agenda [0]. It's not a matter of being "unwilling to admit the past harms", rather it's about bringing them up in the appropriate context - Trumpism revolves around a long litany of real grievances and hypocrisies, but then channels that anger into highly destructive "solutions".

And as far as the caricature of "middle-class liberals" that you were addressing? If people are just now waking up, I do not see this as something to condemn! To me the actual concern is preventing them from falling back asleep (eg that "just vote Democrat" fallacy)

> The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.

Care to elaborate on this? My initial reaction is that we should take this legibility for granted, in the sense that we should strive for everyone to become legible. We often shit on the idea of bureaucracy, but if it's the best way we've found to neuter autocratic power, then maybe we need to stop taking it for granted? (FWIW me of 15 years ago is screaming at current me for having written that)

[0] actually I just glanced at the poster's comment history and this is exactly what they're doing. eg "It's all bad so why bother with shades of gray"
by rchaud | 2025-12-29 22:03:53+00:00
Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.
by supern0va | 2025-12-29 22:04:09+00:00
LLMs are honestly rather amazing for product search and comparison.

Here's a use case for me last week: I'm re-organizing my bathroom sink/vanity, and I want a few counter top organizers to keep things neat and tidy. I have a low mirror, low medicine cabinets, and generally tight spaces to work with and want to maximize storage.

So, I have a 10" wide space and I can't have anything over 16". I want to find a drawer organizer as close to 16" tall without going over, and as close to 10" without going over. Given a choice between the two, I want to bias for more height.

Go to Google or Amazon and try finding that. You're going to be trying permutations of 10x16 and 9x16 and so on, and digging through pages looking for something approximate.

In theory maybe there's some filter options on Amazon that might work, but they're usually incomplete, wrong, or absent. It's a terrible experience even when it's supported.

ChatGPT (or even Amazon's kind of janky Rufus) immediately finds top near-perfect matches for me to choose from. 15-20 minutes of aggravating digging turned into 90s of letting ChatGPT think and search while I was off grabbing a coffee.
by gnubison | 2025-12-29 22:05:00+00:00
To clarify, these aren’t the normal Feynman lectures. He lectured at a different institution and the author of this webpage transcribed those lectures to produce this set of notes. The content covered is different from the famous set of lectures.

The normal Feynman lectures are here: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-12-29 22:05:08+00:00
> I am amazed that people take Hal Puthoff at his word that he has worked on all these secret projects for decades even though he cannot describe in definitive terms what the actual outcomes of those programs were.

This is one hundred perfect my view on this, and things are more than suspicious when suddenly being asked to get into the weeds on some technical aspect these guys start citing national security to keep things vague.
by deadbabe | 2025-12-29 22:05:12+00:00
Where the hell was all this fear when the push for open source everything got fully underway? When entire websites were being spawned and scaffolded with just a couple lines of code? Do we not remember all those impressive tech demos of developers doing massive complex thing with "just one line of code"? How did we not just write software for every kind of software problem that could exist by now?

How has free code, developed by humans, become more available than ever and yet somehow we have had to employ more and more developers? Why didn't we trend toward less developers?

It just doesn't make sense. AI is nothing but a snippet generator, a static analyzer, a linter, a compiler, an LSP, a google search, a copy paste from stackoverflow, all technologies we've had for a long time, all things developers used to have to go without at some point in history.

I don't have the answers.
by oromissed | 2025-12-29 22:05:13+00:00
Bajaj Finserv is using 442 autonomous voice agents.

According to their investor deck: These agents closed ₹1,980 crore (~$230M) in personal loans in 90 days (18% of call center revenue).

Peak volume is ~650k applications/day.
Collections saw a 55% lift with ~90% less human involvement.
The system operates across 22 Indian dialects with sub-second latency.

What surprised me isn’t that they’re using voice automation, but the depth of it.

This looks closer to full workflow ownership than IVR or call deflection.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-29 22:05:35+00:00
Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results.

And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.

If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-29 22:05:56+00:00
WSJ has been writing increasingly about "AI Psychosis" (here's their most recent piece [0]).

I'm increasingly seeing that this is the real threat of AI. I've personally known people who have started to strain relationships with friends and family because they sincerely believe they are evolving into something new. While not as dramatic, the normalization of the use of "AI as therapist" is equally concerning. I know tons of people that rely on LLMs to guide them in difficult family decisions, career decisions, etc on an almost daily basis. If I'm honest, I myself have had times where I've leaned into this too much. I've also had times where AI starts telling me how clever I am, but thankfully a lifetime of low self worth signals warning flags in my brain when I hear this stuff! For most people, there is real temptation to buy into the praise.

Seeing Karpathy claim he can't keep up was shocking. It also immediately raises the question to anyone with a clear head: "Wait, if even Karpathy cannot use these tools effectively... just what is so useful about AI?" Isn't the entire point of AI that I can merely describe my problem and have a solution in a fraction of the time.

The fact that so many true believers in AI seem to forever be just a few more tricks away from really unleashing this power, starts to make it feel very much like magical thinking on a huge scale.

The real danger of AI is that we're entering into an era of mass hallucination across multiple fields and areas of human activity.

0. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-chatbot-psychosis-link-1abf9d...
by masklinn | 2025-12-29 22:06:06+00:00
The compiler is the arbiter of what’s what (as long as it does not run afoul the CPU itself).

The memory being uninitialised means reading it is illegal for the writer of the program. The compiler can write to it if that suits it, the program can’t see the difference without UB.

In fact the compiler can also read from it, because it knows that it has in fact initialised that memory. And the compiler is not writing a C program and is thus not bound by the strictures of the C abstract machine anyway.
by nospice | 2025-12-29 22:06:14+00:00
"Linked theoretically, conceptually, and politically, both to each other and to their unacknowledged or obfuscated ideological origins in accelerationism and nihilism, these endeavors, and their proponents in government and technology sectors, represent the ultimate preppers, ready to start anew somehow and somewhere else: in a self-contained unit like Biosphere 2 or HI-SEAS, on the newly discovered “habitable” planets, or on Mars."

Hmm... I think it's a lot of convoluted, wordy sentences just to paint a scary picture of an invented strawman the author disagrees with.

It's ironic because the usual accusation levied against "preppers" is that they're weirdos who are afraid of fellow man, but the author is playing the same game. It's all nebulous yet clearly connected: the Apple campus in Cupertino, 1960s civil defense posters, the NSA, Sim City 2000, Biosphere 2, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, rural gun nuts, Christian doomsday cults... and what are they working toward? Unclear, but it's obviously something bad.
by hinkley | 2025-12-29 22:06:21+00:00
We still haven’t proven whether some quantum effects do or don’t follow this. So there may be a loophole where information can move faster than light but the carrier for that information can not. Which might make ansibles possible some day, with the caveat that you can only have so many conversations per ansible before you need a refill with new entangled matter. In which case you have to divide the information by the travel time to determine your aggregate data rate. And the travel time will be at a fraction of the speed of light.

So you might be able to consult on which planet to terraform but you’re not going to video call the wife and kids unless you’re the richest person in the galaxy.
by dundarious | 2025-12-29 22:06:34+00:00
I just installed a GOG Windows game in Heroic, and the Settings state "This game does not support Cloud Saves" even though my account has cloud saves clearly visible for that same game on the GOG website.

Given I'm using Heroic from AUR on a supported OS, and installed with default settings, I consider this cloud save support to be less than stellar, but that's a separate matter, I'm not trying to turn this thread into a support issue.
by belter | 2025-12-29 22:06:38+00:00
Ask a model to

"Write a chess engine where pawns move backward and kings can jump like nights"

It will keep slipping back into real chess rules. It learned chess, it did not understand the concept of "rules"

Or

Ask it to reverse a made up word like

"Reverse the string 'glorbix'"

It will get it wrong on the first try. You would not fail.

Or even better ask it to...

"Use the dxastgraphx library to build a DAG scheduler."

dxastgraphx is a non existing library...

Marvel at the results...tried in both Claude and ChatGPT....
by anthk | 2025-12-29 22:07:13+00:00
See this: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/Apout

X11 calls can be just forwarded to the currently running server in your machine. The rest, yes, it must be implemented.

PD: I'm not saying IE for Unix would run under that; Solaris it's pretty much post BSD 2.1 and maybe from another Unix branch.

But code from NetBSD could be adapted for such task.
by muvlon | 2025-12-29 22:07:24+00:00
Yes, kind of. In the same sense that Vec<T> in Rust with reused indexes allows it.

Notice that this kind of use-after-free is a ton more benign though. This milder version upholds type-safety and what happens can be reasoned about in terms of the semantics of the source language. Classic use-after-free is simply UB in the source language and leaves you with machine semantics, usually allowing attackers to reach arbitrary code execution in one way or another.
by sshine | 2025-12-29 22:07:34+00:00
> I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions.

I'm incentivised to use abstractions that are harder to learn, but execute faster or more safely once compiled. E.g. more Rust, Lean.

> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

LLMs benefit from abstractions the same way as we do.

LLMs currently copy our approaches to solving problems and copy all the problems those approaches bring.

Letting LLMs skip all the abstractions is about as likely to succeed as genetic programming is efficient.

For example, writing more vanilla JS instead of React, you're just reinventing the necessary abstractions more verbosely and with a higher risk of duplicate code or mismatching abstractions.

In a recent interview with Bret Weinstein, a former professor of evolutionary biology, he proposed that one property of evolution that makes the story of one species evolving into another more likely is that it's not just random permutations of single genes; it's also permutations to counter variables encoded as telomeres and possibly microsatellites.

https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/the-joe-rogan-experience/24...

Bret compares this to flipping random bits in a program to make it work better vs. tweaking variables randomly in a high-level language. Mutating parameters at a high-level for something that already works is more likely to result in something else that works than mutating parameters at a low level.

So I believe LLMs benefit from high abstractions, like us.

We just need good ones; and good ones for us might not be the same as good ones for LLMs.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-29 22:08:35+00:00
The question is, why has this post been massively upvoted?

It contains zero useful information. Just somebody struggling with AdWords and they don't know why. Not helpful.

I have to assume the vast majority of upvotes are based on the title alone, assuming it's about Search? A large proportion of top level comments are about Search too. Depressing.
by breadislove | 2025-12-29 22:08:55+00:00
a good system (like openevidence) indexes every paper released and semantic search can incredible helpful since the the search api of all those providers are extremely limited in terms of quality.

now you get why those system are not cheap. keeping indexes fresh, maintaining high quality at large scale and being extremely precise is challenging. by having distributed indexes you are at the mercy of the api providers and i can tell you from previous experience that it won't be 'currently accurate'.

for transparency: i am building a search api, so i am biased. but i also build medical retrieval systems for some time.
by rchaud | 2025-12-29 22:09:02+00:00
How about the possibility that the cost of lying is less than the capital gains that can be realized by lying about it? EM was only fined $20 million when he said he had secured funding to take the company private at $420/share [0]. The stock bounce from that "news" was in the billions.

As it stands, he can get a trillion dollar pay package if a something-trillion market cap target is hit.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-loses-...
by Yoric | 2025-12-29 22:09:53+00:00
Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, I've regularly felt that the US is rather prone to hero worship, see e.g. the passion dedicated to presidential candidates, former presidents, billionaires, but also how the main characters of pretty much all American biopics I recall can't ever be wrong.

If my observation is correct, I guess what we're witnessing with Musk could be a case of hero worship – and in any narrative in which Musk is a hero, he's of course right.
by the_af | 2025-12-29 22:10:23+00:00
I wouldn't say "on the war path", but specifically about your dismissal of other narratives than the dominant one. I engaged you after I read more replies by you that confirmed my suspicions about your initial question.

It's not just about the term "useful idiot"; if you're being honest you'll admit you stated more things, including a bizarre strawman about people arguing "China is freer than the US". Do you deny this?

In another comment I went into more detail, but I guess if you're comfortable deflecting and claiming "you can't be bothered" that's ok.
by mikepurvis | 2025-12-29 22:10:42+00:00
Absolutely this. I recently got a nice photo taken with my kids and for the first time I... didn't post it on Facebook. I sent it to my family group chat. Yesterday I posted on Facebook for the first time in months and it was about the power being out for an hour in the ice storm. I haven't posted travel photos to FB in years.

I'm mostly still on FB at all for the acquaintance-level connections to things like neighbourhood, church, and hobby communities. All the people I actually care about are in private group chats.

I was reflecting recently that Google Plus actually had the right idea back in 2011 with "circles", but at the time we all said it was too hard figuring out which circles we wanted to share a particular message or thought with. Hmm, maybe they were ahead of the game all along?