MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-12-13 13:04:18+00:00
Yeah it is, that's why I disclose this stuff.

The counter-incentive here is that my reputation and credibility is more valuable to me than early access to models.

This very post is an example of me taking a risk of annoying a company that I cover. I'm exposing the existence of the ChatGPT skills mechanism here (which I found out about from a tip on Twitter - it's not something I got given early access to via an NDA).

It's very possible OpenAI didn't want that story out there yet and aren't happy that it's sat at the top of Hacker News right now.
by arminiusreturns | 2025-12-13 13:04:19+00:00
Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0

The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.
by redrove | 2025-12-13 13:04:20+00:00
Yeah looks like they missed the forest for the trees.

I see this kind of thing in our industry quite often; some Rube Goldberg machine being invented and kept on life support for years because of some reason like this, where someone clearly didn’t do the obvious thing and everyone now just assumes it’s the only solution and they’re married to it.

But I’m too grumpy, work me is leaking into weekend me. I had debates around crap like this all week and I now see it everywhere.
Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books
by Agraillo | 2025-12-13 13:05:03+00:00
I read many non-fiction books, but recently noticed that only a few qualify as truly heavy, thought-provoking reads, that you literally can't finish in a manageable time because you keep telling yourself, "Wait a minute," then stop to Google something, run an experiment, or just think deeply. My current example (still unfinished) is "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. It's mind-blowing - the entire memory universe around us that I never properly explored before.
by simonw | 2025-12-13 13:06:45+00:00
There's a mechanism for that built into skills already: a skill folder can also include additional reference markdown files, and the skill can tell the coding agent to selectively read those extra files only when that information is needed on top of the skill.

There's an instruction about that in the Codex CLI skills prompt: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/13/openai-codex-cli/

If SKILL.md points to extra folders such as references/, load only the specific files needed for the request; don't bulk-load everything.
by dmurray | 2025-12-13 13:06:55+00:00
This article both undersells and oversells the technical challenge exchanges solve.

First, it is of course possible to apply horizontal scaling through sharding. My order on Tesla doesn't affect your order on Apple, so it's possible to run each product on its own matching engine, its own set of gateways, etc. Most exchanges don't go this far: they might have one cluster for stocks starting A-E, etc. So they don't even exhaust the benefits available from horizontal scaling, partly because this would be expensive.

On the other hand, it's not just the sequencer that has to process all these events in strict order - which might make you think it's just a matter of returning a single increasing sequence number for every request. The matching engine which sits downstream of the sequencer also has to consume all the events and apply a much more complicated algorithm: the matching algorithm described in the article as "a pure function of the log".

Components outside of that can generally be scaled more easily: for example, a gateway cares only about activity on the orders it originally received.

The article is largely correct that separating the sequencer from the matching engine allows you to recover if the latter crashes. But this may only be a theoretical benefit. Replaying and reprocessing a day's worth of messages takes a substantial fraction of the day, because the system is already operating close to its capacity. And after it crashed, you still need to figure out which customers think they got their orders executed, and allow them to cancel outstanding orders.
by IanCal | 2025-12-13 13:07:20+00:00
I think you’re picturing the unit test case the opposite way around to me, but what I see relies on having something generated for you. While a unit test case will also pass the weak specs, there exist spec meeting implementations that don’t pass the test.

So either that requires “generate valid code and let’s test it” or that you can write a proof statement like:

If : there is at least one implementation which is valid for the following properties, and does not meet this single property (fixed input output pair) - specifications are under defined.
by cgio | 2025-12-13 13:07:26+00:00
The title is obviously the wrong way around, exchanges turn distributed logs into order books. The distributed part is a resilience decision but not essential to the design (technically writing to a disk would give persistence with less ability to recover, or with some potential gaps in the case of failure (remember there is a sequence published on the other end too, the market data feed)). As noted in the article, the sequencer is a single-threaded, not parallelisable process. Distribution is just a configuration of that single threaded path. Parallelisation is feasible to some extent by sharding across order books themselves (dependencies between books may complicate this).
Ask HN: What's the most real value you've seen AI create so far?
by ericlamb89 | 2025-12-13 13:07:56+00:00
There’s no shortage of AI announcements, startups, and benchmarks but less clarity on where it’s making a meaningful difference in practice.

What’s the most concrete, sustained value you’ve seen AI create? Modest examples are welcome.

Could be:

Better outcomes for customers or users

Work that’s now possible (or enjoyable) that wasn’t before

Scientific, educational, or social impact

Revenue, margin, or productivity gains
by dnet | 2025-12-13 13:08:08+00:00
See https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

> This is the same failure mode of all security-through-obscurity. Secrecy means that bad guys are privy to defects in systems, while the people who those systems are supposed to defend are in the dark, and can have their defenses weaponized against them.
by alexpotato | 2025-12-13 13:08:37+00:00
At a past job (hedge fund), my role was to co-ordinate investigations into why latency may have changed when sending orders.

A couple of quants had built a random forest regression model that could take inputs like time of day, exchange, order volume etc and spit out an interval of what latency had historically been in that range.

If the latency moved outside that range, an alert would fire and then I would co-ordinate a response with the a variety of teams e.g. trading, networking, Linux etc

If we excluded changes on our side as the culprit, we would reach out to the exchange and talk to our sales rep there would might also pull in networking etc.

Some exchanges, EUREX comes to mind, were phenomenal at helping us identify issues. e.g. they once swapped out a cable that was a few feet longer than the older cable and that's why the latency increased.

One day, it's IEX, of Flash Boys fame, that triggers an alert. Nothing changed on our side so we call them. We are going back and forth with the networking engineer and then the sales rep says, in almost hushed tones:

"Look, I've worked at other exchange so I get where you are coming from in asking these questions. Problem is, b/c of our founding ethos, we are actually not allowed to track our own internal latency so we really can't help you identify the root cause. I REALLY wish it was different."

I love this story b/c HN, as a technology focused site, often thinks all problems have technical solutions but sometimes it's actually a people or process solution.

Also, incentives and "philosophy of the founders" matter a lot too.
by arw0n | 2025-12-13 13:09:27+00:00
Completely agree, and for me it is not just about the easier/quicker access to information, but the interactivity. I can ask Claude to spend half an hour to create a learning plan for me, then refine it by explaining what I already know and where I see my main gaps.

And then I can, in the same context, ask questions while reading the articles suggested for learning. - There's also danger involved there, as the constant affirmation ("Great Point!", "You're absolutely right!") breeds overconfidence, but it has led me to learn quite a few things in a more formal capacity that I would have endlessly postponed before.

For example, I work quite a lot with k8s, but during the day, I'm always trying to solve a specific problem. I have never just sat down, and started reading about the architecture, design decisions, and underlying tech in a structured format. Now I have a detailed plan ready on how to fill my foundational gaps over the Christmas break, and this will hopefully save me time during the next big deployment/feature rollout.
by Detrol | 2025-12-13 13:10:17+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

I built Quorum because I wanted a way to break out of the single-model echo chamber. I often found myself manually pasting outputs between Claude and GPT to get a second opinion or to find holes in a logic chain.

Quorum is a TUI (built with React Ink + Python Asyncio) that orchestrates these interactions automatically.

Instead of just chatting, you select a protocol (like 'Oxford Debate' or 'Socratic Method') and assign models to roles. For example, you can have a local Llama (via Ollama) propose a code architecture, and force GPT to act as a rigorous critic ("Advocate" mode).

Key focus for this release was the hybrid engine: it runs local models sequentially to save VRAM but parallelizes cloud requests to keep speed up.

Happy to answer questions about the TUI implementation or the consensus protocols!
by danaris | 2025-12-13 13:10:19+00:00
Which a) has a whole host of other concerns associated with it, and b) still does not solve that problem, because it's not at all hard for a child (especially a teenager!) to sneak their parent's ID, use it to authenticate for a service, then put it back.

After all, are most services going to require the ID to be present for every session? Or are they going to require a one-time authentication for the account?
by noitpmeder | 2025-12-13 13:10:24+00:00
Obviously you're being facetious, that is not at all what that poster is claiming.

While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't result in ill effects, if ill effects happen in said dark alley it is still worth the discussion to remind people to stay out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or until the root problem, whatever it is, is improved).

Pretending that it is OK to enter dark alleys and forcing blame elsewhere will continue to have people unwittingly enter dark alleys.
by codingdave | 2025-12-13 13:10:52+00:00
When building up something small and new, sure, checking security in each route is quick and easy. But a time will come where your security, roles, and whatnot have evolved to the point that new features and roles would mean you need to go update every route. Aside from the tedium to do so, it introduces more changes which means more potential for mistakes. That is when middleware is better.

When you do get to that point, don't hard-code checks on whether the current user has the exact roles for that specific route. Instead, get more creative. Every app will have different needs, but I like to do all the setup for the auth checks when they first login, cache an array of their allowed routes on the server, and then you just check whether the cache has the current route on each request. (Yes, and clear that cache if their access changes mid-session.)

Doing so is not much code, performs well at scale, and you never have to touch the routes themselves when refactoring security, you just need to tweak that setup function.
by mannykannot | 2025-12-13 13:10:55+00:00
I will just float this idea for consideration, as I cannot judge how plausible it is: Is it possible that LLMs or their successors will soon be able to make use of formal methods more effectively than humans? I don't think I am the only person surprised by how well they do at informal programming (On the other hand, there is a dearth of training material. Maybe a GAN approach would help here?)
by bombcar | 2025-12-13 13:13:03+00:00
Cancelling trains to preserve on-time statistics is the kind of perverse activity you get when metrics aren’t correctly setup.

A cancelled train should be counted as delayed until the next train (close to the worst-case scenario) so as to discourage it.

But the real problem with deteriorating service is that people will put up with it for a long time - as long as they get to where they’re going eventually.

But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.

And then you have no riders and trying to get back on track will take 20 years or more.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-13 13:13:28+00:00
3 problems I can think with my idea are: (1) it makes the tripping less noisy, so it increases the chance someone might ignore or miss the trip. I guess with the right UX that can be mostly sovled. (2) if a bug walks in front of the camera, is that 1 trip or multiple trips? The bug would be visible for multiple frames, so it might do a ton of secret rotations for a single incident, which could present an odd UX to the user. (3) in the original design, there's an asymmetric key that's deleted on trip, which isn't really possible in my design. That means in the original design, if the phone is hacked, that doesn't let the attacker forge security footage, because the phone only has a public key, whereas in my design, if the phone is hacked, that does let the attacker forge security footage, because security is based on a symmetric key/secret. (One thing I don't understand about the original design is why it has both a symmetric key/secret and an asymmetric key. If they're both deleted at the same time, and don't auto-rotate, I don't see what benefit the symmetric key/secret provides.)

One idea to improve the (2) problem is to instead of only rotating the secret on trip, rotate for every frame, regardless of whether a trip is ongoing or not. So if there are 10 photos/sec that would be 10 rotations/sec. And then there can be a boolean in the signed data with each frame (signed e.g. with a MAC using the secret) that indicates whether there's an ongoing trip or not (and also include a timestamp in the signed data). So that means regardless of whether it's tripping, an attacker can never backdate images prior to when the attacker got control of the system.
by alexpotato | 2025-12-13 13:14:08+00:00
There is a precedent for organizations from wildly different industries meeting and sharing thoughts, lessons learned and procedures.

Some cases that come to mind:

- The United States Marine Corps spent time with New York City Fire Department. The USMC was interested to know how the FDNY managed radio communications, chaotic environments and co-ordinating teams from different departments in an urban environment

- In one of the Gladwell books he mentions getting financial traders and generals together to play military simulation games. The idea being that the traders were used to dealing with streams of fast moving information and they had to quickly decided what to do next.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-13 13:14:12+00:00
> the current regime is very open about how excited they are about getting that oil and very hand wavy about everything else

Yes, because it makes sense to trust what the Trump admin tells you.

Oil might be one of the many excuses they give, but it's obviously a lie because there is nobody else in the world capable of profitably extracting Venezuelan crude at any meaningful scale.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-13 13:14:57+00:00
>Landlords usually require written notice to enter the premises, in advance, and cannot "lock you out at any time" without going through an eviction process if you have a lease.

Sure, in the same way that landlords aren't able to unfairly keep security deposits - they can and often do do it because it takes a lot of time and effort to attempt to get recompense after the fact, and the consequences even in that case are not significant enough to disincentivize them.
by simonw | 2025-12-13 13:15:31+00:00
I shipped a new release yesterday - https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/changelog.html#v0-28 but yeah, the last core release before that was in August. I've been pushing out plugin releases for it though, for new models from Gemini and Anthropic and others.

Honestly the main problem has been that LLM's unique selling point back in 2024 was that it was the only tool taking CLI access to LLMs seriously. In 2025 Claude Code and Codex CLI etc all came along and suddenly there's not much unique about having a CLI tool for LLMs any more!

There's also a major redesign needed to the database storage and model abstraction layer in order to handle reasoning traces and more complex tool call patterns. I opened an issue about that here - it's something I'm stewing on but will take quite some work to get right: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1314

I've been spending more of my time focusing on other projects which make use of LLM, in particular Datasette plugins that use the asyncio Python library: https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#async-mod...

I expect those to drive some core improvements pretty soon.
Ask HN: Any online tech spaces you hang around that don't involve AI?
by jc_811 | 2025-12-13 13:15:56+00:00
I understand why Ai is dominating online discourse right now. The tech is novel, it’s pushing boundaries, the business side has trillions of dollars involved, and it’s made its way to the mainstream of every day people.

But, I just truly don’t find it interesting. For all those that do - great! But for myself, for whatever reason it just does not scratch that part of my brain. I’d rather spend days writing and debugging code (to create a 5 minute automation ;) ) than having Ai spit something out in 10 seconds.

I just use Ai like a supercharged stack overflow. Ask it something if I have a syntax error or whatever, and then move on by continuing to use my own brain to think through the logic and patterns of my project.

All that to say - I miss what HN was before Ai and LLMs started dominating everything!

Anyone have other spaces, blogs, communities, or whatever where you go to learn and/or discuss interesting things that don’t have anything to do with Ai?
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-12-13 13:16:28+00:00
> you have /dev/kmem access so could just edit the kernel data structures.

Not anymore: since kernel 2.6.26 /dev/kmem only exists if CONFIG_DEVKMEM is enabled, and it was removed completely in 5.13.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/851531/ [2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-12-13 13:16:44+00:00
So you are justifying it. For the record it's not just what you watch with the streaming service, it is everything you watch through their TV program.

You still do not get it: you can find a pseudo-justification for _every_ type of tracking they do to you. But none of these are really true justifications. You can do _everything_ without any type of tracking -- even the very basic premise: it shouldn't even be true that you need an account _at all_ to use an Apple TV.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-13 13:17:04+00:00
to the point that I had to pull an extra circuit... but tri phase so good to go even if I would like to go bigger.

I've limited power consumption to what I consider the optimum, each card will draw ~275 Watts (you can very nicely configure this on a per-card basis). The server itself also uses some for the motherboard, the whole rig is powered from 4 1600W supplies, the gpus are divided 5/5/4 and the mother board is connected to its own supply. It's a bit close to the edge for the supplies that have five 3090's on them but so far it held up quite well, even with higher ambient temps.

Interesting tidbit: at 4 lanes/card throughput is barely impacted, 1 or 2 is definitely too low. 8 would be great but the CPUs don't have that many lanes.

I also have a threadripper which should be able to handle that much RAM but at current RAM prices that's not interesting (that server I could populate with RAM that I still had that fit that board, and some more I bought from a refurbisher).
by neerajnegi1003 | 2025-12-13 13:17:44+00:00
After spending way too much time manually engaging on LinkedIn to grow my startup's presence, I got curious: what actually works? The Problem Most devs and founders hate LinkedIn's engagement game. You post something technical or meaningful, get 3 likes from bots, while someone posting "5 lessons from my cat about product management " gets 10,000 impressions. But here's what the data actually showed after analyzing top-performing posts: Timing matters more than we think:

Posts between 7-9 AM and 5-7 PM (local time) get 3x more initial engagement The first 60 minutes are critical for algorithmic distribution Early engagement signals quality to LinkedIn's feed algorithm

The cold start problem is real:

Without initial engagement, even great content dies in obscurity LinkedIn's algorithm uses the first 10-20 interactions to determine if your post is "worthy" Most technical posts never escape this cold start because our networks are small

What I Built I created Hyperclapper - a simple tool that helps you coordinate genuine engagement within your network. Not bots, not fake engagement, just helping real people find and support each other's content. How it works:

Connect your LinkedIn (read-only OAuth) Join engagement pods with people in similar industries Get notified when someone posts (you choose how often) Engage authentically with content you actually find valuable

Why this isn't spammy:

You control what you engage with - no forced likes All engagement is from real accounts You're helping surface good content that would otherwise be buried Think of it as a RSS feed for your network's best content

The Results After 3 months of testing with 500 beta users:

Average post impressions increased 4.2x Meaningful comments (not just "Great post!") up 6x Several users got inbound leads directly from increased visibility

The trickiest part was building the engagement pod matching algorithm. We use a combination of:

Industry tags Posting frequency compatibility Historical engagement patterns Mutual connection depth

Why I'm Sharing This LinkedIn engagement is a grind, especially for technical folks who just want to share knowledge. This tool helps solve the cold start problem without resorting to engagement bait or algorithmic hacks.

I'm launching the beta publicly this week. Would love feedback from the HN community since you folks are typically skeptical of social media growth tools (rightfully so).

Try it: hyperclapper.com

Genuine question for HN: How do you balance the need for visibility with the distaste for "engagement optimization"? Is there a way to play the game without losing your soul?
by michaeljx | 2025-12-13 13:17:54+00:00
It's part of the parental responsibility to provide enough structure and instill enough discipline to your kids so that they grow to be complete persons. Sure it will be nice if social media was restricted like tobacco, and I am sure one day it will, but you can't relegate all responsibility for everything to the state. I don't want to live in a bubble wrapped society for the sake of the children.
by tomrod | 2025-12-13 13:18:43+00:00
No, really. You could make a city be defended but there was no great way to make a nation state before gunpowder without natural barriers in place.

Further, trade goods are found over large distances, which doesn't work over large distances and many alleged single-tribe-lands unless the good is extremely valuable and defensible from theft.

Your claim that great powers style organization is specifically refuted.