MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-11 15:52:06+00:00
those charts are different from the point that i am making, which can be seen here:

https://i0.wp.com/www.edwardconard.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/has-intergenerat...

the “propaganda is so good” and yet anyone on the internet has seen the charts you’re linking dozens of times. fwiw, your chart makes a lot of assumptions by subsetting to hourly, excluding benefits, and using a different inflation adjustment for income vs. productivity (the last one is 100% a chart crime). every time they make the choice that will make the gap most striking, https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/realtime/files/2015...
by berkes | 2025-12-11 15:52:06+00:00
The other thing that design patterns allow, is to learn pitfalls, applications and other attributes about them.

To keep in your analogy, if you have a 3KG naildriver with a 2m handle you'll quickly find out that driving nails into a drywall with that leaves you with no wall. And that it's a bad idea to use a "Naildriver" to drive these "spiralled-slothead-nails" (aka screws) into wood.

But with a common language, such as design patterns, you can easily learn where they are good, what their limits are, in what cases other patterns fit better, and what pitfalls to avoid and so on.

If I search the web for "why is it so hard for my naildriver to drive in spiralled-slothead-nails" I'll get zero results. But when I search for "why is it hard to hammer in a screw" I'll get good results. May sound like a silly example, but for me that sillyness illustrates how obvious designpatters should be.
by martythemaniak | 2025-12-11 15:52:24+00:00
1. I typed "How do I get a gemini api key" in my chrome bar

2. Firs line in the top result said "click here and then click the Get Key Button". I clicked the link and went to the page.

3. On the page I clicked "Get Key"

4. I named the key, then selected "New project" from the dropdown. I named the new project

5. I now have a key.

I actually timed myself, it took 34 seconds. This is a garbage ragebait post.
by timdaub | 2025-12-11 15:52:38+00:00
I always cringe when I hear the word "Nazism." Because the first time I heard it, it was when Putin said it in a speech after invading Ukraine. And indeed, if you check Google Trends, you'll see that the term had its peak around that time and has had an increased usage ever since. Nazism is not a word known in German either. We purposefully call it national socialism. And to be honest, I think it makes sense to be national socialism. Because it is nationally socialist. Meaning it is social towards the nation. Which is also a reason why there is the "Internationale." Because to me socialism that is constraint to a nation is inevitably nationalist, I mean how else could it not be?
by jMyles | 2025-12-11 15:52:41+00:00
...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell:

* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.

* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.

* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.

* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.

* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.

* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.

* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.

...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".
by thr0waw3y | 2025-12-11 15:52:44+00:00
> This is not a story about gas prices, this is a story of consumer manipulation, dark patterns, monopolistic practices, etc.

Meh. Snacks are expensive at every gas station; it's the market-decided price of convenience, not "monopolistic practices". Just get gas cheaper at Buccees and then get snacks cheaper at your nearby market if you want to optimize for price, nobody is stopping the money-conscientous consumer from doing that.
by maccard | 2025-12-11 15:52:51+00:00
The read speed off of an 8xDVD is ~10MB/s. The cheapest 500GB SSD on Amazon has a read speed of of 500MB/s. An NVMe drive has is 2500MB/s. We can read an entire DVD's capacity (4.7GB) from an SSD in under 10 seconds, compared to 8 minutes.
Show HN: Faraday, real time security engine for coding agents
by plawlost | 2025-12-11 15:53:03+00:00
We just shipped Faraday v3.1 at VulnZap.

Faraday sits inside agentic coding flows (Cursor, Claude, TS/JS based agents) and watches AI written diffs in real time. It pulls live CVE data, scores exploitability, and suggests patches before humans merge anything.

The goal is to make AI written code something you can trust by default, instead of hoping CI catches it later.

Docs: https://vulnzap.com/docs

Launch video: https://x.com/yazcaleb/status/1999141884963229776

Happy to answer questions about the engine, the SDK, how we integrate with tools like Cursor and Ariana.dev, and what has not worked so far.
by f311a | 2025-12-11 15:53:09+00:00
I like to ask LLMs to find problems o improvements in 1-2 files. They are pretty good at finding bugs, but for general code improvements, 50-60% edits are trash. They add completely unnecessary stuff. If you ask them to improve a pretty well-written code, they rarely say it's good enough already.

For example, in a functional-style codebase, they will try to rewrite everything to a class. I have to adjust the prompt to list things that I'm not interested in. And some inexperienced people are trying to write better code by learning from such changes of LLMs...
Ask HN: Is it significant that token length of source is close to e?
by keepamovin | 2025-12-11 15:53:53+00:00
What's the relationship between Shannon entropy of the distribution, and token length? For example, English is quoted as having a token length of ~4 characters, but source code (that I've tested) seems to be closer to 2.7. Is this significant that it's close to e (i.e., the base of the natural logarithm)? Is source code a more efficient and natural representation of structure/knowledge/information than English? Any thoughts? Any connection with how log appears in thermodynamic entropy?
by kmm | 2025-12-11 15:54:11+00:00
That's actually a message from the (Arch) initramfs[1], in case it can't mount the root filesystem or find an init to hand off to.

The kernel has a different error message: "No working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel."[2]

1: https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/blob/2dc9e12814aafcc... 2: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d358e5254674b70f34c84...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-11 15:54:29+00:00
People complain about gas prices despite gas being so outrageously cheap compared to everything else. Gas first ticked over $1.79 in April 2004, not adjusted for inflation.[1]

Just goes to show that most people are parrots and not actually using their head when stating arguments.

[1]https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?f=m&n=pet...
by Noaidi | 2025-12-11 15:54:41+00:00
I said "monopolistic practices", I did not say it was a monopoly.

"In 2019, shortly after Buc-ee's opened their first store in Alabama, the company was sued for "setting unfair pump prices", because they were selling gasoline to the customers for less money than it costs to buy and transport it to a retail outlet. While it is common within the United States for larger gas station chains to use a pricing strategy where gas is used as a loss leader to draw customers and encourage the sale of other goods, the practice is banned under Alabama state law."

_wiki
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-11 15:54:47+00:00
no, you just have to ask for the change - wait ~minute, review. and if it’s a small change, review goes fast. typically i’ll have a zellij/tmux with lazygit one pane, a cli agent (cursor-agent or codex) in the other, and a pop up vim pane. i can see the changes in lazygit as they’re made and review immediately and commit
by acdha | 2025-12-11 15:54:48+00:00
You also need some decent support + auditing. There are a couple of places to configure (e.g. setting CURL_CA_BUNDLE globally covers multiple OSS libraries) but there will be cases where someone hits one of the edge clients and tries to ignore the error, which ideally would lead to a scanner-triggered DevOps intervention. I think a fair amount of the rancor on this issue is really highlighting deeper social problems in large organizations, where a CIO should be seeing that resentment/hostility toward the security group is a bigger risk than the surface problem.
by croemer | 2025-12-11 15:55:05+00:00
Been getting lots of 503 errors (in CI) for https://github.com/k3d-io/k3d/releases/latest for about 30 minutes.

When I checked Github status there was nothing there.

The incident was only declared 7min ago - and only for issues. Late and not broad enough.

Update: Now everything is yellow https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/xntfc1fz5rfb
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-11 15:55:16+00:00
> Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload

All LLMs degrade in quality as soon as you go beyond one user message and one assistant response. If you're looking for accuracy and highest possible quality, you need to constantly redo the conversations from scratch, never go beyond one user message.

If the LLM gets it wrong in their first response, instead of saying "No, what I meant was...", you need to edit your first response, and re-generate, otherwise the conversation becomes "poisoned" almost immediately, and every token generated after that will suffer.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-11 15:55:28+00:00
You have the point of view that having publicly available queer content and abortion information is a good thing, something I generally agree with.

But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.

These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.

That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
by simiones | 2025-12-11 15:55:32+00:00
I think the writer had multiple relatively weird confusions, to be fair. It's most likely that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". They obviously knew something about escape analysis and Go's ability to put variables on the stack, and they likely knew as well that Go slices are essentially (fat) pointers to arrays.

As the author shows in their explanations, they thought that the backing array for the slice gets allocated on the stack, but then the slice (which contains/represents a pointer to the stack-allocated array) gets returned. This is a somewhat weird set of assumptions to make (especially give that the actual array is allocated in a different function that we don't get to see, ReadFromFile, but apparently this is how the author thought through the code.
Show HN: QCMP Framework for Poison-Resistant AI Agents (ArXiv Cs.ai Pending)
by brad-mcevilly | 2025-12-11 15:55:58+00:00
Hey HN—after a year digging into agentic AI vulnerabilities, I've built QCMP: a 4-layer architecture to slam the door on memory poisoning. MCP's at 16K servers, but attacks like MINJA (98.2% query-only success) and AgentPoison (80%+ backdoors from 0.1% poison) expose the core flaw—memory trusts itself too much.

QCMP borrows from IIT consciousness metrics (CCI >0.90 to freeze fragments), post-quantum checksums (ML-KEM-768), CTC self-consistency (NIS >0.95), and mantis shrimp-style sparse checks (<50ms TME). OWASP/EU AI Act ready, with Rust impl tips.

PDF (in-browser view): https://github.com/bradmcevilly/qcmp-whitepaper/blob/main/QC...

First arXiv push to cs.AI—hunting endorsements (4+ recent subs). Feedback on the quantum-bio hooks or swarm layers? Open to riffs.

deepsweep.ai | linkedin.com/in/bradmcevilly

I've spent the last year tackling memory poisoning in agentic AI (e.g., 98% MINJA success via queries alone). Introducing QCMP: a 4-layer architecture blending IIT consciousness metrics (CCI >0.90 thresholds), post-quantum checksums (ML-KEM), and CTC consistency for tamper-proof agent swarms.

Key wins: Detects 0.1% AgentPoison backdoors in <50ms; OWASP/EU AI Act compliant.

PDF: https://github.com/bradmcevilly/qcmp-whitepaper/blob/main/QC...

First arXiv sub to cs.AI—seeking endorsements/feedback from the HN community. Thoughts on the quantum-bio hooks or multi-agent layers? Open to chats.

Site: deepsweep.ai | LI: linkedin.com/in/bradmcevilly
by mindcrash | 2025-12-11 15:56:04+00:00
The Netherlands pretty much has the most strict carbon regulations in Europe. So while houses could be build, they can't be build because of those.

And while those are in place our small country is literally flooded with asylum seekers and our government doesn't seem to care about that (~1000 each week for several years now and those are just the official numbers, https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/publicaties/2025/01/...).

If they get a permit to stay (and most of them do) they get priority access to the already small housing market. So a lot of people who want to start a family in their own house are stuck at the basement or the attic at the house of their parents (either figurative or literally).

If someone thinks I am making things up or exaggerating: I was lucky enough to buy the house of my parents before this nightmare started. I bought it for approximately $150k, which is near the actual market price at the time. Somewhere in the next 1-2 years it will probably be valued at least 4 times more (if it isn't already).
by browningstreet | 2025-12-11 15:56:38+00:00
Another problem I'm having is.. with the latest iOS public betas, when you swipe down to bring up Siri search, it takes 2-4 seconds for the keyboard to show up. Every time. Went to an Apple store and they said, "re-install from scratch". Which isn't really easy these days, given work MFA accounts etc.
by kakacik | 2025-12-11 15:56:38+00:00
Interesting mental gymnastics here - under no circumstances should kids have no phones, and of course we talk about full smart phones. Everybody should do their best to make it as child-friendly as possible (which goes against primary incentives of every involved corporation giving you that free software to use) because... it would be nice? It would be appropriate?

In ideal world those are all good expectations. In actual ugly world out there, seemingly getting uglier each day, its dangerously naive. We talk about children dammit, its first and foremost responsibility of parents to keep them safe from all serious harm. You want to have contact? Give them dumb Nokia and they can never use an excuse it ran out of battery, and if lost it will be cheap to replace.

Or whatever else, but don't give them full access to whole internet and then be surprised when they go straight to its ugliest and most addiction-forming parts. They face peer-pressure? Tough one, but having some mental resiliency already during teens is great for rest of life, and maybe the shallowest and most pathetic of peers aren't the best crowd to hang with anyway. And its not like any actual popularity is gained, just blending in a faceless crowd.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-12-11 15:56:43+00:00
The dyslexia point is interesting; yes, English orthography causes more reading disorders than languages with more regular spelling-to-sound mappings (Italian, Finnish, etc.). That's consistent with the parser having to work harder when the signal is noisier.

Your intuition about "slower more intentional parsing" connects to something I'm exploring: we may parse language at two levels simultaneously; a fast, nearly autonomic level (think: how insults land before you consciously process them) and a slower deliberate level. Whether those levels interact differently across languages is an open question.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-11 15:57:33+00:00
> More or less nothing is optimized these days

Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games.

> I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit

I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.
by MrDOS | 2025-12-11 15:57:58+00:00
Ah, thank you for pointing these out! I'd missed the introduction of “flex” instance types (apparently in May last year[0] – still long overdue relative to the introduction of T4g in September 2020[1]). Curious that so far, they all appear to be Intel-based (C7i, M7i, C8i, M8i, and R8i). M7i-flex instances also cost 45% more than the corresponding T4g instances. That's sort of understandable, as the generational improvements probably bring more than 45% better performance for most workloads, but it also makes them harder to justify for the sorts of long-running,-mostly-idle duties they're being touted for.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-compute-optimized-c7i-f... [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-t4g-instances-burstable...
by s1mon | 2025-12-11 15:58:03+00:00
That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more later...
by mort96 | 2025-12-11 15:58:11+00:00
The negativity towards this is wild. A company followed relatively widely accepted industry practice (lots and lots of other games also have huge sizes on disk for the exact same reason), then eventually they decided to do their own independent testing to check whether said common practice actually makes things better or not in their case, found that it didn't, so they reversed it. In addition, they wrote up some nice technical articles on the topic, helping to change the old accepted industry wisdom.

This seems great to me. Am I crazy? This feels like it should be Hacker News's bread and butter, articles about "we moved away from Kubernetes/microservices/node.js/serverless/React because we did our own investigation and found that the upsides aren't worth the downsides" tend to do really well here. How is this received so differently?
by miggol | 2025-12-11 15:58:16+00:00
> But what actually being banned is accounts, not access.

Is this implied, or is this detailed in the law? I can see why this would make sense. So many businesses just have a link to their facebook page as their business website, which you should still be able to view. And presuming platforms like YouTube fit the definition, banning kids from watching anything on there would be pretty rough.

> One might argue that this removes the algorithmic feeds. But I would wager that social media companies will just use browser fingerprinting to continue to serve algorithmic content to logged out users, if they aren't doing this already.

On the subject of YouTube, I wonder if they would allow for the creation of teen accounts, which restrict all social media functions but allow subscriptions. But would that then also remove algorithmic recommendations? What about data harvesting off those accounts? If so, I might have to look up how to get a teenage fake ID.
by scottyeager | 2025-12-11 15:58:20+00:00
On Linux, the default init program is usually systemd. The main job of the default init program is typically to be a process manager. That is, it starts other programs and can restart them if they crash. Since it's the first process to start (PID 1), if it exits the kernel can't continue and will panic, usually followed by a reboot.

Containers work similarly, except that they don't take the whole system down when their PID 1 exits. That's why containers often don't have a process manager inside, but Linux based operating systems do.
by nixpulvis | 2025-12-11 15:58:22+00:00
We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.

Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.
by StratusBen | 2025-12-11 15:58:34+00:00
Huh...weird. I just looked into this and we do have us-east-1-chi-1....but not chi-2. It appears that chi-2 isn't being returned at all as part of the bulk pricing API from AWS for some reason. We'll see if we can dig deeper on why that's the case but just wanted to let you know that's the root issue from our end.