MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-22 06:30:58+00:00
> The sophisticated version I heard is to make the differences in the white space between individual words/lines/wherever.

That would be a naive way to do it.

Here is an example of a more sophisticated way:

A canary trap is a (method, way) for (exposing, determining) an information leak by giving (different, differing) versions of a (sensitive, secret) (document, file) to each of (several, two or more) (suspects, persons) and (seeing, observing) which version gets (leaked, exposed).

I can now include 9 bits of a watermark in there. If I expand the lists from two options to four it would be 18 bits. Four to eight would double that again - so diminishing returns after 4. The lists can vary in size too of course.

The sentiment of an entire paragraph can serve as single bit, it would have a chance to be robust to paraphrasing.

In the example above, if two or more leakers get together you might think that they could figure out a way to generate a clean version. But it turns out if there are enough watermark bits in the content and you use Tardos codes (a crafted Arcsine distribution of bits) small coalitions of traitors will betray themselves. Even large coalitions of 100 or more will betray themselves eventually (after 100s of 1000s of watermarked bits, the scaling is a constant + square of the number of traitors). The Google keyword is "traitor tracing scheme".
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 06:31:50+00:00
> Voters aren't immune from failure.

Hard disagree. Voters are never at fault. It is incumbent upon the candidate to give the voters something to vote for.

> ... they stay home and don't bother to vote at all

Because they had nothing to vote for. Candidate's fault.

So what you've touched on is what's called "lesser evil voting", an idea that it is the voter's responsibility to engage in harm reduction. For too long the Democratic Party has relied on this to do nothing by just being a gentler face on fascism. Some might say you're rewarding that behavior by turning up to vote for them anyway, even when they offer you nothing. Millions stayed home in 2024 because they were offered nothing. That's the only power voters had and they exercised it. And I said at the time that the Democratic Party will learn nothing and change nothing as a result of a devastating loss in the easiest lay up of all time.
by maweki | 2026-01-22 06:36:21+00:00
In light of that, I am wondering why the article opted to go for "However, determining the optimal join order is far from trivial.", when there are hard results in literature.

I was also missing mentioning "sideways information passing", though some of methods are exactly that.

I am wondering whether the company consults literature or whether they fiddle about, mostly reinventing the wheel.
by maxglute | 2026-01-22 06:37:27+00:00
> so subsidized

Emphasis on "so", i.e. past obvious strategic rationale like food "security", there's reason to believe US ag has excessive subsidies. IMO answer is like every other "strategic" sector, farmland political economy has been captured by wealth (i.e. Bill Gates largest farmland owner). There's a fuckload of tax haven / loop holes tied to farmland that defers capital gains tax, estate/inheritance tax, property tax. Farmland is stable investment (because land) used to park wealth - it's an asset class, hence if held as asset, wealthy will double down / double dip to make sure it doesn't go idle, so they lobby all the "easy" crops to get massive subsidies and now something like 80% of subsidies goes to top 10% of recipients. US doesn't need to produce that much surplus corn/soy, but it's relatively easy to grow so big agri with capital sunk on those crops will lobby for continued subsidy of said crops, build up even more wasteful sectors like agri to energy (30-50% of corn goes to ethanol), and next thing you know a very inefficient ground water to subsidized agri commodity to gdp generator takes on it's own logic. TLDR, people good at at spread sheets rigged US agri like they rigged everything else.
by MattGaiser | 2026-01-22 06:37:50+00:00
I imagine it is about this:

> But Brazil lacks the human skin, pig skin, and artificial alternatives that are widely available in the US.

This is not an improvement on existing methods (it may end up being, but that is not the motivation) but rather a case of it being all they have to work with.

Tilapia skin is probably better than no skin at all.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-22 06:38:11+00:00
This particular vulnerability relied upon passing the require function to a scope to allow the loading and running of arbitrary code. This is what I tend to call a blacklist approach. You're saying in this sandbox certain features can't be used because they will allow escape.

The alternative is a whitelist approach. Instead of disallowing dangerous features you're enabling only the features you need.

So a build system like Gradle or Maven (same thing really) has a limited set of primitives it is allowing access to. It's not loading, say, the entire JVM and all the Java core libraries and then listing all those you can't use.

You see the difference? If nothing else, the blacklist approach is going to fail when the virtual machine (or whatever) adds a new API call upstream and it's added without intent to the sandbox by simply doing an update where nobody has thought to disable it.

Another way of looking at this is Gradle isn't being compiled into Java bytecode and run in the same environment as the IDE (sandboxed or otherwise). That is inherently riskier.
by AmiteK | 2026-01-22 06:39:42+00:00
On tool-call overhead: in the MCP flow it’s typically 1–2 calls per task (watch_status once, then read_bundle for the relevant slice). In watch mode we also skip snapshot refresh entirely.

Token-wise, the intent isn’t “dump everything”.
it’s selective reads of the smallest relevant bundles.
If your workflow already achieves what you want with AGENTS.md + LSP querying, that may indeed be more token-efficient for many sessions.

The trade-off LogicStamp is aiming for is different: verifiable, diffable ground-truth artifacts (CI/drift detection/cross-run guarantees).
Tokens aren’t the primary optimization axis.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-22 06:40:27+00:00
The main problem with obtaining ID is that is takes time, and it's not evenly distributed. In the US its not folklore that people of color are less likely to have ID, it's a statistical fact.

This can be fixed, but you will notice the people who champion voter ID never bother trying. Naturally, the only reasonable conclusion is they like it that way. They're not stupid, after all.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-01-22 06:41:26+00:00
I agree this has recently been heavily abused by certain people who don't want to see articles from a particular topic (usually a controversial one). And I've seen HN comments where someone will say "I don't come to HN to read about XYZ, so I'm flagging all XYZ posts I see." Some of these do get reversed by the moderators (who do a good job all things considered), but by that time they're gone from the home page and fall into oblivion.
OpenSkills – Stop bloating your LLM context with unused agent instructions
by twwch | 2026-01-22 06:41:34+00:00
Hello HN,

I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem).

To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills.

The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers:

Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded for discovery).

Layer 2 (Instruction): The core SKILL.md prompt (loaded only when the skill is matched).

Layer 3 (Resources): Heavy reference docs or scripts that are conditionally loaded based on the specific conversation context.

Why this matters:

Scalability: You can have hundreds of skills without overwhelming the LLM's context window.

Markdown-First: Skills are defined in a simple SKILL.md format. It’s human-readable, git-friendly, and easy for the LLM to parse.

Conditional Resources: For example, a "Finance Skill" only pulls in the tax-code.pdf reference if the query actually mentions tax compliance.

Key Features:

Python 3.10+ SDK.

Automatic skill matching and invocation.

Support for script execution (via [INVOKE:script_name] syntax).

Multimodal support (Images via URL/base64).

GitHub: [https://github.com/twwch/OpenSkills] PyPI: pip install openskills-sdk
by fleebee | 2026-01-22 06:42:06+00:00
I can only speak for $MY_JOB, but I'm pretty sure everyone was on Atom before VSC "got good". Atom had a good plugin ecosystem; what really drove the change was Atom's horrible performance issues whereas VSC was snappy and responsive.

What I believe also influenced the shift was that at that point in time MS had accumulated a decent amount of developer trust by giving us TypeScript and later on by acquiring GitHub. They appeared to care and have the right vision for open source.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-22 06:42:33+00:00
those are not questions I have, nor answers I feel that I am lacking, and it fits a familiar online debate technique of bogging down discussions when you don't like the direction they are going in, wasting the time of your interlocutor. are you really so unimaginative and out of touch that you don't know the answers to your questions?

legitimately elected politicians cheat left and right all over the place, and there is every reason to rhink illegimate election is just as attractive to them as the fruits of the power they seek, it's human nature, it's in the bible, it's in the koran, it's why we have laws. I would prefer a voting system that was guaranteed as secure as we can because the power to vote them out of office is our best hope.
by deng | 2026-01-22 06:42:42+00:00
Indeed, the Gas-Town token is down 97% from all-time high, see https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gas-town/

I cannot judge if Steve is malicious or just gullible, but he's obviously a smart guy, so he definitely should've known better. It's weird how these AI evangelists use AI for everything, but somehow he didn't ask ChatGPT what all of this means and if it may have reputational damage, because I just asked if I should claim these trading fees, and it said:

Claiming could be interpreted as:

* Endorsing the token

* Being complicit if others get rugged later

* This matters if your X account has real followers.

and in the end told me to NOT claim these fees unless I'm OK with being associated with that token. So there, Steve, you are now associated with a rug-pull.
by crote | 2026-01-22 06:42:49+00:00
> If the system is transparent enough and provides mechanisms for verification and control

That "if" is doing an awful lot of work here!

You can literally explain paper voting to children - it was part of my mandatory Civics classes. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure you need a cryptography PhD to even begin understanding why the various digital protocols are supposed to be secure. Even worse, as a software developer I am aware that things like "how do I know the compiler is trustworthy" and "how do I know the computer is in fact running the right binary" are very much open problems in the industry, so I know that any computer is untrustworthy.

Sure, if it's transparent and verifiable there's no reason to distrust it, but we don't live in a world where a transparent and verifiable digital voting system has been invented yet, so there are plenty of reasons not to trust them.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-22 06:45:10+00:00
It just happens. I was happy on netbeans, then I was forced over to eclipse, which I got used to. Then I got forced over to intellij. I'm still pissed about that (even though it's rider for me these days).

I don't mind VSCodium that much because I can put my tooling on the side (like a good unix fanboy) instead of hoping that jetbrains reimplements every other tool. Ag, grep beat IDE searches any day.

But yeah we have reach a stupid point in the industry where VSCodium asks me to trust a codebase before it will let me edit it.
by roenxi | 2026-01-22 06:45:21+00:00
> If you do the math on the number of pairs of EU countries that need to find bilateral solutions ... it becomes clear why the EU government exists. It's just not efficient otherwise. (Answer: 351)

That logic doesn't hold. If it made sense supermarkets wouldn't work because they have to hold bilateral negotiations with hundreds of thousands of customers. In practice, they just offer a take-it-or-leave-it deal and people either accept it or they don't.

Similarly, countries offer a take-it-or-leave-it set of requirements to foreign investors. If investors aren't taking the deal, countries have the power to unilaterally renegotiate what they offer.

> Doesn't Wall Street dominate international finance? They don't seem like lepers. Also, when international financial regulation has been discussed, I think it's the US that usually undermines it. But maybe you mean something else than what I understood?

I dunno, maybe they operate out of the Caymans or something legally complicated. I'd estimate maybe 20-30% of the stock offers I see have a lot of front matter materials saying something to the effect of "if you come from the US you aren't even allowed to read this, go away". Very US-specific exclusions. Maybe the offers I get are too small time? I dunno, I just report what I see. I always chuckle at it though.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-22 06:45:31+00:00
what you are actually saying is that a certain class of people "know better" than what another class thinks they want.

If you look at financial markets and finance theory, there is no validity to the idea that people are long term blind and short term mistaken. markets discount the future, they are the best estimates of the future rather than somebody with no skin in the game magically "knowing better"
by kouteiheika | 2026-01-22 06:45:40+00:00
> On the infra side, training a 1.5B model in ~4 hours on 8×H100 is impressive.

It's hard to compare without more details about the training process and the dataset, but, is it? Genuine question, because I had the opposite impression. Like, for example, recently I did a full finetuning run on a 3B model chewing through a 146k entry dataset (with 116k entries having reasoning traces, so they're not short) in 7 hours on a single RTX 6000.
by ameshkov | 2026-01-22 06:45:57+00:00
More or less, built on top of it with added udp/icmp.

When writing server and client a lot of time is consumed by additional features, not on implementing the spec itself. For instance, in order to be truly stealthy we have to make sure that it looks *exactly* like Chromium on the outside, and then maintain this similarity as Chromium changes TLS implementation from version to version. Or here’s another example: on the server-side we need to have an anti-probing protection to make it harder to detect what the server does.
by Ekaros | 2026-01-22 06:46:31+00:00
In healthy working free market. There should be competition delivering better product at cheaper price.

Maybe one thing we should do is to allow suing company executives for breach of fiduciary duty when they waste resources on some useless project or feature. This could make many companies more efficient.

Oh and also ban dumping. You should not be allowed to sell stuff below cost of production. Development effort with big maybe ignored.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-22 06:47:27+00:00
> Castle doctrine would still apply.

> ICE doesn't have jurisdiction over citizens.

None of this matters because of their lawless, masked, paramilitary gestapo tactics where they get away with using chemical weapons, murdering people in the street, and breaking & entering without judicial warrants. They are masked criminals acting extrajudicially including kidnapping and disappearances of US citizens and non-citizens, retaliatory arrests of people exercising Constitutionally-protected free speech, and conducting summary executions. Equal protection under the law is a distant, idealistic fantasy that has evaporated except to be used as justification for punitive punishment against anyone not a celebrity, rich, or law enforcement.
by verdverm | 2026-01-22 06:47:37+00:00
I'm not sure the comparison I'm hoping to draw out is coming through

This seems more similar in spirit to AGENTS.md than LSP, so I'll make the comparison there. Today, I require zero tool calls to bring my AGENTS.md into context, so this would require me making more tool calls, each of is a round trip to the LLM with the current context. So if I have a 30k context right now, and you are saying 1-2 calls per task, that is 30-60k extra tokens I need to pay for, for every one of these AGENT.md files that needs to be read / checked to see if in sync.

I use git for the verifiable / diffable ground truth artifacts. I can have my LSP query at different commits, there is no rule it can only access the current state of the code
by 9rx | 2026-01-22 06:48:49+00:00
> over half of corn acreage is used for ethanol.

That doesn't mean much without more details. Corn is used as a tool in the crop rotation to enable growing foods for humans to eat. As we learned before ethanol's time in the sun, farmers are going to grow it anyway to support their rotations. The only question is if it is better to recapture that into usable energy or to let it rot out in the field.

> ... when taking land use into account

But if not taken into account? The harsh reality is that ethanol plants are unable to pay cost-of-production-level prices for corn. It now typically costs $5+ to produce a bushel of corn, while ethanol plants generally start to lose money as the price rises above $4.50 per bushel. You're not growing corn for ethanol. You accept selling corn to ethanol buyers when you can't find a better home for it.

Corn especially is a tough one to predict. A couple of years ago yields around here were nearly 100 bushels per acre higher than normal! Even if we put in the mightiest effort to grow exactly the right amount of corn for reasonable food uses, that 100 bushel surprise means a good 1/3 of your crop has no predetermined home right there. Of course, it can go the other way too. If you end up 100 bushels per acre short of what you expected...

Between needing to grow extra to protect against unexpected low yields, combined with unexpected high yields, half to the corn crop having no home (and therefore ending up as ethanol) isn't that far outside of what cannot be reasonably controlled for.

> To recap US overproduces calories to the point that it hurts the country.

That's fair. We don't have the technology to do better, unfortunately. Maybe once LLMs free up software developers once and for all they can turn their focus towards solving this problem?
by Uehreka | 2026-01-22 06:49:26+00:00
I (and I suspect many others) usually think of a constitution as “the hard-to-edit meta-rules that govern the normal rules”. The idea that the stuff in this document can sort of “override” the system prompt and constrain the things that Claude can do would seem to make that a useful metaphor. And metaphors don’t have to be 100% on the nose to be useful.
by mannanj | 2026-01-22 06:49:53+00:00
Yes. When you learn about the CIA and their founding origins, massive financial funding conflict of interest, and dark activity serving not-the-american people - you see what the possibilities of not operating off pesky moral constraints could look like.

They are using it on the American people right now to sow division, implant false ideas and sow general negative discourse to keep people too busy to notice their theft. They are an organization founded on the principle of keeping their rich banker ruling class (they are accountable to themselves only, not the executive branch as the media they own would say) so it's best the majority of populace is too busy to notice.

I hope I'm wrong also about this conspiracy. This might be one that unfortunately is proven to be true - what I've heard matches too much of just what historical dark ruling organizations looked like in our past.
by teiferer | 2026-01-22 06:50:39+00:00
It's not the only way.

An alternative is to organize the world in a way that makes it not just unnecessary but even more so detrimental to said soldier's interests to launch a missle towards your house in the first place.

The sentence you wrote wouldn't be something you write about (present day) German or French soldiers. Why? Because there are cultural and economic ties to those countries, their people. Shared values. Mutual understanding. You wouldn't claim that the only way to prevent a Frenchmen to kill you is to kill them first.

It's hard to achieve. It's much easier to just mark the strong man, fantasize about a strong military with killing machines that defend the good against the evil. And those Hollywood-esque views are pushed by populists and military industries alike. But they ultimately make all our societies poorer, less safe and arguably less moral.
by defrost | 2026-01-22 06:50:52+00:00
> by that time they're gone from the home page

So what, that's just a single curated view of a wealth of submissions and comments. There are many people who rarely look at "the front page" and suffer not from frontophilia.

> and fall into oblivion.

Hardly. the /newcomments and /active pages clearly show where the actions at, if that's your thing. Many [flagged] and not-the-front-page submissions have huge comment conts and go back and forth for days.

You can see an alternative listing at https://hckrnews.com/ , you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.
by crote | 2026-01-22 06:51:23+00:00
Election security should not hinge on a "trust me bro" - especially when people are being convinced the other way by Russian propaganda talking heads on social media.

Manual counting requires zero trust. In my country anyone is welcome to observe the entire process from start to finish, if they wish to do so. A few years back a fringe far-right party tried importing the voting integrity distrust over here, and recruited people to watch their local polling stations to "expose the fraud". Which was totally fine because they were always allowed to do so, and it fizzled out because zero evidence of fraud was found, and that party still didn't get a significant number of votes.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-22 06:51:43+00:00
> They're not in the business of converting a user's file type from one to another.

Their job is getting an image file into reality, not to be the absent owner of a big machine.

> That would be inconsistent from what the user sent.

If the machine accepts some type of normal image file, then they can losslessly convert other file formats to that type. There is nothing inconsistent about that.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-22 06:52:10+00:00
It's not only because of sanctions. It's primarily because their leadership have deeply technical backgrounds. Most of my peers who ended up in policymaking roles in Europe (and in some cases the levers of power) all had a humanities or legal background.

Assuming Iran didn't follow the path that it did, Iran would have also ended up becoming a tech hub like Israel became today.

But this recognition should not be used to glaze a regime that has officially admitted to killing at least 5,000 protestors [0] and in reality killed significantly more people than that.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...
by array_key_first | 2026-01-22 06:52:11+00:00
There are many reasons not to do those things, "lalala not listening" isn't an excuse.

It's usually very simple, too. For voting ID: ID isn't evenly distributed, and that's not an opinion, that's a fact.

So if you require ID, then obviously you will suppress some demographics more than others. That creates a bias. Again, not opinion.

This can be solved. You will notice none of the people championing voter ID make even a thinly-veiled attempt to solve it. Instead they say stupid things like "oh wow so black people can't get ID now? Uh, buddy, I think YOU'RE the racist one!"