skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's somehow immensely funny to me that some state probably had an entire project to land this backdoor in xz, spend literal years to make it happen. And then it was immediately detected and all effort was for nothing.
Show HN: I build a tool that will tell you what to respond in negotations
After reading the book Getting to Yes, I really want some tool to help me negotiate more efficiently without having to memorize everything principle.

You start by putting in interests of each party, then you can explore different functions: how to respond to the other party, explore objective criteria out there or brainstorm more negotiation options.

Still working on it! Leave me feedback if you have any suggestions!
Back From The Future: 1995's predictions of 2025 life
Diligent Graphics Engine Ported to Rust
A world class LLM is sort of like saying you stuck a dildo on a donkey’s head and you’ve got a unicorn to sell. It’s a donkey mate. The problem is that most people can’t tell the difference between a donkey and a unicorn because everyone was told everything was a unicorn for the last 20 years.
I can’t help but suspect Starship’s recent run of spectacular explosions might frustrate efforts to launch more nuclear-powered craft like the Voyagers too soon…
Amazing that this is being downvoted. To everyone the "righteous" side: your thieving overlords wear this "savior" disguise as a disguise. Your putting it on won't ever make you one of them.
It’s not really considered throwing away Peano’s work. Peano was working in the very infancy of logical formalism.

As it turns out, further work developing on his discovered that using a recursively enumerable schema for induction rather than a second-order induction axiom gives rise to a simpler abstraction that still has all the properties that Peano actually desired, and which makes further developments in the space much easier.

Continuing to call it Peano Arithmetic is respect for the fact that the guy got it mostly right, and it took the mathematics community many more years to refine the ideas to their current point.

Is it a shame that Galois theory isn’t presented as a historical fossil and frozen to its state of development in Galois’s lifetime? I may be making a rather big assumption, but I like to think he would be proud, and so would Peano.
I’m quite happy for people to waste time and money on an economic dead end. Just not Europe. We can do better while everyone is ruining their society with it.
Thanks! That is on my roadmap. I need to extract the notes form the database(sqlite)[0] from the zip file and process it along with the many media files it can contain. Right now this is a TUI and will have limited media capabilities.

[0] https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Database-Stru...
Avian: 3D physics engine for the Bevy game engine
I think it's a good thing. Let them experience our little hell. They'll come out appreciating our craft more once they get through :)
Ask HN: Next steps after CS bachelor – more math, ML, or physics?
I'm a 22 y/o computer science student finishing my bachelor this semester with a 3.8/4 GPA. I've always been good (not great) at math and felt CS lacked more mathematical depth. This led me to take many theoretical modules on ML/DL, and I did my bachelor thesis on a deep learning topic.
Given the current state of the tech sector and the difficulty junior devs face finding jobs, I'm trying to decide what to do next and would appreciate advice.
My options are:

Master's with focus on ML/DL, including additional math modules
Bachelor's in Mathematics
Bachelor's in Physics

Some context: I'm from Germany, where there are currently over 250k Computer Science students. AI is advancing and increasing existing dev productivity. Several friends of mine are struggling to find jobs, with some receiving offers around 35k yearly.
Any insights on which path might be more valuable in the current market?
Can a daily nap do more harm than good? A sleep researcher explains
ISPs being asked by the government to block sites at the DNS level is very common.
Sure you can delete your data, but guess what, they'll retain it anyways under "regulatory obligations". I've gone back and forth with their privacy team and this is the last response:

"This is a follow-up from the 23andMe Team. To clarify, we and our laboratory vendors are bound by various legal and regulatory obligations that may necessitate retention of certain information. We want to assure you that our data retention program adheres to applicable legal requirements which can vary depending on what country or state a customer lives in, the state a contracted laboratory is located in, and any applicable federal or state licensing obligations related to the ancestry and health products we sell. We can confirm that samples and genetic testing results are deleted in accordance with applicable law and any legal retention obligation serves as a proper exception related to a data deletion request under data privacy laws."
I see your problem (at least according to Yegge's theory): the batch applicants are just too senior. If they were more junior, only then would they benefit from the 100x multiplier. The olds are just too far removed from the enlightened way, you see
The indicators are reliable, or do you have proof otherwise?
> NixOS and reproducible builds did not detect the xz backdoor

Nix declarativeness is quite useful to increase protection against exploits in a number of ways. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of untapped potential. My number one priority would be to implement fine-grained ephemeral containers. Guix has these already.

This would make it convenient to run every single process with restricted privileges, including no access to ~/, except those directories that are needed by the task. That would prevent e.g. a rogue pip package from stealing SSH keys.

Still, I think the xz backdoor did not work on NixOS because its unusual non FHS-compliant filesystem structure.
Your examples are the ones that stole the money from the wrong guys. If you just go for the middle or lower class nothing will happen to you. Look at the Sacklers... for a more recent example. Purdue settled for $24 million, admitting no liability, sealing the deposition.
> humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily

What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away?

> The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place.

> I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing.

Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
MCP is a handy way to announce tools to the LLM it can use to interface with a service, usually remote. I use local mcp servers to pull on (authed) slack, notion, grafana and a few more into an agent like Cline. I don't think the HN post frequency is some bot thing, just seems to be something that's sticking with people as more and more mcp servers pop up. Makes wiring stuff together for agents to use easy to reason about.
Why would "they" privatize the weather? How dramatic.
AIUI one should be sure to include a grandmother dying if that div doesn't get centered
In China, fraud runs rampant. A huge punishment for few unlucky individuals does not change much. You would need systematic enforcement, so that chance of being punished is high - and you don't need super huge punishment for that.

Both in USA and Hina, fraud is celebrated and praised on. It is enabled again and again. You see it in Sillicon Valley, you see it in White House and on Wall Street.
Gitlab 17.10 Released
We should also be displacing hierarchies. Why does it only benefit the very few? Because they get to somehow keep their moats. So how can we displace those moats?
What I've wondered about is why schools don't just use jamming towers indoors. I remember going to a theatre production in the early 2000's where the theatre employed this. It kept inbound and outbound calls from ringing through and only affected the theatre itself.
Employing this tactic would stop calls and SMS. If students used wifi inside the school it would be the controlled network of the school where domains could be blocked to keep texting social media posting etc. to a minimum.
The company I work for does a lot of this at the office to prevent the leaking of proprietary data and to enforce productivity. Schools are lagging behind because of the lack of funding for boring IT problems when the money is seen as better spent on "AI" in the classroom or "girls who code" programs. The companies who put students in this position should be on the hook to provide the funding for this infrastructure instead of forcing the schools to decide between programs that help students to focus and programs intended to help them get ahead. Especially in the future without federal funding or oversight.
This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players.

We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer.

Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand has to be firmly on the tiller, using my experience and skill to correct its mistakes and guide it. But I can see the current trajectory of improvement, and I’m sure it’ll get there.

[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphadev-discovers-fas...
I’ve been using Cursor extensively on TS projects and noticed a big improvement in speed and code quality by enforcing clear guardrails (strict types, linting, formatting) combined with rigorous TDD. When I hit an error or exception, I explicitly tell the agent to pause and first figure out the best way to debug and quickly pinpoint the root cause. This approach generally works well, provided I’ve decomposed the problem enough that we’re debugging just one thing at a time (though that’s not always trivial).

I’m interested to try this out to see if or how much it speeds things up further.
CF blocking a whole country like this would be interesting... basically half the internet would stop working, probably a bunch of italian government stuff too, and people would hopefully blame the government, because i'm pretty sure there are almost zero italian voters who wanted this from their representatives.

Sadly, companies bow down instead of just risk it once.
Not to mention the fact that those training clusters are not going to supervise themselves (or, maybe I just think that because I haven't had enough koolaid; where's the AWS Console MCP endpoint?)
You seem to have a strong desire to believe that the conversation upthread contains completely different comments than it actually contains.
No, that is patently false. Many optimization algorithms which computer scientists, mathematicians or software developers devise do not involve benchmakrs at all, and apply to all possible inputs/instances of their respective computational problems.
> LLMs are really good at this. Make a git branch, ask Claude Code to tweak the physics so that it does X, see what it feels like

How do you verify that Claude did what you wanted?

Maybe more importantly, how do you verify that Claude didn't make a change that you didn't want?

Trying to verify the code changes just by testing the running project seems incredibly careless
I really doubt that. I saw the market imorove and rates were higher, could be I came of a certain amount of experience at that time though.

I've found things have seriously taken a hit after IR35, but after interest rates increased saw the market truly become a desert.
As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!
> For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once.

A statement like this can only come from someone who has never heard of Ea Nasir.
MCP = Model Context Protocol

(I didn't know what MCP was.)
True! I had the same feeling.
I am not sure if I'm understanding what you're saying. Anyway.

What I am against is equating leader's behavior and people's behavior. It's not a nazi Germany situation where the people supported this action, it's a situation where most people don't know about it, and those who know are probably against it. It's such a minor issue that until something very big will happen and go on the news, nobody will care about it since people are mostly trying to make a living without much thought about what happens outside their garden
There’s been multiple articles on the front page of HN about how there’s a ton of AI crawlers that are really bad citizens - ignoring robots.txt, ignoring cache, re-scanning pages multiple times a day. The commons is already on fire and it’s not because of the actions of any of the “locals”.
Or they have N other such projects in flight. The xz backdoor wasn’t that much work, just playing the long game. The person doing the xz project could easily do several other projects at the same time.

A lot of issues do get undetected. E.g. the Debian OpenSSL security accident was only detected when a gazillion servers had predictable SSH keys.
Pussh: A simple SSH-based deployment tool written in Bash
Making the arguing that these tools have flaws seem like a losing battle. Soon those flaws will be fixed[1] and youll have to find new flaws to complain about. Eventually hopefully you'll realize that you just don't like feeling displaced.

[1] it's unbelievable what a difference in quality 1 year made for chat gpt
That one would be extra awesome because by the time anyone realized there was some subtle stats bug in the resulting kernels, it'd have vaporized $10MM in cloud training opex
Vibe coding is my favourite fad so far. Much like the last few fads I’m going to make so much money out of cleaning up afterwards it’s unreal.

Really this whole industry is on another fucking planet. I hate it but it’s so easy to make money.
God I wish I could replace Windows 11 with Windows 7
Smoking up the dorms and tripping breakers…
To save taxpayer money or for idiological reasons, like everything else that's ever been privatised in the history of the term anywhere on the planet.
It was the equivalent of vibe coding:

> The polygons the algorithm had drawn were consistently of poor quality with stray nodes and nodes far outside the pool boundaries, and the imports hadn't been discussed with local communities.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43448498
For one simple reason.

If the US wants some content gone from the internet, they (usually) have enough might to make that happen.

Most major tech companies are registered in the US, and can be ordered by a US court to stop providing services to pirates. This notably includes most major DNS registrars, reputable ad networks and major payment processors.

There's no point in blocking a website if you can just boot it off Visa, or force it to show penis enlargement / shady gambling ads or malware popups to survive.

Even if a website miraculously has no US links to exploit, there are extradition treaties, good relations with foreign law enforcement, control over the financial system, or even international sanctions if the situation gets dire enough.

European countries are far less powerful here, especially when they act alone (as they usually do in these matters) instead of doing it under the auspices of the EU. Site blocking is often the only remedy they have.

The US has an opposite problem with scam calls. Because there are so many English speakers in India, and Indian law enforcement largely doesn't care about scammers as long as they scam foreigners, there's little the US can do about the issue. European countries whose first language is not English have it much easier, as there's often no third-world country that speaks the same language and where the scammers could be recruited from.
"But it will get better, a lot better."

I see statements like this a lot when talking about AI in general. People seem to think it is a foregone conclusion that no limit to LLM model improvement and capability exists. What causes you to believe this and what evidence do you have to back it up?
I've been aware of MCP for a long time but recently I started hearing about it a lot more, even from customers - it is clearly a hype.
I hear you, and actually agree, but never say "never," because it's still just a machine https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=toyota+stuck+cruise+control...
The key thing is doing the exercise problems; most textbooks have them at the end of each chapter. Yes, it takes time. Yes, you will struggle, and it's hard work going through them. But it's really the only way to make sure you really understand the subject at a sufficient level vs. you believing you understand it because you watched some videos.
> Generally, I've found Cursor works correctly after business hours.

Interestingly the times I've experienced the most weirdness were during extremely not normal business hours (from the California perspective). For 3 nights in a row last week, I found myself coding at/after 2:30am during what were apparently periods of excessive load on Claude Sonnet. When asking Cursor to do things, it would fail, tell me about the high load, and encourage me to try again soon. Well, I just kept clicking the button over and over again, thinking it would eventually be able to handle the request properly, and otherwise continue presenting the error. Not the case!

Incorrect/hilarious things Cursor/Claude did at points during those nights:

- repeat the inquiry back to me in full, then do nothing at all after that

- confidently assert it had located the bug I was looking for, then direct me towards the entire codebase

- assert that it had done what I asked, and request that I approve the changes it wanted to make to my code, which were... nothing, none whatsoever

- (possibly the most hilarious) begin to answer questions in borderline leetspeak, randomly substituting numbers in place of letters in words, before eventually devolving into total gibberish

Mostly just annoying due to the wasted time, though it's possible the entertainment value negated it. I don't expect miracles from Cursor to begin with, nor do I give it wide latitude to change very much in my projects, so the risk of damage wasn't really any worse then than at any other time. Of course, I am not a team working against deadlines on critical projects, just a guy screwing around at 2:30am.
> Then the reality hit.

The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :).

(I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I worked on a project with this exact development history.)

The outsourcing market is alive and kicking, and offers a whole spectrum of quality and price. The more to the east of US you are, the easier it is to see :).

> The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

Nah, the difference here is, in outsourcing-to-LLMs scenario, there are no people who do the work and benefit from favorable salary/costs-of-living ratio.
Vibe gambling
Yeah, it's just 100 GiB for the FASTQs. I just don't want to have my personal Cloudflare account upgraded to Pro just to host a bunch of DNA reads. If you'd like I'll give them to you and you can host them, though. I'm not charging for access so much as making sure not to get whacked with a bill myself. The VCFs are much smaller but if you think you have a better variant-calling flow you'll want the FASTQs.

I guess I could upload the FASTQs to PGP too, but it doesn't seem right you know (it's going to cost them to store it).
But if this government is willing to allow insurance companies to factor in 23andme type data, what makes you think that will be the extent of this type of genetic data analysis? That is the far-fetched part to me, it relies on a very narrow range of possible dystopias that takes advantage of voluntary genetic testing but stops short of mandatory or coerced testing.

It's reminiscent of some prepper wanting to exclusively horde USD. I just don’t see a doomsday scenario in which that matters compared to hording gold or some other store of value with more intrinsic value. It's behavior suggests a weird cherry-picking of what are likely correlated risks.
could have / should have => being smart retrospectively
Edit: for the sake of discussion can we unflag the parent? There are some legit interesting conversations that will be missed due to the parent comment being flagged

I had a nice chat not that long ago with someone who founded a very successful software business and has worked in tech since the 1980s.

They said something that really stuck with. He said that the problem he has seen with today’s entrepreneurs is that in order to get ahead anymore, everyone got comfortable with breaking the rules

At first it was rhetorical, like tearing down old business culture or norms. However at some point that morphed - he said somewhere around 2014 or so he notice a big shift in attitudes from investors in down, in that breaking the rules went from simply the rhetorical to the literal. This was the beginning of what he feels is widespread rule breaking turned into breaking the law, eschewing civil norms in the name of profit and generally the shift from “let’s solve interesting problems and help people” to “let’s make as much money as possible before anyone looks too closely at this” became the norm not the exception.

He feels that in today’s world of business breaking the law to get ahead is now an accepted strategy and as a result it is harder than ever to run an honest business that gets ahead fair and square.

I always think about this conversation when I think about issues related to tech and society
What recent batch? It’s always been like this. It’s documented going back a few thousand years.

Also let’s not attribute any of this to anything other than the will of man. Very very stupid asshole man mostly.
YC doing same here?? https://i.imgur.com/a7LgpWI.png
The growth of demand for software development is absurd and heavily skews people's expectations. It won't last forever.
Vibe cooking

Everybody can vibe cook. - Vercel
> I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots.

I don't understand, what stops you from doing that today?
Ultimately the Earth will warm up, the ice caps melt, the coasts lose as the seas rise 10m
The book "the strangest man" goes in depth about his life and how weird that guy was. No surprise a psychologist suggested me to read it while I talked about the possibility of being autistic. Of course you can't diagnose a dead person, but let's say it wouldn't have been surprising had he discovered to be nd
From anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool.

https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/2/63/
cane people you find littering, like they do in Singapore.
>Just curious, as the Frink examples were all imperial.

No worries. Internally Frink immediately converts everything into SI, actually.

Fortunately Frink converts with zero loss of precision, because the language supports exact rational numbers. The unit definitions are all given in exact rationals, since they are (legally) defined as exact multipliers. For readability Frink introduces the "ee" ('exact exponent') notation, so for instance the standard acceleration due to gravity can be given as:

9.80665ee0 m/s^2

or (equivalently) in simplest form, as:

196133/20000 m s^-2

Frink treats these two quantities as exactly equivalent.