Posts

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Current state of Android USB tethering?

Ask HN: Current state of Android USB tethering? 4 by namesarehard | 0 comments on Hacker News. Does anyone know which Android phones besides Pixel 6 and newer support CDC NCM USB tethering? I tried few Samsung phones (S21 - S25), Xiaomi Redmi 13 and they only support RNDIS. Also, I compiled a list of my findings, and if anyone is interested, it’s open for contributions: https://ift.tt/jKmb9lp

New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: How to Think about AI

Tell HN: How to Think about AI 3 by keepamovin | 5 comments on Hacker News. Yep, that's the title. Stop thinking of AI like an unfair "cheatcode" and start thinking of it as a new programming language. Maybe in other domains, this analogy doesn't match. But that's okay. You're mostly concerned about coding/sysadmin/etc. People think that AI lowers the bar too much, eroding the influence of experts, degrading quality. Maybe so. But this is not new. The same was surely said when C threatened the monopoly of B, and machine code, etc. C allowed "not real programmers" to write programs. This was anathema. A violation of the sacred codex! Heretical! And yet, it worked. Now C is beloved of (almost) all. At least revered. And so on, and so on. AI is just a new programming language. It is not "conscious". It is not AGI. It is barely a form of mechanized intelligence. It is not your friend. It is just a thing. A tool. A very useful, multi-tool. Bu...

New ask Hacker News story: The new Grok on X is aligned to favor Elon Musk over anyone else when asked

The new Grok on X is aligned to favor Elon Musk over anyone else when asked 12 by kranke155 | 0 comments on Hacker News. Multiple users on X have caught onto to this. I expect they will correct this shortly. But it seems obvious that the Grok on X (which is different from the model on Grok.com) is Elon Musk aligned. The examples include presenting the same historical theory as coming from Bill Gates (doesn't agree) or from Elon Musk (strong theory). Users picked up on that and started asking nonsensical questions. I found a thread of this because Grok seems disabled now, it wouldn't answer my attempts at replicating these results. In that thread Grok proceeds to say that Elon would not have rested on the seventh day, unlike God. That he would have delivered Fallout 4 better than Todd Howard. That he would get more citations in economics Daron Acemoglu. Many of these are literal screenshots I made myself. I'm sure they will be scrubbed soon. Link: https://ift.tt/q6n3QZh ...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How would you architect a RAG system for 10M+ documents today?

Ask HN: How would you architect a RAG system for 10M+ documents today? 2 by Ftrea | 0 comments on Hacker News. I'm tasked with building a private AI assistant for a corpus of 10 million text documents (living in PostgreSQL). The goal is semantic search and chat, with a requirement for regular incremental updates. I'm trying to decide between: Bleeding edge: Implementing something like LightRAG or GraphRAG. Proven stack: Standard Hybrid Search (Weaviate/Elastic + Reranking) orchestrated by tools like Dify. For those who have built RAG at this scale: What is your preferred stack for 2025? Is the complexity of Graph/LightRAG worth it over standard chunking/retrieval for this volume? How do you handle maintenance and updates efficiently? Looking for architectural advice and war stories.

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Vitalik says that QC might break ECC before 2028. This is crazy, right?

Ask HN: Vitalik says that QC might break ECC before 2028. This is crazy, right? 4 by jMyles | 1 comments on Hacker News. Quantum computers haven't even factored a three-digit number yet, right? I don't have handy the equivalent in discrete log solution, but... even if somehow (??!) they gain the 4+ orders of magnitude for Shor's space computation, there remain major unsolved boring problems like error correction and cooling, right? Or have there been some galaxy-shaking developments in QC that actually make this somehow plausible? Some recent, relevant, major discussions I brushed-up on before posting this: * Willow announcement: https://ift.tt/o7CqdzY * Majorana 1 announcement: https://ift.tt/LkWgbRX * OpenSSH statement: https://ift.tt/5X7GYaH * The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy": https://ift.tt/9sbKfQd edit: I do want to say, I like Vitalik a lot and I think he has a beautiful and friendly brain and heart; the few times I hung with hi...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Have you ever seen a perfect codebase?

Ask HN: Have you ever seen a perfect codebase? 2 by mcdow | 2 comments on Hacker News. In my experience even the best software projects have a few skeletons in their closet, blemishes on an otherwise well-built project. At the end of the day, we all have to build things that simply work and provide business value. Striving for perfect code is not the goal. But it does make me wonder: does perfect software even exist? If not, what's the gold standard?

New ask Hacker News story: Meta-algorithmic judicial reasoning engine

Meta-algorithmic judicial reasoning engine 2 by YuriKozlov | 0 comments on Hacker News. We’re experimenting with an architecture for automated adjudication that doesn’t rely on rule bases or statistical prediction. Instead of encoding law as “if–else” rules or training a model on past cases, we model abstract legal reasoning as a meta-algorithm: a control layer that orchestrates several heterogeneous components — hard-coded logic, numerical modeling, and structured natural-language procedures executed by an LLM. The core idea is that the structure of legal reasoning (which stages to run, how to select and interpret norms, how to balance competing interests, when to revise earlier conclusions) is expressed in a strongly typed pseudocode / meta-language. Some parts of this meta-algorithm are implemented directly in code (procedural checks, basic qualification, graph updates), some are mathematical (utilities, equilibria, fuzzy uncertainty), and some are written as high-level instructi...