MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-04-18 22:13:10+00:00
Why are you so certain of this? The NSA has a long history of attempting to insert backdoors in cryptographic systems. Most recently they bribed RSA to make their compromised PRNG the default, which shipped in software as late as 2014, possibly even later.

And these are just the attempts we know about. What makes you think that they haven't succeeded and we just don't know about it?
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-18 22:13:25+00:00
The profitability will come when we factor in the environmental damage in the prices.

However the elephant in the room at least for aviation is that the energy per kg is about 50 higher for kerosene than for lithium batteries. A very large part of an airliner is fuel already. 50 as much? Not gonna happen. This will remain a really short range thing unless a really amazing breakthrough happens.
by disambiguation | 2025-04-18 22:14:04+00:00
All social injustice stems from the first law of economics: there isn't enough to go around. DEI will come and go, but so long as we lack the wealth to meet everyones needs (and wants), there will always be inequity. The real question is, does anyone have an idea of what a fair world looks like in the mean time? Why do people disagree on what that fair world looks like? Is it a fools errand to try and make the world fair when there's no clear goal to move towards? How do folks who support DEI think of it in the above context?
by machomaster | 2025-04-18 22:14:07+00:00
It's the other way around. ASI will come sooner than AGI.

Imagine an AI, which is millions of times smarter than humans in physics, math, chemistry, biology, can invent new materials, ways to produce energy, will make super decisions. It would be amazing and it would transform life on Earth. This is ASI, even if in some obscure test (strawberry test) is just can't reach human level and therefore can't be called proper AGI.

Airplanes are way (tens, thousands+) above birds in development (speed, distance, carrying capacity). They are superior to birds despite not being able to fully replicate birds' bone structure, feathers, biology and ability to poop.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-04-18 22:14:13+00:00
Strangely, the article doesn't mention any of the performance tuning benifits that Linux offers, such as being able to run system binaries and packages that are built with CPU microarchitecture optimisations for your specific CPU family; being a able to switch to a CPU scheduler that's more tuned to your workload thereby delivering better FPS and frametime stability (eg by using the LAVD and bpfland schedulers); being able to run your games under a compositor that's dedicated and optimised specifically for gaming (gamescope) etc.

Also, the article fails to mention how nice the overall user experience in Linux is, due to the lack of various annoyances which Windows has. For instance, Windows Updates tend to interrupt you, reboot at the most inopportune moment, and when you do reboot it holds your PC hostage with the message "working on updates, don't turn off your computer" (which can take ages), sometimes requiring multiple reboots. Linux has none of that nonsense - you update whenever you want to, reboot only once, the reboot is also instantaneous and doesn't hold your PC hostage. And if you're on an immutable/atomic distro, you get the advantage of fail-proof atomic updates, and the option for updates to be fully automatic, and if for some reason an update doesn't work out for you, you can rollback instantly right from the boot menu without needing to use a separate tool. Honestly, the superior update handling - especially with immutable distros - is a major selling point of Linux over Windows. Just ask any veteran Windows user and they'll say updates are probably one of the biggest annoyances in Windows, so I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention this.

The article also doesn't mention the issue of spyware and bloatware in Windows, which is not only annoying, but can also slow down your gaming experience. Of course, you can run a debloater tool - and most tech-savvy users do indeed run one - but you need to do so every month because Microsoft tends to sneak in new bloatware, or the changes you made to the packages/filesystem etc can get undone due to updates. Also, there's the issue of thirdparty spyware which no debloater handles, such as the rootkits installed by anticheat programs. Privacy issues aside, these rootkits are even known to cause BSODs and cause Windows Updates to fail! No such issues on Linux.

Finally, the biggest thing most gamers want is a hassle-free gaming experience without all of the above nonsense. Many of them want a console-like experience, where you come home after a hard day's work, power on your PC, and bam, you're off gaming without having to worry about a thing. Linux can offer that experience with gaming-optimised immutable distros such as PikaOS, or Bazzite where your PC boots straight into Steam (if you get the "deck"/htpc edition) and you can jump straight into your game, without having to worry about OS updates or any other maintenance tasks.

And that's what gamers want the most, they just want to game, without any nonsense from the OS. And the article fails to capture this. This, IMO, is why Linux is the best gaming system.
by summerlight | 2025-04-18 22:14:26+00:00
Not sure why you're trying to conflate intellectual capability problems into this and complicate the argument? The problem layout is the same. You delegate the works to someone so you cannot understand all the details. This makes a fundamental tension between trust and confidence. Their parameters might be different due to intellectual capability, but whoever you're going to delegate, you cannot evade this trade-off.

BTW, not sure if you have experiences of delegating some works to human interns or new grads and being rewarded by disastrous results? I've done that multiple times and don't trust anyone too much. This is why we typically develop review processes, guardrails etc etc.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-04-18 22:15:21+00:00
That does not make it legal and it does not eliminate the responsibility of asking for the warrant and using it.

Not saying there was a conspiracy here, but bad judges exist and arranging for a warrant is possible even for honest judges. If you are a policeman and you want to kill someone, get a judge to sign a "no knock" warrant, get in their house and shoot them, it happened many times; there were cases when the warrant was not even for the address of the poor guy that was killed and last year the warrant was for someone that borrowed a lawn mower from the judge who signed it and did not return it. So the warrant excuse is not so good.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-18 22:15:34+00:00
This is so vague as to be meaningless because body of research (attacks and hw-accelerated implementations), details, implementations, uses, and adversary/ies budget(s) matter. Furthermore, the obsession with optimizing for "fast" cryptographic algorithms/implementations undermine themselves when it comes to the cost of CPU-bound brute force attack which become cheaper and more attainable over time.
by crote | 2025-04-18 22:16:14+00:00
The math would already change quite a bit if airplanes had to play on a level playing field. For example, in the EU there are no taxes on aviation fuel. For a country like Germany that's the equivalent of a yearly 7 billion euro subsidy.

Add fuel taxes and CO2 surcharges, and same-continent rail travel suddenly becomes a lot more attractive!
by numpad0 | 2025-04-18 22:16:24+00:00
> They always assume that the technology will never get better, that industrial economies of scale don't exist

The technology hadn't improved not much more than a quarter's worth so far in my lifetime as far as EV is concerned.

Wh/kg figures hasn't changed, even fusion seems closer than solid state batteries, mileage figures for EVs is same 4mi/kWh, battery recycling still hasn't been figured out. They can't even recover Lithium out of Lithium ion batteries. wtf.

Meanwhile, computers had gotten like, up to petaflops per nation to per building to per node. Wireless Internet went from kilobits to gigabits. Everyone wears UNIX or Linux watches.

IMO, optimistic heuristics floating around EV is too shallow. The model just doesn't have enough parameters that it's expecting growth where it should not and vice versa. It just needs way more grounding to be meaningful.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-18 22:16:52+00:00
> They are an attractive option for some military ships, but I doubt anyone would be willing to risk it for regular commercial shipping.

There's been a few built over the years, mostly for research.

Russia apparently still operates one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

Despite hurtles you've pointed to it is still being considered:

https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research...

> This source of power confers some advantages. "You will have ships going maybe 50% faster because the fuel is essentially free once you have made the upfront capex investment," Sohmen-Pao said.

You achieve ~0 emissions AND avoid increasing transit time going with pure sailing ships.
by l72 | 2025-04-18 22:16:59+00:00
I always thought slashdot had an interesting concept with meta moderators. Their job was to look at how someone moderated a comment and verify if it was moderated correctly. If it was that moderator was giving more moderation points (how many times they could up/down vote something). If it wasn’t they lost points.

You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.
by chrisrodrigue | 2025-04-18 22:17:00+00:00
There's no mention of what Python version this is actually in.

After some digging, it looks like the answer is 3.14 [0], so we won't be seeing this until October [1].

One could argue that this is a security fix (just read the first sentence of the blog post) and should be included in all the currently supported versions (>=3.9) of Python [2].

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Doc/whatsnew/3.1...

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0745/

[2] https://devguide.python.org/versions/
by ben_w | 2025-04-18 22:17:19+00:00
Oceans can be extremely rough, but even mild waves make it inappropriate to approximate PV as thin.

The requisite area to power a ship is huge, something like 1.4km^2 (ballpark estimate for 20% cells, reasonable capacity factor guess, 60 MW consumption requirement). If a ship is about 30m wide, it's trailing about 45 km of PV. You're not even into 4 digits of cargo ships before the combined length is longer than the circumference of the planet.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-18 22:17:49+00:00
Comparing XMPP/Matrix to Slack is like comparing Telnet to Chrome. Yes, they both display text, they're both interactive. But the latter has about 5,000x more features, which is why we all use it.

Yet with Slack, it doesn't use a standard. Could you build an app like Slack that includes XMPP/Matrix along with a whole lot of other stuff? Sure. But without the whole kitchen sink, you still don't have a standard other apps will follow. You have a proprietary app plus XMPP. Other apps won't be compatible with it. Which is the case with Slack's competitors.

Think of a web browser. It's larger than a kernel. It's probably the biggest, fattest, meatiest, most feature-rich application in the world. (And it should be, because it's a freakin' application platform at this point.) But it all runs on.... standards! Every part of it. I'm saying, do that, but for the massively feature-rich, complex, large, almost unwieldy, but insanely productive, communications platform that is Slack.

I get that a lot of people don't really understand what the big deal about Slack is. A lot of people thought the same thing about web browsers back in the day. But once they started using them a lot, they got it. It's not just a document viewer, just like Slack isn't just chat.
by seszett | 2025-04-18 22:18:05+00:00
We also have electric ferries here in Antwerp and Ostend. I don't think they're hybrid, although it's not clear when they get charged, I would assume during the wait times (about 15 minutes wait and 5 minutes ferrying) but I have not noticed them actually connecting anywhere, maybe I just haven't noticed though. The communication says it can sail for three hours on batteries, so they must charge during the day while operating.

And at my other place around Nantes they're building a new ferry that is supposed to be hybrid electric/hydrogen. I'm not very optimistic on hydrogen though so I don't know. The latest info say the budget has tripled and the delivery has been reported from 2026 to 2030.
by ingvar77 | 2025-04-18 22:18:16+00:00
I think it was a great idea, useful in many cases (confirmations, approvals, votes, unsubscribes, forms, up-to-date flights and bookings info etc etc. I for sure admire that I can accept meeting invites right inside email in Gmail. Email must stay the same - it has HTML/text parts, these will stay same and can be accessed in 5 years. If someone really wants to include dynamic info in email they will do anyway- either link to webpage or dynamic image.
by troyvit | 2025-04-18 22:19:10+00:00
I think we're disagreeing about what real solutions are. To me, banning TikTok won't change anything because Instagram, Youtube, etc. will take over what they did and/or VPNs will become the new awesome. To you, altering how families are formed or making child care free, or establishing UBI are (probably accurately) impossible dreams.

So what would systemic changes and improvements would you make, keeping in mind the First Amendment?
by mabster | 2025-04-18 22:19:11+00:00
We were using Luajit with our own extensions with our own binding mechanisms that included automatic translation of indices. And we had A LOT of bindings.

There was some "fun" there. Luajit C functions uses space indentation that becomes tabs every 8 spaces, i.e. mixed tabs and spaces. And his custom assembler for the assembly portions.

I personally spent a lot of time "refactoring code to generate less garbage" as we had purposeful garbage collection in our idle time.

One of the advantages with Lua was that everyone could code in it. I.e. for our games all the artists, sound engineers and producers were developing Lua which was super productive.

But the function signature one in particular - that would have saved me a lot of stress on release nights!
by busyant | 2025-04-18 22:19:18+00:00
"By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures," Kennedy said.

The "hilarious" aspect of this comment is that it makes a testable prediction: "eliminate those exposures" means ASD rates should plummet.

a) They won't plummet.

b) Someone will re-define the criteria for diagnosing ASD to make it seem like they did.
by testing22321 | 2025-04-18 22:19:31+00:00
This x 1000.

A friend was a career LAPD detective, and he gave me the talk. He said because I’m a nice guy I might try to help the police by explaining what I saw in detail. He was adamant that I never ever do that, because in the absence of someone to pin it on, they would find a way to pin it on me. He saw it as literally their job.

No matter what, even if you are just standing there when something happens, don’t talk to the police.
by AdrianB1 | 2025-04-18 22:22:10+00:00
>> Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to protect the rights of people

Yes, next time they do it the data cannot be used in court as it was already declared anti-constitutional by that Circuit and good faith argument cannot be used. Good faith and not knowing the law are different; good faith can be used when the law is not clear enough and there was no rule to clarify.

It happens very often with 2A restrictions that are overturned by courts, but they are in effect for years and when they are repelled by courts then similar laws are passed just to be repelled years later, but during all the years there is an anti-constitutional law in place with prohibitions. So police cannot do cell searches, but local governments can enact anti-constitutional laws with intention and wipe rights successfully, for example laws that mandates telecom companies to provide the data to the police.
by spacechild1 | 2025-04-18 22:22:44+00:00
I'm building 2D computer game environments for musical performances and interactive installations. I ended up developing my own little engine. The current iteration is based on:

- SDL2 for input and window management

- OpenGL for rendering

- libpd for sound generation and processing

- RtAudio for audio I/O

- sol2 for Lua bindings

- Qt6 for the tile map editor

I'm not targeting the web, though.

> The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to graphical elements

Are the sounds generated from game events? In that case, time synchronization between game clock and audio clock is indeed an interesting problem with multiple solutions, each with their own trade-offs.

If the game only acts as the user interface, you can treat it like in a regular DAW.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-18 22:22:49+00:00
> A different type of hard failure is when we detect that we’ll never reach our overall goal. This requires a goal that can be programmatically verified outside of the LLM.

This is the largest issue : using LLMs as a black box means for most goals, we can't rely on them to always "converge to a solution" because they might get stuck in a loop trying to figure out if they're stuck in a loop.

So then we're back to writing in a hardcoded or deterministic cap on how many iterations counts as being "stuck". I'm curious how the authors solve this.
by saghm | 2025-04-18 22:24:01+00:00
I thought that copyright holders could relicense code however they wanted? I don't think GPL or not is the issue, but whether or not all third-party contributors have assigned the copyright of their contributions to the party trying to relicense. My understanding is that this is often difficult or even impossible in practice to obtain after the fact codebases with large numbers of contributors over the years if signing something ahead of time wasnt't a requirement previously, and I don't have any insight into whether Wordpress is in this situation or not, but I don't think whether the code is GPL or not is relevant to this
by chimpanzee | 2025-04-18 22:24:32+00:00
I’m quite curious why this, me sharing my own highly-applicable experience, is being downvoted. I’ll take the additional downvotes simply to be given an answer.

If it’s due to a lack of clarity, I’ll gladly elucidate here. (I can’t directly edit the comment at this point)

Edit: Haha thanks for the extra downvotes HN. So predictable.
by rayiner | 2025-04-18 22:24:34+00:00
I’m trying to establish what people think “diversity” means. The foundational premise of the civil rights movement is that race is a superficial characteristic and people are the same. Accepting that as true, the concept of “diversity” makes sense only as a confirmation about the absence of irrational racial discrimination.

But OP suggested that diversity itself was a good thing, which makes no sense because racial differences aren’t meaningful. All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
by repstosb | 2025-04-18 22:24:38+00:00
Amdahl's Law, like most 20th-century performance "wisdom" and metrics, focuses excessively on instruction count, neglecting memory and I/O pressure. 64 cores doesn't mean 64 independent cache pyramids and memory buses. In real life, the difference between CPU cycle frequency and memory latency is so great that memory pressure primarily determines performance, whereas core count really only matters to the extent that it contributes to that memory pressure.
by sitharus | 2025-04-18 22:25:09+00:00
Where I live companies are moving to electric ferries because they’re cheaper to operate, require less maintenance, and are much quieter for the passengers. Plus they don’t emit any exhaust fumes while idling at the dock.

The port also has an electric tug boat, which their reports say is very handy because it changes power output much faster than diesel tugs. Charging times are not a factor according to their reports.

Our power grid is 80+% renewable though.

Of course the article ignores that it’s easier to improve the emissions of a few large powerplants than every car, ferry and scooter, and that the minerals in batteries don’t disappear after use.
by Retric | 2025-04-18 22:25:58+00:00
Flying an aircraft requires talking to air traffic control which existing systems can’t do. Though obviously not a huge issue when the aircraft already has radios, except all those FAA regulations apply to every single aircraft you’ve retrofitting.

The advantage of general intelligence is using a small set of hardware now lets you tackle a huge range of tasks or in the above aircraft types. We can mix speakers, eyes, and hands to do a vast array of tasks. Needing new hardware and software for every task very quickly becomes prohibitive.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-18 22:26:22+00:00
> but putting a reactor on each plane would probably have negative externalities.

Probably? It would be a disaster every time one crashes, would carry a huge proliferation and terrorism risk. Oof.

In the 50's some countries were that crazy and they even put reactors in space. Two of which crashed and one contaminated a huge area in Canada. Luckily common sense prevailed and these things don't happen anymore. Though nuclear ships still exist, there's only a few icebreakers in the civilian fleet AFAIK.
by zik | 2025-04-18 22:27:50+00:00
His estimate the LCoE of an electric vehicle with lithium batteries is off by a factor of ten. My back-of-the-napkin calculations make it to be $0.22–0.25 per kWh.

Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car - in terms of their energy costs per mile, including energy storage. Using the above numbers the EV comes out to around $0.07 per mile including the lifetime costs of the battery, and the ICE comes out to around $0.125 per mile.

In short - his numbers are completely wrong and when calculated correctly prove the opposite of what he's trying to say.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-18 22:28:01+00:00
For the marine uses specifically, the use of hydrofoils promises to dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for movement at any decent speed.

Previously hydrofoils weren't used because they rely on complex feedback mechanisms to maintain ride height despite waves etc.

Sure, someone could pair hydrofoils with gasoline engines, but I suspect they won't, and that means hydrofoil+electric will win out over conventional hull+hydrocarbon fuels for a bunch of use cases.
by aurizon | 2025-04-18 22:28:42+00:00
See if some benefits are available - CEO might be amenable. Careers are not summer jobs, they are built year by year, often as the company grows and new niches appear that need paid training. Often paid training has a duty to stay 1-2 years and can be pro-rated because some training = $$$ and they want a degree of permanence. Some people do not know how happy they are - until they are not! Insert shot of Bugs Bunny hammering the point of a 500 pound bomb = CRINGE = Marks bomb DUD - or not...