MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smittywerben | 2025-04-27 18:03:13+00:00
You are correct to question the premise. I don't care about Wikipedia, I am asking about some systemic decisions from decades ago that most people take for granted these days. The Red Cross doesn't need defending because the AMA backs it up due to tax deductions and medical licensing/lobbying overlap. Yet, in this political thread, Wikipedia moderators argue that their curation is the value and that it's not political and not the contribution, similar to Stack Overflow moderators hollowing out their site.

This brings me to the handling of actual experts, like medical doctors. How could the Wikimedia Foundation justify removing a licensed doctor like James Heilman ("Doc James") from its Board, a decision even Jimmy Wales supported? I get that they put him back shortly after, but that's so arbitrary. Someone putting their professional credibility on the line to provide accurate public information without explaining the original removal publicly? Yes, he was reinstated shortly after, but the initial act and the lack of a clear public explanation for the original removal feel arbitrary and undermine trust. Here was someone putting their professional credibility on the line for accuracy, and they were treated in such a dismissive way. The exact type of caustic politics causes this split between public health advice and the medical profession. Frankly, I'd rather see funding go directly to the experts if this is how they treat people.

Imagine if Wikipedia were frozen as a "2017 Doc James Edition" snapshot. Would that be so bad if that could slash operating costs by 99%? I could live with a slightly outdated encyclopedia for a few years if it meant escaping the constant, resource-draining burden of moderation and the endless debates about needing more free contributions, now we're overloaded and needing more funding/moderators. Then the donations could go to archive.org, which I hope Wikipedia donates to, since I mostly use Wikipedia for links to archive.org snapshots, since I like to see the source, not what people "curate" for me.

The constant fundraising solicitations are grating when contrasted with how they treated Doc James, or when users are lectured about their "privilege" for accessing supposedly free information. It seems Wikipedia doesn't inherently need my contribution or money; they had a highly dedicated expert, pushed him out (temporarily, but damagingly), and kept asking for donations. Claiming that donating today supports the same original mission feels increasingly misleading. Doc James must have the patience of a saint. It infuriates me when that kind of undervaluation happens, and they get to deduct taxes "for the public good," I get yelled at by the moonlighting Wikipedia/Discord mods for even questioning it. It's no surprise he's focused on teaching now.

Anyways, thanks for not attacking me for a seemingly dumb question. I don't have the answer to my question either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
by nine_k | 2025-04-27 18:03:39+00:00
Be certain to use acid-free paper [1]. The typical cheap bright-white paper of today will have hard time staying in a good condition in 100-200 years. Ideally go for the ultra-durable cotton-rag paper used e.g. for paper money.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper
by asiekierka | 2025-04-27 18:04:40+00:00
> Thing is, GPL requires you to explicitly allow that behavior, so HBC can't use GPL software.

Couldn't, not at the time. HBC has been open-sourced some time ago, sans DRM, as the Wii has long lost commercial relevance beyond enthusiast communities. This open-source re-release is what the repository is.
by Jensson | 2025-04-27 18:05:01+00:00
> The war started before that happened with the invasion of Crimea

That wasn't a war though, nobody called it a war between Ukraine and Russia at the time. Read news from the time, no mention of war between Ukraine and Russia.

The Ukraine war was very different than Russia other aggressions, the resource scarcity likely triggered this extra aggressive behavior. You can say this resource scarcity was ultimately their fault, but a starving beast will fight very aggressively regardless whose fault it is that its starving.

If the Crimean water crisis didn't happen then likely Russia would just have continued to incite rebellions and annex territory that way, and not declare a full scale war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-27 18:05:24+00:00
That's true, of course, but SIMs can be reprogrammed by the carrier on a whim. Plus, there are handover features that command the modem to downgrade the connection from the network side, and who knows if the modem will listen to the SIM's config if the network commands it to do something.

I haven't needed to enter APNs in years, there are standards to provision those by SMS if they're missing and most of them are pre-configured in the phone's OS.

I think limiting this at the modem side will be more effective than reprogramming the SIM card, but the specifications are open enough that you could take a look at a SIM's contents by throwing it in a reader.

You could also look at the code and blobs dealing with eSIMs, as they provide the same features but often come packaged in the form of software.

Check your local laws before you start messing with SIM cards, though, altering certain identifiers can be a crime.
by screye | 2025-04-27 18:08:07+00:00
In defense of democracy, this issue was less prevalent until the last 30 years.

You don't need everyone to agree on things in a democracy. The issue is lack of leadership and unclear power hierarchy (who matters- house, senate, president, state, or courts).

Democracies with clarity function well. Switzerland leans into state rights, and each canton operates with little federal overhead. The Indian president and senate are weak. The power of civil litigation is limited. So, if you win the states and the house, then you can get a lot done. The Indian house has a full majority and is in the middle of a building boom. Hell, the US built the entire interstate system in a democracy.

IMO, the US's problem is disproportional optics. On paper, the House> president > Senate> courts. But media attention is towards courts > president > senate > house. Roe v Wade was the biggest story of last year, but on paper, the House could've made a bipartisan decision that completely overrode the courts. People are most interested in Presidential elections, but the president has little power. So you end up in a lame-duck Obamacare-style compromise or a Trump-style tariff tantrum. People democratically voted for the president. But turns out, that's not the person who holds power. The house is supposed to be all powerful, but can't pass a single bill. That's how you get wonky policies smuggled through the only unlock unblockable bill. (Budget)

Democracies like any system can fail. At least with democracies, the bad outcome is that nothing gets done. In authoritarian, you get famine, genocide, or coups.

Hot take, but the US should get rid of the senate and limit the power of civic litigation. House introduces the bill, President signs it. Courts step in if the bill is illegal. No filibuster, promote simple majorities.
by tiu | 2025-04-27 18:08:10+00:00
I was playing around with Fortran (modern-ish) recently was pretty impressed with the entire ecosystem. `fpm` is really really nice to work, pretty decent LSP server (fortls) as well as good enough documentation.

I am not sure however I like the verbosity of it where if you are using 'raw' editors without snippet support, it becomes a chore very soon.

All in all it is nice to use and play around with.
by nsbk | 2025-04-27 18:08:22+00:00
I'm short on time and couldn't read the whole article, but apparently metabolic health is a huge factor that doesn't seem to be pointed at here. Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Same goes for other metabolic health impacting factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and the likes.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-27 18:08:32+00:00
The tradeoff is that this is very expensive at the scale of large geospatial data models both in terms of performance and storage. In practice, it is much more common to just take regular snapshots of the database. If you want to go back in time, you have to spin-up an old snapshot of the database model.

A less obvious issue is that to make this work well, you need to do time interval intersection searches/joins at scale. There is a dearth of scalable data structures and algorithms for this in databases.
by Modified3019 | 2025-04-27 18:08:59+00:00
You can take that as meaning “I’ve never had a noticed issue that was detected by extensive ram testing, or solved by replacing ram”.

I got into overclocking both regular and ECC DDR4 ram for a while when AMD’s 1st gen ryzen stuff came out, thanks to asrock’s x399 motherboard which unofficially supporting ECC, allowing both it’s function and reporting of errors (produced when overlocking)

Based on my own testing and issues seen from others, regular memory has quite a bit of leeway before it becomes unstable, and memory that’s generating errors tends to constantly crash the system, or do so under certain workloads.

Of course, without ECC you can’t prove every single operation has been fault free, but as some point you call it close enough.

I am of the opinion that ECC memory is the best memory to overclock, precisely because you can prove stability simply by using the system.

All that said, as things become smaller with tighter specifications to squeeze out faster performance, I do grow more leery of intermittent single errors that occur on the order of weeks or months in newer generations of hardware. I was once able to overclock my memory to the edge of what I thought was stability as it passed all tests for days, but about every month or two there’d be a few corrected errors show up in my logs. Typically, any sort of stability is caught by manual tests within minutes or the hour.
by galeaspablo | 2025-04-27 18:09:01+00:00
Let’s separate two advantages in the average case with Kafka.

1. Sequential IO when reading from disk.

2. Use of disk cache (instead of reading from disk) when re-reading recently read events.

#2 helps when you have many consumer groups reading from the tail. And this advantage would extend to index-based streaming.

But #1 would not fully extend to index-based streaming.

When does this matter? When adding a new consumer group you would lose the speed advantage of sequential IO, because it consumes from the beginning (which isn’t in disk cache).

BUT this has become less important now that SSDs are so prevalent and affordable. Additionally, in practice, the bottleneck isn’t in disk IO. Consumers tend to perform IO in other systems that incur O(log n) per insert. Or network cards can get saturated way before disk IO is the limiting factor.

I speculate that we got Kafka et al because we didn’t have such abundance of SSDs in the early 2010’s.

So, returning to your question, you wouldn’t notice the difference in the average case, as long as there are SSDs under the hood.
by rival_elf | 2025-04-27 18:09:31+00:00
> Criminal IMSI catchers are pretty much dead,

This isn't true, there are major incidents related to IMSI-catchers going on globally right now. E.g. last week from Japan: https://newsonjapan.com/article/145466.php, https://commsrisk.com/amateur-detectives-find-numerous-fake-..., and mass arrests happening in Thailand related to the operation of them recently.

To see news related to them, search "Fake Base Stations" or "SMS Blaster", as this is how they're commonly referred to in the media now.

Other notable highlights from the last few years include: the news from Paris a few years ago where police detonated a car with an imsi-catcher in it because they thought it was a bomb, but actually the driver was being paid to send out sms spam via 2g downgrade attacks: https://commsrisk.com/paris-imsi-catcher-mistaken-for-bomb-w.... Also the attempt to disrupt the federal elections in the Phillippines using a kind of "SMS blaster" that takes advantage of unauthenticated emergency alert messages, so a step beyond the "classic" imsi catching attack that we haven't seen used in the wild before.
by klysm | 2025-04-27 18:09:40+00:00
That is not a _justification_ - merely an _explanation_ of how we got here. I fully agree that a historical understanding of how we got to where we are is essential for understanding why we have what we have. However, it's critical to not conflate the history and evolution as a justification for why the current system sucks so much! I agree there is a massive amount of complexity and branching to consider, but autotools and the whole C ecosystem does a terrible job of tackling that complexity, and introduces a huge amount of accidental complexity into the solution space.

The co-evolution of hardware, software, and all other moving targets has landed us in a fairly abysmal local maxima. More recently developed toolchains (e.g. zig, rust, etc.) show us that there are much better ways to tackle these problems. Of course they introduce other ones, but we can do so much better.
by devnull3 | 2025-04-27 18:10:17+00:00
I think an in-between approach could be:

1. Identify top-N tenants

2. Separate the DB for these tenants

The top-N could be based on mix of IOPS, importance (revenue wise), etc.

The data model should be designed in such a way that from rows pertaining to each tenant can be extracted.
by almosthere | 2025-04-27 18:10:53+00:00
I think late stage capitalism might be here. I think we can pull it back, but one thing that might need to happen is get to a point where mergers/acquisitions are extremely hard to do or impossible.

If we had thousands of smaller companies that find and fill their niche, they can adapt quickly to change and keep prices low because they are constantly competing with 30 other companies.

As soon as you allow for a mega corp to gobble up 40% of the market, you find out quickly that another 40% is at dinner with them deciding on next years prices together.

Two years in a row now I walked into ABC Supply (a roofing supply company). They printed out letters from Malarkey, GAF, Owens Corning and a few others and taped them up on a board. The words are almost identical in stating that this year on April 1 they will have a price increase between 7 and 10 percent.

Keep in mind that NONE of these companies are depending on Chinese materials, and share no parent company. But together they own 100% of the local market. Their prices are within $5 a square of each other. No matter which roof you chose, you're paying the same price.

The people at ABC are sick of my joke I always tell them: "I guess price fixing is no longer illegal!"

I'll try to get a picture of this board on Monday and post it here.
by spacemadness | 2025-04-27 18:11:26+00:00
It is relevant. There are a lot of folks trying to control all narratives regarding MAGA and the US move toward fascism and reactionary right wing populism, even if loosely affiliated, on here by eliminating content. That’s what fascists do after all. It’s not difficult in it being an open forum. Tech is intertwined with politics as it turns out, and a post by PG calling out Thiel is incredibly relevant to HN for obvious reasons.
by throwaway98797 | 2025-04-27 18:11:38+00:00
excellent write up

advice ultimately boils down to work harder in judging talent.

everyone wants a single word answer oh sally is great, john is okay.

the truth it’s hard work to right level people.

no one gets it right.

systems get co-opted by ruthless people for personal gain.

only hard and consistent work by leadership can reduce, but not eliminate the harm
by 256_ | 2025-04-27 18:11:59+00:00
This is addressed in the second paragraph of TFA:

"Stuff which is somehow limited (stack overflows, arbitrary configuration, etc) is still considered Turing complete, since all "physical" Turing machines are resource limited."

In my opinion, worrying about infinite memory, in regards to Turing completeness, makes the task of implementing computation much less interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure CSS only does one generation (or a finite number of them) before stopping anyway.
by satanfirst | 2025-04-27 18:12:12+00:00
Software hadn't consumed the world yet, so there was plenty of programming in higher languages to bring in 999 of every 1000 programmers in to when virtually no one was still needed for assembly.. I'm skeptical that there's much need for more technical specialists at the next higher levels as business people can now get all the help they were supposed to get in codeless systems, etc.
by busyant | 2025-04-27 18:12:28+00:00
I took screenshots of existing 20 year old digital photos ... so ... no relevant exif data.

o3 was quite good at locating, even when I gave it pics with no discernible landmarks. It seemed to work off of just about anything it could discern from the images:

* color of soil

* type of telephone pole

* type of bus stop

* tree types, tree sizes, tree ages, etc.

* type of grass. etc.

It got within a 50 mile radius on the two screenshots I uploaded that had no landmarks.

If I uploaded pics with discernible landmarks (e.g., distant hill, etc.), it got within ~ 20 mile radius.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-27 18:14:29+00:00
> The build should include target-specific files, as opposed to creating a maze of ifdefs inside the code.

Hard disagree. What makes you think it's a maze of ifdefs?

Compiling a library should be as simple as "compile every .c/.cpp file and link them into a static/shared lib". The nightmare maze is when you don't do that and you need to painfully figure out which files you should and shouldn't include in this particular build. It's horrible.

Far far far simpler is to stick with the rule "always compile all files". It's very simple to ifdef out an entire file with a single, easily understood ifdef at the top.

I do agree you don't want the middle of a file to be a fully of 10 different ifdef cases. There's an art to whether to switch within a file or produce different files. No hard and fast rule there.

Fundamentally you put either your branching logic in the code or in the build system. And given that source files should be compatible with an unbounded array of potential build systems it is therefore superior to solve the problem once in the code itself.

I am currently trying to get the Zig glibc source/headers to compile directly via clang and trying to figure out which files to include or not include is infuriatingly unclear and difficult. So no, I strongly and passionately disagree that build-system is where this logic should occur. It's fucking awful.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-27 18:15:04+00:00
Fortunately, there are independent multibillion dollar industries who would prefer to solve it with semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retratutide.

Of course, the article makes the case that there's no epidemic so none of this is really important. We don't have to go "oh woe is me oh woe is me" constantly.
by fredrikholm | 2025-04-27 18:15:15+00:00
They make it near impossible to extend from the outside.

I can pass a Reader interface to your function, but I cannot (easily) add a

> | UnusualProtocol(Socket)

as a third party consumer.

Other than that, sum types are the better abstraction. With exhaustive first class pattern matching (eg. with proper matching on destructuring), nothing comes close in terms of ergonomics.
by MelodyUwU | 2025-04-27 18:16:13+00:00
i dont know of wii homebrew but in the nds space there is BlocksDS which is not part of devkitpro, and in gba space you can get (experimental) toolchains from wf-pacman (wonderful toolchain). sadly, the nintendo homebrew space is ruled by devkitpro, and i spent some time trying to find an alternative to it, but that doesnt seem to exist right now.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-04-27 18:16:40+00:00
> The only feature from ZFS that I would like, is the corruption detection.

I run ZFS on my main server at home (Proxmox: a Linux hypervisor based on Debian and Proxmox ships with ZFS) but...

No matter the FS, for "big" files that aren't supposed to change, I append a (partial) cryptographic checksum to the filename. For example:

20240238-familyTripBari.mp4 becomes 20240238-familyTripBari-b3-8d77e2419a36.mp4 where "-b3-" indicates the type of cryptographic hash ("b3" for Blake3 in my case for it's very fast) and 8d77e2419a36 is the first x hexdigits of the cryptographic hash.

I play the video file (or whatever file it is) after I added the checksum: I know it's good.

I do that for movies, pictures, rips of my audio CDs (although these ones are matched with a "perfect rips" online database too), etc. Basically with everything that isn't supposed to change and that I want to keep.

I then have a shell script (which I run on several machines) that uses random sampling where I pick the percentage of files that have such a cryptographic checksum in their filenames that I want to check and that verifies that each still has its checksum matching. I don't verify 100% of the files all the time. Typically I'll verify, say, 3% of my files, randomly, daily.

Does it help? Well sure yup. For whatever reason one file was corrupt on one of my system: it's not too clear why for the file had the correct size but somehow a bit had flipped. During some sync probably. And my script caught it.

The nice thing is I can copy such files on actual backups: DVDs or BluRays or cloud or whatever. The checksum is part of the filename, so I know if my file changed or not no matter the OS / backup medium / cloud or local storage / etc.

If you have "bit flip anxiety", it helps ; )
by mbuda | 2025-04-27 18:17:36+00:00
DISCLAIMER: The co-founder and CTO of Memgraph here.

To add more context, Memgraph Enterprise pricing is explained under https://memgraph.com/pricing: "Starting at $25,000 per year for 16 GB, Memgraph has an all-inclusive, simple pricing model that scales with your workload without restrictions. No charge for compute. No charge for replicas. No charge for algorithms. No Surprises.".

In addition, Memgraph Community is free (standard BSL license, which turns into Apache2 4 years after release date, https://github.com/memgraph/memgraph/blob/master/licenses/BS...), and it has many features that are usually considered enterprise (users, replication, not a single degradation in performance or scale, etc.).

Please elaborate more about why the pricing seems expensive, or put it into the infra-cost perspective :pray:
by dbdoskey | 2025-04-27 18:18:32+00:00
This is IMHO where the interesting direction will be. How do we architecture code so that it is optimized around chatbot development? In the past areas of separation were determined by api stability, deployment concerns, or even just internal team politics. In the future a rep might be separated from a monolith repo to be an area of responsibility that a chatbot can reason about, and not get lost in the complexity.
by rival_elf | 2025-04-27 18:20:51+00:00
Tangentially related, the latest major Android release supports updates from the modem with details about whenever your IMSI/IMEI/unencrypted SUCI are disclosed to the network (with support for some contextual information, e.g. which protocol message was it disclosed in), as well as insight into the in-use network cryptography configuration for different protocols.