MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2025-04-12 06:10:20+00:00
Pretty much every PR does get reviewed before merging (especially of non-committers) and compromises would be easy to detect in the typical version bump PR. At least it's all out in the open in a big monorepo. E.g. in Debian, maintainers could push binaries directly to the archive a few years ago (I think this is still true for non-main) and IIRC even for source packages people upload them with little oversight and they are not all in open version control.

Of course, Debian developers/maintainers are vetted more. But an intentional compromise in nixpkgs would be much more visible than in Debian, NPM, PyPI or crates.io.
by nramanand | 2025-04-12 06:11:17+00:00
A relevant aside: surely insider trading is happening all the time? There are so many daily market-shifting events involving so many privy parties that it seems inevitable to happen every few minutes (not defending the actions in the article).

How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.

How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
by defanor | 2025-04-12 06:12:43+00:00
I think an article like that would benefit from focusing more on protocols, rather than particular APIs to work with those: referencing the specifications and providing examples of messages. I am pretty sure that the article is about chunked transfer encoding [1], but it was not mentioned anywhere. Though possibly it tries to cover newer HTTP versions as well, abstracting from the exact mechanisms. In which case "JS API" in the title would clarify it.

As for the tendency described, this seems to be an instance of the law of the instrument [2], combined with some instruments being more trendy than others. Which comes up all the time, but raising awareness of more tools should indeed be useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
by thunderbird120 | 2025-04-12 06:13:35+00:00
This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.

[1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...
by refurb | 2025-04-12 06:14:10+00:00
It's not mine boggling at all.

Our ability to detect lead only gets better and better with new technologies. Whereas a few decades ago we could detect 1 part in 1 million (ppm) we can now routinely detect down to 1 part per 1 trillion (ppt), that's 1 million more sensitive analysis.

To give a sense that's a 1 microgram in 1,000 tons of material.

As a result, you can't set the level at "no lead" because that's an impossible level to achieve.

Right now the US sets it at 10 parts per billion. So in a normal jar of baby food - approximately 100 grams - that's less than 0.1 microgram of lead.

Lead naturally occurs in soil at levels 15-40 parts per million or 1,000 times higher. Growing your own veggies in soil untouched by man is going to risk higher levels than allowed in baby food.
by glacier5674 | 2025-04-12 06:14:59+00:00
If you search for Shockmaster, the AI Overview you get is as follows:

> Fred Alex Ottman, a retired American professional wrestler, is known for his WWF personas "Tugboat" and "Typhoon". He also wrestled as "Big Steel Man" and "Big Bubba" before joining the WWF in 1989. Ottman wrestled for the WWF from 1989–1993, where he was a key ally of Hulk Hogan. He later wrestled in World Championship Wrestling as "The Shockmaster", a character known for raising his fist and making a "toot-toot" sound.

Which is obviously false. The "toot-toot" was part of his gimmick as Tugboat, while the Shockmaster gimmick is known for its notoriously botched reveal.

Point being, Google is losing on the "telling one early 90s wrestling gimmick from another" AI front.
by ruuda | 2025-04-12 06:15:27+00:00
I'm trying Imagen 3 to add pictures to a presentation in Google Slides, and it's making such basic mistakes that I thought image models weren't making any more by now. I tried for half an hour to prompt it into generating an illustration of a Thinkpad facing with the back to the viewer, so the keyboard is not visible. It couldn't do it, it would always make the keyboard face towards the viewer. Or you ask for an illustration of an animal pointing a finger, and it gives it an additional arm. Meanwhile you ask OpenAI to ghiblify a picture while changing the setting and adding 5 other things, and it absolutely nails it.
by edanm | 2025-04-12 06:15:32+00:00
You're technically correct of course.

Then again, the overwhelming majority of people talking about Israel not having a right to exist are advocating for the violent overthrow of it that by when you're repeating their slogans, you're not advocating what they're advocating.

Also, while there are some valid reasons for the idea that "Israel doesn't have a fundamental right to exist" (like if you think no state has a right to exist), if you only think this about Israel, then it's very likely an antisemitic argument.
by microtonal | 2025-04-12 06:15:37+00:00
Yes Nix is forked. There were some attempts to fork nixpkgs, but they failed because it's far too much work to maintain something like nixpkgs. Nix being forked is less of an issue, because at the very least everyone needs to be compatible with nixpkgs. I think it's ok to have multiple implementations, they lead to exploration of new directions (e.g. one of the projects attempts to reimplement Nix in Rust). Well and of course, Guix started as a fork.

I agree that the infighting is not nice. But to be honest, when you just use NixOS and submit PRs, you do not really notice them. It's not like people are fighting them in the actual PRs to nixpkgs.
by Quarrel | 2025-04-12 06:17:01+00:00
These sort of trades happy fairly regularly, before market breaking news in individual stock names.

Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)

The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-12 06:17:22+00:00
It’s not a perfect rule, but in addition to ThinkPads, generally any laptop that only has a an Intel/AMD iGPU is going to fare better under Linux, and Intel for WiFi/Bluetooth is also very solid. The problems start to creep in with discrete GPUs and odd-brand/cheaper chipsets.

That, and don’t expect brand new hardware to work well unless you’re willing to deal with a cutting edge distribution and all the trouble those can bring. One gen back from current is usually enough of a lead time for things to catch up.
by GeneralMayhem | 2025-04-12 06:18:55+00:00
Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.
by SauciestGNU | 2025-04-12 06:20:39+00:00
After the fall of the Nazi regime, two new German governments were installed, and then unification happened. Yugoslavia broke up. The Soviet Union broke up. States alter, abolish, and replace themselves all the time.

Maybe the dissolution I'm hoping for will actually take the form of Israel codifying a constitution finally that grants equal rights to Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.

>Beyond any doubt, the humans in Israel and the occupied territories all have a right to exist.

I certainly agree here.
by scott_w | 2025-04-12 06:21:30+00:00
I find this current trend to hate DevOps to be childish. DevOps was a response to a very real problem of “throw it over the wall,” where the Dev team would build it and the Ops team had to figure out how to make it run, usually without any documentation. The change to having the Dev team responsible for deploying and running the product (and responding to the on-call they cause) creates a forcing function for the team itself to improve quality and deployment efficiency.

Your analogy makes literally no sense because what you’re trying to achieve in a courtroom is not the same thing you’re trying to achieve in a software engineering organisation.
by hurtuvac78 | 2025-04-12 06:22:03+00:00
The president nominates the SEC chair, and can fire him.

This explains how, written just before Trump assumed power:

While he can't force Gensler to step down as a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he can name a new interim SEC chair as soon as he's inaugurated on Jan. 20. He can also nominate a new commissioner to the Senate, which has to confirm the pick.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/07/heres-how-quickly...

And Gensler resigned as Chair as soon as Jan 20th:

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-29
by andersmurphy | 2025-04-12 06:23:55+00:00
That's the number of divs combined with the CSS transition animation on each cell. If I remove the animation on each cell it runs much better on lower end devices (looks a lot worse though). In general though older devices can't handle as many cells.

I'm sure you can write hyper specific hand tuned code for this example that will run better, but you'll lose all of the flexibility (and you have to load that hand tuned code first too). I could send down purely a string of data and have either an expression swap classes or wrap it in a web component (you can do both in Datastar). But, in short passing json and running your logic on the client adds up.

Like anything though test and measure.
by tyre | 2025-04-12 06:24:02+00:00
Some people have turned to downloading qBittorrent[0] and use 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org (to start).

At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.

For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.

Not sure. These are arguments.

[0]: https://www.qbittorrent.org/
by mullingitover | 2025-04-12 06:25:40+00:00
No economic system is functional without a bunch of compromises, and capitalism needs strong regulations as a check to keep it from turning absolutely rotten.

We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen.

It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-12 06:26:37+00:00
What's surprising about all this is how quickly, easily and cheaply the republic was dismantled and how little opposition there was from people in power.

This culminated in Trump v. United States [1] where unelected partisans simply invented presidential immunity completely out of thin air. That means there are absolutely no possible legal repercussions for any of this. None. And even if there were, the agencies in charge of enforcing it have either been gutted or they've been subverted by putting a sycophantic lackey in charge.

This is the new kleptocracy we live in. Nobody is coming to save us. The supposed political opposition (ie the Democratic Party) is nothing more than feckless controlled opposition who are more interested in defending US imperialism than they are in winning elections.

Things are only going to get worse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
by boznz | 2025-04-12 06:27:30+00:00
I thought it was just me. A few hours ago Gemini told me "As a language model, I'm not able to assist you with that." This was after generating an image a few minutes earlier. I think the copy/paste buffer pulled in some old source files I had attached a few days earlier (no idea how) because under the "sources and related content" it now showed two files Gemini is obviously calling its brother imagen for offloading the image generation, which is smart I guess if it works
by huijzer | 2025-04-12 06:27:36+00:00
Overall the argument by the author is very convincing and well put. One part I don’t fully agree with is

> If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses.

This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy. Buy option where the writeoff is small when wrong and the payoff huge when correct. As described in the post, the ratio was 1 to 25. Also it was likely that the market would go through huge shifts because the policy is so unpredictable.

So it is not impossible that someone figured that it would be possible to just buy these calls for the whole month. As long as one was a hit, the trade would not make a loss. And given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month. These short option bets are truly not such strange ehm options in these volatile times.

So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.

Having said that, I do find the evidence very strong and it’s reasonable to assume that this was insider trading. I personally suspect someone at JPM or Ackman. They said they “convinced” Trump so maybe Trump said in a meeting that it would probably happen and they immediately bought the calls.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-04-12 06:28:55+00:00
If your HTTP server provides and supports the appropriate headers and you’re serving supported file types, then it absolutely is true.

Just putting a url in my Chromium based browser’s address bar to an mp4 file we have hosted on CloudFlare R2 “just works” (I expect a video tag would be the same), supporting skipping ahead in the video without having to download the whole thing.

Initially skipping ahead didn’t work until I disabled caching on CloudFlare CDN as that breaks the “accept-range” capability on videos. For now we have negligible amount of viewership of these mp4s, but if it becomes an issue we’ll use CloudFlare’s video serving product.
by noosphr | 2025-04-12 06:29:07+00:00
And yet google's main structural disadvantage is being google.

Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete. The only reason why google search isn't dead yet is that it takes a while to index all web paged into a vector database.

And yet it wasn't google that released the architecture update, it was hugging face as a summer collaboration between a dozen people. Google's version came out in 2018 and languished for a decade because it would destroy their business model.

Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need. I don't see google being able to pull off an iPhone moment where they killed the iPod to win the next 20 years.
by backslash_16 | 2025-04-12 06:30:05+00:00
I agree it's totally worth it! I'm lucky that I have just enough free time to debug these things and I work with a few excellent Linux devs who have helped me with a few things.

Thanks for understanding the spirit of my point about the shortcomings above and I really like the way you phrased the "Windows has its issues as well, they're just different ones" - and I completely agree there.

With Windows you need to navigate the Microsoft account, files getting stored in OneDrive, updates happening outside your control (arguably a good thing for most users), and more that I'm sure I'm not thinking of.

I do think the Windows issues are more abstract like security, privacy, and default on features - while the Linux ones tend to be more in my face usability ones. Again agreeing that choosing your hardware and desk/laptop setup can alleviate many of things. But that requires knowing ahead of time and people switching in reaction to something Windows is doing don't get that benefit.

I guess I'm writing all this because the idea of a Linux distribution working perfectly on most/all laptops really excites me and I think being candid about the shortcomings yet providing support to the distributions is how we can get ace these fit and finish issues.

Food for thought for anyone else reading this - the end goal of Linux for everyone is why I don't get too worked up about snaps. If they get to a point where I can tell my mom she can safely install apps X, Y, and Z by pointing and clicking in the app center it's a great computing future.
by Liftyee | 2025-04-12 06:31:59+00:00
Out of curiosity, when was the last time you used Linux on a laptop platform? Anecdotally, it's come a long way since 5 years ago - daily driving Ubuntu 24.04 on my Thinkpad, and I can get 8 hours of use (engineering workload) in a day. It's not ARM level of performance, but far from "useless".
by eru | 2025-04-12 06:35:19+00:00
It depends on what you mean by 'strong regulations'. Regulations that are on the books should be enforced as written. In that sense I agree. But it doesn't mean that we actually necessarily need all the regulations that are on the books to stay on the books.

Eg, it would be perfectly fine to make insider trading legal by law. (And in fact, the definition of insider trading in the US differs a lot from the one used in France. So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.)

I agree that random enforcement of some regulations but not others depending on the whim of the executive is less than ideal.
by amadeuspagel | 2025-04-12 06:35:27+00:00
> In a section titled “scientific freedom,” the document seems to refer at least obliquely to developments in the United States, where scientists working on topics such as gender, global health, and climate change have seen their funding slashed and important data sets have been scrubbed from the websites of federal agencies. “Funding decisions will be based on science-driven criteria,” the document states. “It seems like that should be a no-brainer, but we have seen how quickly it can change,” says Eva Winkler, an oncologist and medical ethicist at Heidelberg University and a member of the German Ethics Council.

If this obliquely refers to anything, then to a scandal under the last german government, where the minister of science and education had demanded to know whether any signatory to an open letter received funding from the ministry[1].

[1]: https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/politik/foerdermittel-aff...
by elcritch | 2025-04-12 06:36:09+00:00
> Neither .NET's nor Rust's Tokio async implementations work this way.

Well that’s great. I didn’t mention Rust in that list because it does seem to perform well. Its async is also known as to be much more difficult to program.

> and having much lower memory footprint. You cannot compare Erlang/Elixir with top of the line compiled languages.

And yet I do and have. Despite all the cool tech for C# and .Net, I’ve seen simple C# web apps struggle to even run on Raspberry pi’s for IoT projects while Elixir ones run very well.

Also note Elixir is a compiled language and BEAM has JIT nowadays too.

I did hesitate to add C# to that list because it is an impressive language and can perform well. I also know the least about its async.

Nothing you said really counters that async as a general paradigm is more likely to lead to worse performance. It’s still more difficult to profile and tune than other techniques even with M:N schedulers. Look at the sibling post talking about resource allocation.

Even for Rust there was a HM post recently where they got a Rust service to run a fair bit faster than their initial Golang implementation. After months of extra work that is. They mentioned that Golang’s programming model made it much easier to write fairly performant networking code for. Since Go doesn’t use async it seems reasonable to assume go routines are easier to profile and track than async even if I lack knowledge of Go’s implementation details on the matter. Now I am assuming their Rust implementation used async but don’t know for sure.
by tstrimple | 2025-04-12 06:36:53+00:00
There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.
by andersmurphy | 2025-04-12 06:38:35+00:00
You don't need websockets SSE works fine for realtime collaborative apps.

Websockets sound great on paper. But, operationally they are a nightmare. I have had the misfortune of having to use them at scale (the author of Datastar had a similar experience). To list some of the challenges:

- firewalls and proxies, blocked ports

- unlimited connections non multiplexed (so bugs lead to ddos)

- load balancing nightmare

- no compression.

- no automatic handling of disconnect/reconnect.

- no cross site hijacking protection

- Worse tooling (you can inspect SSE in the browser).

- Nukes mobile battery because it hammers the duplex antenna.

You can fix some of these problems with websockets, but these fixes mostly boil down to sending more data... to send more data... to get you back to your own implementation of HTTP.

SSE on the other hand, by virtue of being regular HTTP, work out of the box with, headers, multiplexing, compression, disconnect/reconnect handling, h2/h3, etc.

If SSE is not performant enough for you then you should probably be rolling your own protocol on UDP rather than using websockets. Or wait until WebTransport is supported in Safari (any day now ).

Here's the article with a real time multiplayer Game of Life that's using SSE and compression for multiplayer.

https://example.andersmurphy.com

It's doing a lot of other dumb stuff explained a bit more here, but the point is you really really don't need websockets (and operationally you really don't want them):

https://andersmurphy.com/2025/04/07/clojure-realtime-collabo...