MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-22 04:42:39+00:00
I've been fascinated by numbers lately, and one of my go-to tools is a simple mobile app that calculates all the divisors of a given number. So I can determine prime numbers, and readily factor the non-primes. And it's been eye-opening.

Now I'm no crackpot numerologist, adding up the numerical values of Bill Gates' name, or telling you who shot JFK. But I can tell you that the main launch pad 39A at Cape Kennedy was not numbered by accident -- look it up in the Book of Psalms. And it's interesting how the city buses around here are numbered. For example, the 68xx series; I look up Psalm 68 and I can definitely imagine the bus singing that as it lumbers down the road -- can't you?

Back to primes -- if we consider the top numbers authorities of our times, such as the US Post Office, city planners, and the telephone company (circa 1970s). I ran a chunk of ZIP codes from Southern California and discovered that some are the factors of two quite large prime numbers. Others yield interesting factors. Once again I pull out my Book of Psalms.

There are plenty of other "hermeneutics" to interpret assigned numbers, especially street addresses. And as for phone numbers, I've gone back to figuring out "what do they spell" on a standard TouchTone keypad, because sometimes it's quite informative.

It's no accident, for example, that the hospital where I was born is located at 4077 5th Avenue. And that number assigned by city planners, many decades before M*A*S*H was written or went on TV. Significant nonetheless.

I also figured out a few prime numbers related to my own life, and others that are recurring tropes, just cropping up at interesting times. What's your social security number? Have you sort of broken it down and pondered if those numbers turned up again and again in your life? Every time I see a number now, I'm compulsively factoring it out in my head. Is it prime? It feels prime. I'll check it in the app later; try some mental math for now.

I'm also counting things more often now. How many spokes in a wheel? How many petals in a flower, especially a flower depicted in art. How many brick courses in that interesting wall they built? Plug any interesting numbers back into the divisors app. Finding the primes, find the factors, just ponder numeric coincidences. It's fun. So many signs and signals, hidden in plain sight before us. Buses singing Psalm 68 as they take on passengers. Launch pads singing Psalm 39 as Europa Clipper slips the surly bonds of Earth. What's on your telephone dial?
by kats | 2025-04-22 04:44:41+00:00
Some random thoughts, might be interesting (or not).

Some things that really do fit into tables, where there's no empty fields in the rows:

- Relational databases

- Hardware circuit truth tables

- Assembly language opcodes

- FPGA compiler output

- Matrix multiplication. Or some GPU programs e.g. if you want to have a conditional statement using multiply-add, then 'if (cond) then x1 else x2' would be 'out = (cond * x1) + (cond * x2)'.

Those things have good performance in one way or another. But it's not easy to make all the application logic fit into a table-based schema.

e.g. Why does someone choose a python web server framework which sends and receives JSON. It's really super easy to extend and add something without knowing what you'll need in advance.

But if you try to fit that into a table, you'll have to change the table schema for everything to try to best fit what the program does right at the moment. And then if there's one new extra complex or long-running function, it will never easily fit the same schema as the others. You'll have to break the big function down into some smaller common operations.
by nativeit | 2025-04-22 04:45:31+00:00
> For GPL licenses anyway...I think their[sic] is (or there should be) a non-profit foundation established to collectivize the funding and legal actions

Hence my thinking there is. I kept thinking EFF for some reason, but I knew that wasn't right. EFF are the ones who consistently predict which anti-privacy/anti-consumer laws will definitely get passed.
by veidr | 2025-04-22 04:46:10+00:00
The person you are quoting already conceded that is less readable, but that the ability to set a breakpoint easily (without having to stop the process and modify the code) is more important.

I myself agree, and find myself doing that too, especially in frontend code that executes in a browser. Debuggability is much more important than marginally-better readability, for production code.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-04-22 04:47:30+00:00
You are drastically underestimating the value and control that the processor networks bring.

Wells Fargo might underwrite the credit on my credit card, but I would immediately cancel that line of credit if it wasn’t accessible through the Visa network.

The value of a credit card isn’t just the line of credit, it is the near universal and frictionless acceptance as a method of payment.
by msephton | 2025-04-22 04:48:32+00:00
Having run communities myself, I would: take it seriously—immediately—let the community know that harassment is unacceptable, support the person who reported it, investigate privately, remain neutral to all parties. Based on the result of the investigation: enforce consequences or changes—nothing, warning, timeout, ban—introduce or amend policy to help prevent it happening again, support healing of the victim and the community. These are all quite possible in private/managed communities. Not a panacea by any means, but worth doing.
by msephton | 2025-04-22 04:48:43+00:00
Having run communities myself, I would: take it seriously—immediately—let the community know that harassment is unacceptable, support the person who reported it, investigate privately, remain neutral to all parties. Based on the result of the investigation: enforce consequences or changes—nothing, warning, timeout, ban—introduce or amend policy to help prevent it happening again, support healing of the victim and the community. These are all quite possible in private/managed communities. Not a panacea by any means, but worth doing.
by plagiat0r | 2025-04-22 04:49:07+00:00
I've checked the site, it looks very nice on mobile.

However, some checks have bugs or they makes no sense:

1. SPF missing ?all is broken, it report missing when it is there

2. Checking SOA records makes no sense in 2025. Their serial formats is irrelevant in modern DNS services that don't even use AXFR/IXFR

3. Checking for SOA TTL or minimal is also useless, unless the TTL is higher than 7 days. Really, it is up to the DNS admin to set very low TTL

4. Checking if different record types have different TTL makes zero sense, again it is up to the domain owner

5. DMARC/DKIM well, debatable. It has nothing to do with DNS per see and a lot of SMTP admins find them useless. A proper SPF with "-all" is enough to prevent using your domain for mail spoofing. DKIM and DMARC is usually a waste of time, and spammers always get it right anyway. I would go as far as to say that if you operate SMTP server, don't bother to check or add DKIM and definitely ignore DMARC.
by QuiEgo | 2025-04-22 04:49:55+00:00
The 3-2-1 rule is wisdom of the ages. The "2" in the rule is all about having your data in at least two different types of "media". A modern read on this is anything tied to the same account counts as the same type of "media". So, you need at least one copy of your data not tied to your Apple ID.

A few things you can do here:

- Own a mac with enough storage to download your entire iCloud / Apple Photos data set. Configure your mac to do so. Your mac is still activation locked to your Apple ID though, so backup that local copy through Time Machine or the service of your choice (e.x. Backblaze). A NAS is very helpful to automate this.

- Use app(s) on your phone that will copy of your data to the location of your choice, such as Photo Sync.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-04-22 04:50:35+00:00
Wait until somebody uses string templating to insert something that ends with a backslash, changing the meaning of following characters from what the syntax highlighting thinks; a curse be upon that person.

Escaping/quoting is such a mud pile everywhere because it's in-band communication, but nobody would tolerate all out-of-band because it's too tedious. At least newer languages are getting better with things like 'raw' strings or Rust's arbitrarily long delimeters, but I'd still like more control.

I'm surprised I never see languages adopt directed delimeters like {my string} or something, since it lets you avoid escaping in the very common case of balanced internal delimeters.
by NoPicklez | 2025-04-22 04:50:45+00:00
Apart from the HomeLab tinkering aspect, I don't know why you would do this over Spotify or Apple music.

I use Spotify the same way I managed my music on Windows media player, creating my own playlists of various genre's and years. What Spotify allows me to do is find the music I want straight away rather than finding a way to procure it.

I can do all of that and not have to self host anything.
by pixelesque | 2025-04-22 04:52:57+00:00
Not defending them in any way, but I know with my Infrant (then Netgear unfortunately, who last year killed the products) ReadyNASs which also used mdadm to configure BTRFS with RAID5 in a similar way to Synology and QNAP, the recommendation was that you don't want your BTRFS filesystem to run low on space, because then it runs out of metadata space, and if it does that it becomes read-only, and can become unstable.

Basically, the recommendation was to always have 5% free space, so this isn't just Synology saying this.
by bze12 | 2025-04-22 04:55:10+00:00
I’ve found that apps like uber, coinbase, robinhood etc that offer subscriptions can opt you in somewhat unexpectedly because most people are accustomed to an IAP confirmation screen. They can bypass this due to the nature of their subscription, so one too many “continue” taps and bam you’re subscribed. They don’t display pricing so prominently either.

Happened to me with coinbase, I accidentally subscribed and got charged for 3 months. Luckily they were able to refund me since I didn’t actually use the service.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-04-22 04:55:56+00:00
My deepest apologies for insufficiently distilling my thoughts for you.

> Who is expressing indignation?

The media is irate and resentful for having been flummoxed by some no-good knave. (third paragraph of the article notes several of them - Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the BBC)

> Speaking of careful reporting, can you back that up?

> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.

I beg to differ, and since i am very bored, I had the 3 minutes to find these.

In 2019, Metro published a story about a "haunted" doll, later criticized for lack of verification; the article was quietly removed from their website after public backlash. A 2015 Cosmopolitan article on beauty trends was pulled after it misrepresented cultural practices without proper research. The i newspaper in their 2021 article on Brexit was heavily criticized for unverified claims about trade disruptions. In 2018, the Express removed an article claiming a celebrity’s health scare without sufficient evidence, following legal threats. In 2017, a Hello! story about a royal family event was withdrawn online after inaccuracies about attendees were exposed. The Daily Star's article in 2016 about a UFO sighting was removed after it was revealed to be based on a hoax. In 2017, the Daily Mail retracted a story about an immigrant crime wave after data was found to be misrepresented. The Sun withdrew in 2015 a front-page story claiming a celebrity scandal after evidence was debunked.

Aaaand, here I ran out of bourbon. I mean, I stopped pulling together the BBC articles that had to be withdrawn so I am just giving up the pleasure of finding them to you.

> Their ability to evaluate seems pretty good, as we rarely see stories like this one.

It is no great mystery why journalists so rarely turn their pens against their own. In a profession already fading into irrelevance, its influence waning, its audience drifting elsewhere, few are eager to hasten the decline by airing their own failings. Pride and self-preservation conspire to maintain a hollow façade of credibility, even as the foundations rot away. Better, it seems, to pretend the edifice still stands strong than to admit it is already half-forgotten.
by alganet | 2025-04-22 04:56:31+00:00
It is important for the functional guys, and I recognize the importance it has for them.

These "pipelines" and "object streaming" APIs are often built upon OOP. I feel that calling it "transducers" would offend the sensibilities of those who think it must be functional all the way down.

Don't you think it's better to keep it with a different name? I mean, even among the functional community itself there seems to be a lot of stress around purity, why would anyone want to make it worse?
by pama | 2025-04-22 04:59:24+00:00
As a user of code I feel it is more permissive to me to see the code. As a licenser of code I want what is best for me and for others as a user and future developer. Others are free to do anything as long as they dont remove the license and the modified code if they release a software.

If one wanted a different linguistic of pseudo philosophical spin, one could argue that a society would be more permissive than ours in a similar sense that MIT is more permissive than GNU, if it allowed free killing of random people for no reason. Nobody wants to live in such a society and it would not develop as fast as our society. I want to live in a society that permits collaboration, editing, and modification of software I use under the guarantee of the license.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-22 04:59:41+00:00
> I can say the opposite

You mean your are aware of an actual famine in the UUSR in the late 80s?

> Not all ex-USSR ended up like belarus or russia

None besides the Baltic states did well though (and they are somewhat special due to historical and diplomatic reasons). All other states are generally very poor and extremely corrupt (even those that have m have lots of oil like Azerbaijan).
by kyrofa | 2025-04-22 05:01:42+00:00
> When a drive fails, one of the key factors in data security is how fast an array can be rebuilt into a healthy status. Of course, Amazon is just one vendor, but they have the distribution to do same-day and early morning overnight parts to a large portion of the US. Even overnighting a drive that arrives by noon from another vendor would be slower to arrive than two of the four other options at Amazon.

In a way this is a valid point, but it also feels a bit silly. Do people really make use of devices like this and then try to overnight a drive when something fails? You're building an array-- you're designing for failure-- but then you don't plan on it? You should have spare drives on hand. Replenishing those spares is rarely an emergency situation.
by dmoy | 2025-04-22 05:01:47+00:00
I bought a Synology last year and then had to return it because it didn't support two of the enterprise drive model revisions I have (but worked with the others, even one that's the same make).

For the same hardware cost I got a random mATX box that can hold 2.5x more hard drives, a much much beefier CPU, 10x the RAM, and an nvme. And yea it took an hour to set up trueNAS in a docker image, but w/e.

Same exact hard drives working perfectly fine in fedora. If it weren't for hard drive locking I'd have stuck with the Synology box out of laziness.
by ayi | 2025-04-22 05:01:52+00:00
Looks like the correct page is this: https://windsurf.com/security

It says:

Zero-data retention mode is the default for any user on a team or enterprise plan and can be enabled by any individual from their profile page.

With zero-data retention mode enabled, code data is not persisted at our servers or by any of our subprocessors. The code data is still visible to our servers in memory for the lifetime of the request, and may exist for a slightly longer period (on the order of minutes to hours) for prompt caching The code data submitted by zero-data retention mode users will never be trained on. Again, zero-data retention mode is on by default for teams and enterprise customers.
by whyenot | 2025-04-22 05:01:54+00:00
> Higher concentrations of CO2 enables a higher tree line.

While this may make some intuitive sense, [CO2] actually has very little bearing on tree line. The major factors are temperature and length of the growing season. Trees need liquid water to be able to transpire and grow. The growing season also needs to be long enough that trees can harvest enough energy (sugars) from sunlight to power respiration during cold nights and long winters. If you are aware of some articles showing that [CO2] is a limiting factor at high elevations, please share them :)

Tree line is tends to be higher at lower latitudes
by pmags | 2025-04-22 05:02:08+00:00
An unparalleled attempt to amass sensitive medical data for millions of Americans, done at a breakneck pace to meet unrealistic deadlines decided on by an HHS secretary with no qualifications in medicine or science.

The current administrations security track record to date is less than stellar, as evidenced by recent DoD/Pentagon lapses. It's hard to have any confidence that a rushed job from HHS will be any better implemented.
by leirjtliewjtl | 2025-04-22 05:05:17+00:00
Silicon valley doesn't deserve credit for inventing this method. It's ancient. Back in the 90s Nintendo lost a suit for price fixing and somehow got the judge to let them "compensate" plaintiffs by giving them coupons toward the purchase of additional games. Comcast, AT&T, GM, Columbia Records, maybe the majority of Fortune 500 companies have done this. Tale as old as time. Silicon valley didn't invent shit.
by simonw | 2025-04-22 05:05:41+00:00
I've been tracking prompt injection for 2.5 years now and this is the first proposed mitigation for it that feels genuinely credible to me. Unlike most of the others it doesn't rely on using other AI models to try and spot injection attacks, which is a flawed approach because if you only catch 99% of attacks your system will be broken by motivated adversarial attackers.

(Imagine if we protected against SQL injection or XSS using statistical methods that only caught 99% of attacks!)

I wrote up my own extensive thoughts on this paper last week: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/

Admittedly I have a bias towards it because it builds on a proposal I made a couple of years using dual quarantined and privileged LLMs: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/25/dual-llm-pattern/

I'm particularly tickled that a DeepMind academic paper now exists with a section titled "Is Dual LLM of Willison enough?" (Spoiler: it is not.)
by GolDDranks | 2025-04-22 05:06:37+00:00
My understanding is that they can't be _ultramicroscopic_, but they can be quite small. According to the Wikipedia:

> A primordial black hole with an initial mass of around 10^12 kg would be completing its evaporation today

And according to this:

https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/schwarzschild-radius

Mass: 10e12 kg → Schwarzschild radius of 1.5e-14 m which is smaller than a hydrogen atom (5.3e−11 m).

I wonder what would be the mass that'd keep a black hole in thermal equilibrium with the current background radiation...

(Edit. whoops, minus sign in a wrong place made the calculations haywire, fixed now.)
by justlikereddit | 2025-04-22 05:06:43+00:00
Everything is 'tech-person trying to "simplify" entry, into big buttons'

Imagine the Idiocracy healthcare scene. But now you have a menu Diving system within a dense jungle of ten million options. I've never had to click through so many steps to get something very simple done. And I've never had so many completely useless features available

The system is also built for the American healthcare system, but they also sell it to Europe with deceptive practices, with no simplifications whatsoever regarding the less overbearing legal landscape.

As an end user: it's a shit experience to use no matter what you end up using it for, the price tag is an Astronomical Unit but the support you get for that is everything but stellar
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-22 05:06:53+00:00
Ah sorry I didn't explain properly, I meant

a |> await f()

and

a |> (await f())

Might be expected to do the same thing.

But the latter is syntactically undistinguishable from

a |> await returnsF()

What do you think about

a |> f |> g

Where you don't really call the function with () in the pipeline syntax? I think that would be more natural.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-22 05:07:19+00:00
Their pricing is the main reason I don't use Windsurf in spite of finding it to be the only tool that really boosted my productivity beyond what the LLM chat interfaces do already.

This really doesn't seem to make it better. You have a monthly license cost, I get that, but then you're shoehorning in this whole credits system (presumably so they can make money on that too) instead of just charging me pass-through costs for the API calls.

As long as they're doing the credits system I'm not using the tool.
by jsemrau | 2025-04-22 05:08:24+00:00
Proper research, especially the one contributed to conferences, is hard to get by and is usually managed by the conference organizers. Arxiv has some, but it's limited.

It would be great if for a DeepSearch tool for ML, I could just use Arxiv as a source and have the Agent search this. But so far I have not found a working Arxiv tool that does this well.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-22 05:08:32+00:00
Well, imagine that the big bang is really something more akin to a white hole, which is a black hole running backwards: all the stuff has outward momentum, and lots of it, so it can't get pulled back. In standard cosmology the big bang happens not at a point (so it's not really like a white hole) but everywhere, but there's also really strong repellent forces that cause "inflation", which defeats the mass-energy's gravitational pull's attempt to collapse the whole thing. But still, perhaps the thought of a white hole might help you bridge the gap.

Mind you, this is a pop science, handwavy explanation.
by ggm | 2025-04-22 05:09:49+00:00
A bit of a moment here. The image in the article is NOT the same as an Electron Microscopy image: its a 3D render of a structure, not a photograph, or a record of EM scanning.

The PNAS reference is 404.

Basically, this looks like AI slop: it doesn't show the improved image it shows a render of hypothetical structure, and it doesn't reference the paper it references a pnas number which is 404.

This is the correct PNAS reference: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2312905120

The images in there make a lot more sense: they look like Xray crystallography 2D projections of the 3D surface which has been EM scanned.

(when I looked)
by tiew9Vii | 2025-04-22 05:11:57+00:00
A lot of these are home power users.

They build the array to support a drive failure but as home power users without unlimited funds don’t have a hot spare or store room they can run to. It’s completely reasonable to order a spare on failure unless it’s mission critical data needing 24/7 uptime.

They completely planned for it. They’ve planned for if there is a failure they can get a new drive within 24 hours which for home power users is generally enough, especially when likely get a warning before complete failure.