MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-26 07:31:46+00:00
> If they want to do their job well, how about adding some thinking into the mix, for good measure?

That’s what the conversation I shared is demonstrating ;)

> Good would also be,if they actually knew what they are talking about, before trying to tell the engineers what to do.

Often the people enduring the rules aren’t supposed to be security specialists. Because you’ll have your SMEs (subject matter experts) and your stockholders. The stakeholders will typically be project managers or senior management (for example) who have different skill sets and priorities to the SMEs.

The problem is that when it comes to security, it’s a complicated field where caution is better than lack of caution. So if a particular project does call on following enhanced secret practices, it becomes a ripe field for snake oil salesman.

Or to put it another way: no company would get sued for following security theatre but they are held accountable if there is a breach due to not following security best practices.

So often it doesn’t matter how logical and sensible the counter argument is, it’s automatically a losing argument
by qingcharles | 2025-04-26 07:34:08+00:00
Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.

To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:

https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...
by makowskid | 2025-04-26 07:35:16+00:00
There’s a lot of hype about vibe coding—that moment when caffeine hits, your playlist slaps, and you hammer out code like a jazz drummer sprinting through a solo. It’s exhilarating, but relying on that adrenaline burst is like funding your retirement with scratch-offs.

So let’s flip the script to something that actually compounds: vibe refactoring. Same spontaneous energy, but aimed at shrinking technical debt and sharpening your architecture instead of amping up the commit count.
by thingfish | 2025-04-26 07:37:11+00:00
Wait, I sense some genuine concern here. In fact, you tricked me into learning, which is what I also do with my students. I've read the article you provided in your earlier comment, plus the one from Microsoft [0].

They expose a dark secret behind the fork() call and I felt it too when implementing it myself. Almost gave me a heart failure. So here's my simplified take: what if the parent did a malloc() and put the resulting pointer on the stack (which is what git does, BTW). A simple copy of the stack to the child wouldn't be sufficient. The kernel then would have to follow the pointer, malloc() new memory and copy the data. It's not hard to see where this is going. What if there is malloc()ed memory in this copy? It's madness. I suspect this could bring a whole system to its knees.

This is a problem a kernel should not try to solve. Only user space knows about its application of memory. While reading the source code of the software I include in MinC, I always thought this is bad programming, perpetuated by Torvalds' #1 rule "don't mess with user-space", leading to things like copy-on-write.

This all leads me to believe I can get away with doing flat copies of stack and globals during fork(), implement spawn(), never implement copy-on-write and patch the userland code if needed. Am I right?

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by mikewarot | 2025-04-26 07:37:28+00:00
Impedance matching - In RF design, the maximum power is transferred to the load when it's impedance matches that of the source. Your job as a programmer isn't actually the churning out of code, it's the matching of the human and corporate specified requirements (and the subtle errors therein encoded) against what's actually possible to do with code, regardless of the source of said code.

High level languages, debuggers, etc... are all tools to aid in matching your impedance to that of the computer, etc.
by lukan | 2025-04-26 07:40:24+00:00
To me those links you provided, indicate a lot, of what is wrong for me with wikipedia.

Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.

I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)?

"The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked."

So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this.

"But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up."

So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.
by ironbound | 2025-04-26 07:41:06+00:00
The Deepseek v3 paper details a quantisation method of scaling after matmul but before accumulation to improve precision, this is different than normal GEMM as operations are left till the end, can read more in chapter 3.3 of the paper below.

https://arxiv.org/html/2412.19437v2#S3
by Blackarea | 2025-04-26 07:42:02+00:00
That was an interesting conundrum.

I used the gpt research feature to explore that so maybe take it with a grain of salt but I think it's not too bad:

> In short, Americans attend college in greater numbers partly because they feel they must (to secure good jobs), whereas many Germans do not feel they need a university degree to have a good career, thanks to the established apprenticeship system and different employer expectations.

https://chatgpt.com/share/680c8d76-d6a8-8010-a4cd-48155198f9...

This matches my own experience as a german citizen, that german "Ausbildung" is a very valid and accepted option. Maybe university enrollment or tertiary education on its own isn't drawing the full picture? Worth to think about
by flippe2 | 2025-04-26 07:42:45+00:00
I'm launching MAXUP, an open-source project that combines sport, learning, and tech through wearable equipment (smart helmet + smart suit) connected to a personal AI coach.

The goal: to help young people (and everyone!) improve physical fitness, learning skills, confidence, and resilience — using optimized routines, gamification, and minimal costs.

Website http://maxup.infinityfreeapp.com/
by yellowapple | 2025-04-26 07:43:17+00:00
> You don't trust the NYT to verify its own reporters?

What happens when those individuals stop being NYT reporters? Does @nytimes.com leave them verified? Or does that account yank the verification? And who's to say @nytimes.com is only verifying NYT reporters?

> Also, why do you say that in any circumstance? Who do you trust?

People I've met in person, for one. Bluesky has an opportunity to make the old-school web-of-trust idea mainstream, with UI around "Is this someone you've met face-to-face?" and then extending that with multiple levels of checkmarks based on how many degrees of separation exist between a given user's verified personhood and your own.

Organizations actually accountable to the general public, for another. Not some corporation, even if it's a publicly-traded one like the NYT. This is the exact sort of thing that government agencies could be implementing independently as a service to their residents (like I mentioned elsewhere). Or private-sector non-profits; Associated Press would be much more trustworthy than the NYT by that virtue alone, and yet @apnews.com ain't even verified at all, let alone given the magic "trusted verifier" powers. Why?

Barring that, I trust nobody. A blue checkmark doesn't convince me someone's "real". It just convinces me someone got a blue checkmark. I'd rather see that checkmark actually mean something that I can independently verify. Keybase had the right idea there, with the ability to add proofs to your various online accounts to assert "yes, these belong to the same person"; that would be something worthy of some checkmarks. I'd be thrilled to see little icons for "yes, there's a bidirectional connection between @foo.bsky.social and github.com/foo / reddit.com/u/foo / news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foo / etc.".
by casenmgreen | 2025-04-26 07:44:41+00:00
It seems to me with the US administration in its current form, it is not possible to trust material emitted by FBI.

Also, thought crosses my mind, given how forward police are, if there was an active shooter, and I myself was in area with my own weapon, I would be extremely concerned about being myself shot by police.

In any event, whole problem exists only because of private firearm ownership. Remove that, start very long process of disarming civil society, which also in end leads to disarmament of police. In UK, police do not carry guns.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-26 07:44:58+00:00
I'm growing weary of all the AI hype being shoved down my throat. Every time I dig into examples of what it can do, the result seems shittier than what a talented human would achieve instead. I'm forming an impression it's a kludge for the mediocre.

I don't want to be a crotchety old grump about this - I'd love to hear thoughts on truly notable examples where quality far exceeds our existing best in class work.
by paulajohnson | 2025-04-26 07:45:14+00:00
This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable. It was originally developed as the UK answer to the Jeep, but rapidly became the standard utility vehicle for anyone with an outdoor off road job. Especially farmers. Something like two thirds of all Land Rovers ever made are still in use.

This might well go the same way.
by simonw | 2025-04-26 07:45:56+00:00
"Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic."

Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on.

Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.
by bawolff | 2025-04-26 07:47:12+00:00
Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.

There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.

Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.
by derektank | 2025-04-26 07:48:06+00:00
Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.

Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.
by simonw | 2025-04-26 07:48:22+00:00
I found Molly White's video here really useful for helping me understand the Reliable Sources policy: https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/

> The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.
by acatnamedjoe | 2025-04-26 07:48:26+00:00
I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?

These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of boutiquey shops and cafes, etc.

I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that not the case?

And even allowing for a bit of gentrification, it seems wild in 2025 to select it for a "crap towns" award ahead of somewhere like Dover or New Romney.
by eesmith | 2025-04-26 07:48:32+00:00
The legislation doesn't include americium, and even if it did‚ I presume it will be imported under license.

https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A03417/latest/text says "Nuclear material means any source or any special fissionable material as defined in Article XX of the Statute." and Article XX only mentions uranium, plutonium, and thorium.

In any case, high-schooler David Hahn showed us what's possible with a bunch of smoke detectors, camping lantern mantels, and the like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn His lab became a Superfund site.
by 1dom | 2025-04-26 07:48:57+00:00
I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.

The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations. If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.

Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well, but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect for you.

My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet. Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be good/relevant.

Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to accidentally outsource.
by orwin | 2025-04-26 07:49:37+00:00
Wikipedia is a great point of entry for history.

Roughly ~20 years behind current academic research on most subjects, makes it 10 to 40 years more advanced than other encyclopaedia and school curriculums.

But its value is on the bibliography. You have research papers linked, which makes it infinitely better than most other sources. The only way to get closer to the truth in history is rigorous demonstrations, and those only exist in academic papers.

The view on Wikipedia on the French revolution are mostly Furet's views, which is 20 years behind, as it is the case in the Anglo world. Furet isn't the only one cited in Wikipedia though, and his point of view is nuanced with research from the 90s and 2000s, all with links to actual research. The last time I checked, research from JCM on the recently (late 2000s) discovered 'archives du comité' isn't discussed yet there, but all that makes it infinitely better than encyclopaedia brittanica. Infinitely.
by drgo | 2025-04-26 07:50:26+00:00
The crisis in science can only be fixed by addressing the slew of bad incentives built into the system. We can't predicate job security, promotion and prestige of every early career scientist on publishing as many papers as possible, and on obtaining grants (which requires publishing as many papers as possible) and then expect high-quality science. We can't starve universities of public funding and expect them not to selectively hire scientists whose main skill is publishing hundreds of "exciting" papers, and not overproduce low-quality future "scientists" who were trained in the dark arts of academic survival. Reform is more urgent than ever; AI has essentially obsoleted the mental model that equates the count of published papers with productivity and quality.
by Defletter | 2025-04-26 07:51:45+00:00
It's a tossup between Dart and Bun: Dart has better language features but Bun has better APIs. Since Bun is first and foremost a Javascript runtime, it inherits its annoyances and issues, like the complete lack of pattern matching, or switch expressions at all, or decent enums, etc. That said, Bun includes SQLite support and encryption out of the box, whereas Dart is heavily compartmentalised (https://pub.dev/publishers/dart.dev/packages). Imagine if, in Bun, importing "node:crypto" meant needing a "node:crypto" npm dependency. Dart ekes out the win though, I think.
by kouteiheika | 2025-04-26 07:52:30+00:00
> To a beginner who is used to ordinary imperative languages, that Ruby line is extremely difficult to understand.

I don't understand this argument. You are a beginner only for a tiny fraction of your time using a given programming language. Why are we optimizing a programming language for people who don't know it, instead of optimizing it for people who actually program in it?
by arendtio | 2025-04-26 07:52:58+00:00
It looks pretty cool. One thing that has bothered me a bit with Playwright is audio input. With modern AI applications, speech recognition is often integrated, but with Playwright, using voice as an input does not seem straightforward. Given that Magnitude has an AI focus, adding a feature like that would be great:

test('can log in and see correct settings') .step('log in to the app') .say('my username is user@example.com')
by trod1234 | 2025-04-26 07:53:43+00:00
The operative word of critical thought is "thought" which necessarily requires being open to the possibility that not everything is known, nor can it be known given sufficient time, and lack of evidence. You can only base suppositions on evidence.

It is much harder to prove something is not real, when there is no evidence to support it in the first place. It is effectively proving a negative which requires an onerus amount of proof. The absence of evidence doesn't support a null hypothesis in stochastic environments. This is a classic cognitive bias.

Those that do so without proper basis, are most likely deluding themselves than actually participating in critical thought and rational measure based in external reality.

There are a number of anomalies in the historic record, Graham Hancock has pointed out a number of them, and to date there is no explanation for much of the evidence he has pointed out. In fact some of it points to fantastical levels of tools that in some cases exceed current day processes. The Oseiron for example which can't be pumped out with modern equipment.

You conveniently forget the bronze-age collapse which is attributed to a seafaring people alongside chaos, and the burning of the library of Alexandria destroyed some of the most dated records.

You rely on a number of cognitive biases, your suppositions are not supported, and anyone that has to resort to invective and name calling isn't someone who is operating from a rational perspective that is capable of critical thought.

The latter most entirely undermines any argument you might make.
by aaron695 | 2025-04-26 07:53:44+00:00
The internet has screw all that up.

The criminal justice system should be transparent. Anyone should be able to watch any proceedings. This fits with your requirements as long as people don't report it.

The Australia Federal Court live streams but it is illegal to yt-dlp / photograph the monitor etc - https://www.youtube.com/@FederalCourtAus/streams

You also need people before and after (if convicted) to know. For instance witnesses or if they too were victims of crime. This is the impossible problem.

It's not even the reporting, it's easy search, as old newspapers have been scanned I've seen a few family secrets (of people still alive) that I would never have known and never needed to know.
by lukan | 2025-04-26 07:54:13+00:00
Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb.

And this is kind of like a court decision.

But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.
by Huppie | 2025-04-26 07:54:20+00:00
I've been using (mostly) the OpenAI image generator for quite some time generating coloring pages, it's pretty decent at it and can generate just about anything my kids want as long as you word it a bit neutral to avoid it generating (something it recognizes as) copyrighted content.

Great idea to turn your own photos into a coloring book generator!

Edit: I wonder how you prevent it from generating copyrighted content when people upload e.g. 'photos' of Disney content? Or has that not been a problem yet?
by Loic | 2025-04-26 07:54:58+00:00
Thank you.

More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.

Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.

(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)
by yellowapple | 2025-04-26 07:56:13+00:00
It's possible to spin up alternative relays. For example: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u2y

The issue is that relays tend to require a lot more resources to operate than appviews and PDSes (though not necessarily as much as that blog post suggests; I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives), so it's common for alternative appviews to rely on Bluesky's relay instead of taking on the expense of spinning up a new one.

In any case, as that toot notes, the Bluesky outage was on a PDS level rather than a relay level. And thankfully it's much less expensive to run your own PDS; apparently those who do so weren't impacted.
Ask HN: Why does OpenAI require an ID to use their image API?
by speedylight | 2025-04-26 07:56:19+00:00
I was hoping to try out the “Open”AI image generation API in their Playground but it asked me to give them a copy of my ID for verification?

I was planning to build a couple of web applications on top of the API but this is really off putting, especially given how prevalent data breaches have become and the simple fact that there’s no need for it other than their pathetic attempts to look like they care about AI safety.
by robobro | 2025-04-26 07:58:21+00:00
or activitypub ! Part of w3c, tons of servers and clients, even Meta runs an instance

I don't think it's as easy to run nostr relays as activitypub instances but maybe I am wrong. ActivityPub seems way more active than nostr also. Most of what I see on nostr is either cryptocurrency discussion or the kinds of alt-lite content you would find on Gab or Minds