MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-17 04:04:16+00:00
I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will expire and I am planning to let it go really.

I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.

Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.

I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
by chillfox | 2025-04-17 04:05:31+00:00
In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt) and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.

I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.
by anon6362 | 2025-04-17 04:05:46+00:00
To build assembly lines, one has to first make custom tools, jigs, and parts and apply processes to them that cannot just be 3D printed in plastic or metal or FDM'ed.

The main show-stopper to them is the lack of working knowledge about precision tooling manufacturing.

For example, some of the best power machine tools in the world came from Germany and from Bridgeport, CT between 1910 and 1965. There are/were moderately large, 1 micron runout milling machines such as Moore No. 2 and No. 3. These things generally aren't made anymore and not many people know the tricks and processes to make similar or equivalent machines that make other tools and machines. Like that the unshielded body heat of an operator can swing the runout of a precision machine in an otherwise climate-controlled environment.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-17 04:05:57+00:00
> The time between the Napoleon wars and WW1 (1815-1914) was very peaceful in Europe.

If, when you talk about "Europe", you exclude Spain and also Greece, the Balkans, and much of Eastern Europe, sure, the powers in "Europe" did most off their fighting in colonial wars in the period rather than at home (they did a quite a lot of fighting in colonial wars, though.)
by easytube | 2025-04-17 04:06:23+00:00
GPT Image is an AI-powered image generation tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o (the multimodal version of ChatGPT) to transform your text prompts into high-quality images. Simply enter a description and optionally add reference images, choose an art style, and GPT Image will create a custom visual in about one minute. It’s a versatile solution perfect for designers, marketers, content creators, educators, students, game developers, or anyone who needs to quickly produce creative graphics without special skills.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-17 04:08:35+00:00
Now imagine if the odds of simple life becoming intelligent life that we could detect and could become spacefaring is 1 in 1 million.

Why not assume the odds are 1 in 200 million, so that there's only one such planet in the whole galaxy and there's no Great Filter to worry about? It seems just as valid, except "200 million" is slightly less aesthetically pleasing.

We already know that human-type technological civilization is extremely unlikely, since the planet was full of somewhat intelligent bipedal dinosaurs for about 100m years, yet none of them seemed to engage in mining, large-scale construction, severely disruptive extinctions, nuclear power... (humans will leave a thick geological layer of concrete and pollution, along with plentiful unique minerals coming from slag, plastic, etc.)

I really have no patience for this sort of p(doom) nonsense. If you make up numbers you can come to any quantitative conclusion you want. Mildly tweaking totally unfalsifiable odds makes the Fermi "paradox" go away entirely.
by k1tanaka | 2025-04-17 04:08:53+00:00
While I understand the need to have this type of conversation in our current society and economy, I think it is sad that we need to discuss the merits of going to college on a economical basis. Ideally, I think the goal of college is to further education in a specific field. Reducing it as a opportunity for return can be counter-productive with the goals of it on the long term. Of course, this is ideally speaking, the real world doesn't function like that and there is a need for a return both on a individual and societal level.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-17 04:09:26+00:00
Actually most of them are dead and no their families are not getting anything either I am pretty sure. Heck almost 80% of my songs I won’t be able to buy from anywhere at all.

Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!

There you go - artists thanking me :)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-17 04:09:36+00:00
> and by "source" they meant the binary they shipped

Common misconception. Weights are not binary. Weights are hardcoded values that you load into an (open-source or closed-source) engine and you run that engine. The source code for LLMs is both in the architecture (i.e. what to do with those hardcoded values) and the inference engines.

As opposed to binaries, you can modify weights. You can adjust them, tune them for downstream tasks and so on. And more importantly, in theory you the downloader and "company x" the releaser of the model use the same methods and technologies to modify the weights. (in contrast to a binary release where you can only modify only the machine language while the creator can modify the source-code and recompile).

LLamas aren't open source because the license under which they're released isn't open source. There are plenty of models that are open source tho: mistrals (apache 2.0), qwens (apache2.0), deepseeks (mit), glms (mit) and so on.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-17 04:09:52+00:00
Discussion (120 points, 4 hours ago, 91 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376

Related:

2023 Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B (235 points, 135 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468342

2019 Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet (606 points, 384 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944005
by Marsymars | 2025-04-17 04:10:15+00:00
I like body on frame pickups as much as the next guy, but let’s not pretend that the overwhelming majority of pickup drivers in North America wouldn’t be better served by a Hyundai Santa Cruz, a Ford Maverick, or a Honda Ridgeline than whatever cowboy cosplay monstrosity they’re driving.

(As the former owner of a body on frame Nissan hardbody and a Chevy S10 compact pickup, I just put down a deposit on a Maverick because I’ve got no interest in any of the modern-sized body on frame pickups, and there was too much overhead involved in importing a Mitsubishi Triton from Mexico to Canada and figuring out how to source parts.)
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 04:10:15+00:00
Of course, immediately after the edit window closes, I revisit this comment and discover that in the first paragraph I swapped my terms and made a hash of the rest of the thing. Please cut out and paste into your printouts the following corrected version. Thank you!

> I would prefer the "analyze" feature focus on content rather than structure words. I forget the specific linguistic terms but to a first approximation, nouns and verbs would be of interest, prepositions and articles not. Let's call the former "semantic" and the latter "syntactic."
by chongli | 2025-04-17 04:11:06+00:00
No, a TVar is not a mutex guard. A TVar is a software transactional memory (STM) variable. STM works just like a database: you batch together a sequence of operations into a transaction and then execute them. During execution of a transaction, all changes made to the contents of the TVar are stored in a transaction log. If some other transaction occurs during the execution then the whole thing is aborted and re-run.

This can take any ordinary Haskell data structure and give you a lock-free concurrent data structure with easy-to-use transactional semantics. How it performs is another matter! That depends on the amount of contention and the cost of re-playing transactions.
by dsign | 2025-04-17 04:11:32+00:00
You are correct, Haskell has quite a few mutex-like types. MVar is one of them.

However, if memory serves me right, TVar is a building block for the transactional memory subsystem. The guard on TVar with, say, modifyTVar is not really stopping execution at entrance but simply indicating that the block modifies the variable. In my mental model, some magic happens in an STM block that checks if two concurrent STM blocks acted upon the same data at the same time, and if so, it reverts the computations of one of the blocks and repeats them with new data.

To my knowledge, Haskell is the only programming language (+runtime) that has a working transactional memory subsystem. It has been in the language for about 20 years, and in that time many have tried (and failed) to also implement STM.
by Animats | 2025-04-17 04:12:25+00:00
There have been Kinect sensors with true time of flight. The first Kinect used triangulation, but Microsoft switched to time-of-flight for later models.[1]

There are several ways to do this. At short ranges, they all work. Then it gets hard, because not much energy is coming back.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05459
Ask HN: Why are all content apps so insanely cluttered?
by iwatog | 2025-04-17 04:12:27+00:00
Open any social media app, or news app, or any other app, it's like they want to throw three million choices at you. Ad, hit like, subscribe, vid in vid, etc.

The best blogs however only show you maybe 1-5 articles with great design, and it actually causes me to read more.

So from the UI/UX perspective, why do companies continue to make reading harder? Is there some psychology behind it?
by jallmann | 2025-04-17 04:13:37+00:00
I remember buying a Radeon at Fry's (Fountain Valley, Roman Empire), going home, opening it up and... it was something else, a cheap VGA card. They gave me a hard time about taking it back too, 16-year old me didn't know how to cut through the BS so my dad had to go back with me on a 3rd trip and get it sorted out. What a place.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-17 04:13:50+00:00
Maybe I wasn't clear, I think you've misunderstood me. I understand that all sorts of LLMs can be trained using a common corpus of data. But my understanding is that the choice of creating a bitnet LLM must be made at training time, as modifications to the training algorithms are required. In other words, an existing FP16 model cannot be quantized to bitnet.
by pimlottc | 2025-04-17 04:13:50+00:00
I just recently learned from the last Not Just Bikes video [0] that these big box stores tend to be very hard to reuse (even when they don't include a giant spaceship). 99 Percent Invisible has a good article [1] on some of the challenges and a few success stories, but it takes a major effort.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-e_yhEzIw

1: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ghost-boxes-reusing-a...
by whateveracct | 2025-04-17 04:14:16+00:00
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/stm-containers

This library is full of STM-oriented data structures. They perform better than a simple `TVar (Map k v)`.

It's kind of a fun trick actually. The stock Map is just a tree. The STM Map is also a tree [1] but with TVars at each node. So this helps a lot with contention - you only contend along a "spine" instead of across the whole tree, which is O(log n).

[1] Technically a HAMT a la unordered-containers - trie, tree, you get the idea :)
by Avicebron | 2025-04-17 04:15:19+00:00
> The job is but one dimension of life, and it's really not my task to judge anyone based solely upon their waypoint of the moment.

You're not engaging with the real and acute problem of, 1) keypusher gets to look at barista and say "oof, no medical insurance, no investments, living paycheck to paycheck" must be their waypoint, hopefully at 10 years deep into that barista career they get their break as a senior ruby engineer, good thing they were "just at a waypoint"

2). > What else are they doing? Do they have goals? Are they socially connected and building up those around them?

Are they healthy? Have they been able to maintain the same level of fitness as someone who works 4 hours a week writing internal tooling vs dodging traffic and dealing with an equally financially unstable manager screwing their ability to pay rent the next week?

Really smitty
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-04-17 04:15:55+00:00
Amethyst is GPG based so it's the opposite of private, it's verifiable.

Briar is end to end encrypted without any other methodology to identify you besides the meta information (briar hash), so it's as private as it can get. But, it's painful to do a handshake, both peers need to be online at the same time.
by tigranbs | 2025-04-17 04:17:07+00:00
I built a tool to combine multiple MCP servers into one endpoint. This enables keeping a single endpoint exposed to an MCP Client like Claude Desktop or Cursor, but adding more stuff or swapping MCP servers without touching the configuration on the client side. I believe that MCP Client apps like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT would become a new type of browser and a tool like McGravity where you can compose multiple MCP Servers into one would be a necessity moving forward.

It is done using Bun runtime to be able to compile everything into a single distributable binary by cross-compiling it, and also, because with Bun you write TypeScript but you get Golang level of performance with a great TypeScript libraries support.

Let me know what you think!
by bigyabai | 2025-04-17 04:18:22+00:00
> Advertising and branding used to be smart. It was witty, cohesive, and most importantly, it respected the intelligence and shrewdness of the consumer it was marketing to.

They really weren't. If you look at the examples they list, none of them rely on a particularly intelligent audience. Their wording preys on the insecurities of possessing wealth and coerces the viewer with lowest-common-denominator logic. They're insulting and smarmy, pretentious but zero-sum. I read through hundreds of issues of Popular Mechanics as a kid, and even back then I wasn't dumb enough to feel "witty" for parsing an advertisement's joke. Maybe that was more obvious in the context they were published.

What I find funny is that I see nostalgia for every age of branding like this. There are postwar idealists who think all modernity is sin, there are 60s and 70s obsessives that think every advertisement should be full-page and drenched in cigar smoke, and others yet that think the gaudy trappings of the 80s and 90s were the most humanist advertising got. They're all falling for the same illusion of "sophistication" that advertising has always lacked. The fact that the author seems to think branding ever had prestige is kinda a mea-culpa for their own outrageous outlook.
Show HN: Pad.ws – whiteboard-like IDE in the browser
by cyclotruc | 2025-04-17 04:18:51+00:00
We wanted to try a new approach to cloud dev environments, so we combined a drawing app (Excalidraw) with a dev env provisioner (coder)

Each user has access to a Canvas that runs Ubuntu and your workspace is synced in the cloud.

We would love to hear your feedback, and your ideas as to how it could be used!

Disclaimer: this is a very early beta, it might still be unstable at times
by lolive | 2025-04-17 04:19:43+00:00
spotifynewmusic.com used to be an aggregator of human-curated playlists [from The 405, All Music, AV Club, Beardfood, Clash Music, Consequence Of Sound, Drowned In Sound, The Guardian, Music OMH, NME, No Ripcord, Paste, Pitchfork, Pop Matters, Resident Advisor, Slant, The Line Of Best Fit, The Music Fix, The Skinny, Tiny Mix Tapes, and Under The Radar]. It had been my discovery tool of choice, until it abruptly shut down [because, I suspect, the maintainer was a Spotify employee]
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-04-17 04:20:27+00:00
My point that you successfully explained and intentionally ignored is also: /dev/random ignores all state and evidence, meaning it will continue its predefined behavior even when it's damaging to the environment.

Pretty similar to a republican's mindset: I don't have to fix it, let the next generation deal with the problems that I caused.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-17 04:20:42+00:00
Stoicism isn't denial. It's just one mental discipline for dealing with harsh realities, in a way that makes it easier to remain clear and functional, and respond to difficult circumstances mindfully and actively, instead of reflexively and emotionally.

I made no implication that very bad things are not happening. Or that anyone is immune. Quite the opposite.

But I don't want to be afraid, regardless of what happens. Not the, "I can't sleep at night" afraid. Nor the, "I can't speak up and take action" afraid. That is quite literally what the main actors want.

People's ability to maintain their mental health is going to matter. There are so many ways to spiral, internally and externally, during traumatic times, and we all need to be at our best. For ourselves, for each other.

Now might be a good time to be generally supportive of each other. A systemic lack of tolerance for differences of thought is a prime contributor to the fiasco we are in.
by poulsbohemian | 2025-04-17 04:21:53+00:00
I am a realtor and sit on my state's realtor association legislative steering committee, which this year sough to work with legislators on a bill that would limit mass corporate control over housing units... it's surprisingly more complicated than it first appears, and an area where realtors take a view that might be contrary to consumer expectations - we generally like the idea of limitations on corporate ownership, as it in theory creates the greatest opportunity for individual homeownership...

Anyway, some of the scenarios we ran into are things like the 2008 mortgage crisis - what happens if you end up in a market where there is a lot of inventory that no one can afford to hold? In my market, it's starting to look like a lot of builders (read: corporations) built too many houses either that weren't what consumers wanted or demand has shrunk (it is a town with a lot of federal jobs that are evaporating at the moment...). So can a builder hold that inventory indefinitely (assuming they can afford that) as a corporation? Likewise, people often don't want to hear this, but landlords do create efficiencies in the market - there are people out there that either don't want to own a home or can't qualify for a mortgage, and a landlord makes it possible to provide housing for those people as a kind of intermediary. We can argue over what it takes to qualify for a mortgage, but that's really a separate issue. We of course get into the issue of vacation homes or even situations like can I as an individual own a place for my business and a home - after all, they are both real estate, so how tight can we make these rules around ownership? Point being - the basic idea is sound, and some states like CA apparently already have laws on the books, but it's a more complicated matter than just one person == one house.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-17 04:22:04+00:00
> the asymptotic end game would be that every TLS connection requires an online handshake with Connection Authorities to validate the server identity synchronously, right?

The article notes this explicitly: the goal here is to reduce the number of online CA connections needed. Reducing certificate lifetimes is done explicitly with the goal of reducing the Web PKI's dependence on OCSP for revocation, which currently has the online behavior you're worried about here.

(There's no asymptotic benefit to extremely short-lived certificates: they'd be much harder to audit, and would be much harder to write scalable transparency schemes for. Something around a week is probably the sweet spot.)
by lxgr | 2025-04-17 04:24:45+00:00
Yeah, but essentially every home user can only do so after jumping through extremely onerous hoops (many of which also decrease their security when browsing the public web).

I’ve done it in the past, and it was so painful, I just bit the bullet and started accessing everything under public hostnames so that I can get auto-issued Letsencrypt certificates.
by flomo | 2025-04-17 04:25:53+00:00
Warner Atari had left an enormous amount inventory behind. (Beyond what they infamously put into a landfill.) They also had screwed-over the major chain stores, who wouldn't touch anything Atari.

Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets.

(There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
by grepexdev | 2025-04-17 04:26:39+00:00
The reason I emphasize that he said it and didn't write it is because it indicated to me that you weren't aware it was actually a talk he gave and you were just regurgitating a cherry picked quote that's been passed around since he said it.

That further indicated to me that you are not aware of the broader context of what he was saying. He literally spends the first 19 minutes talking about writing something in C++, then says the quote.

It seems it is you who is catering to your own biases by using a few sentences from a 20 minute talk to oversimplify what Pike I'd saying.

The interpretation I am giving is based on the entire talk, not just the quote. I acknowledge that he said Go was created for less experienced devs, but I don't think it that means it is a step backward as you said. It enables so much to be done by the "dumber" demographic, as you so eloquently put it. Go, like any other language, has its limitations. It shouldn't be used for everything, but should be used for the things it is good at (obviously).
by goku12 | 2025-04-17 04:26:56+00:00
Please don't drag Rust into needless controversies like this. Rust does improve the situation. But not even the language developers will make such bold claims.

To begin with, memory safety errors aren't the only source of security bugs. The simplest example is an SQL injection attack. Besides, almost all Rust programs contain hidden unsafe code. You can check the standard library if you don't believe me. Memory safety in Rust depends on verification of those unsafe interfaces. The chance of having such bugs is pretty low since they are widely reviewed (this is the point of Rust unsafe). But such errors do occur sometimes and are reported from time to time.