MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by userbinator | 2025-04-20 07:44:00+00:00
I have USB drives with good old SLC flash, whose data is still intact after several decades (rated for retention of 10 years at 55C after 100K cycles - and they have not been cycled anywhere near that much.)

and consumers would rather have more storage

No one from the manufacturers tells them that the "more storage" - multiplicatively more - lasts exponentially less.

For the same price, would you rather have a 1TB drive that will retain data for 10 years after having written 100PB, or a 4TB one that will only hold that data for 3 months after having written 2PB?

That requires support software they may not want to build

The software is already there if you know where to look.

and support requests from users complaining that toggling SLC mode lost all the data or toggling QLC mode back on did similarly

Do they also get support requests from users complaining that they lost all data after reformatting the drive?

It’s a valid business decision to not support that kind of product feature.

The only "valid business decision" is to make things that don't last as long, so recurring revenue is guaranteed.

Finally, the "smoking gun" of planned obsolescence: SLC flash requires nowhere near as much ECC and thus controller/firmware complexity as MLC/TLC/QLC. It is also naturally faster. The NRE costs of controllers supporting SLC flash is a fraction of those for >1 bit per cell flash. QLC in particular, according to one datasheet I could find, requires ECC that can handle a bit error rate of 1E-2. One in a hundred bits read will be incorrect in normal operation of a QLC storage device. That's how idiotic it is --- they're operating at the very limits of error correction, just so they can have a measly 4x capacity increase over SLC which is nearly perfect and needs very minimal ECC. All this energy and resource usage dedicated to making things more complex and shorter-lasting can't be considered anything other than planned obsolescence.

Contrast this with SmartMedia, the original NAND flash memory card format, rated for 100K-1M cycles, using ECC that only needs to correct at most 1 bit in 2048, and with such high endurance that it doesn't even need wear leveling.

Also consider that SLC drives should cost a little less than 4x the price of QLC ones of the same capacity, given the lower costs of developing controllers and firmware, and the same price of NAND die, yet those rare SLC drives which are sold cost much more --- they're trying to price them out of reach of most people, given how much better they actually are.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-20 07:45:06+00:00
>Neither in (German) high school nor in the many math courses of a physics B.Sc. have I ever used the secant function

I think we used it in geometry in US high school, but only to complete an assignment or two to show we could use trig functions correctly. I had to relearn how all of them worked to help my kid with homework, it's mostly look at the angles and sides you have available and pick which trig function is necessary to figure out which one you're solving for. I'm sure there are real life uses for trig functions, and I hate to be one of those "when are we ever going to use this" types, but I've never used any of them outside of math classes.
by ratatoskrt | 2025-04-20 07:45:32+00:00
It's just a typical response. What he means (in an admittedly unnecessary, snarky way) is that this is not going to revolutionise perceptual colour science. It's not going to be an out-of-this-world experience, nor will it change our understanding of how humans perceive colour. I personally think it's pretty cool, though.
by achenet | 2025-04-20 07:47:54+00:00
what about Roman families?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_ancient_Rome

You had the familia, which was similar to the current nuclear family, but that was wrapped into the larger gens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gens

people cared not just about the success of their intermediate family, but also their gens, which was similar to a clan.

You'll have similar structures in many tribal societies.

Do you have actual statistics to support your hypothesis that

> My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.

besides just "oh yeah bro, it's my read of history bro, totally rigorous"?
by crq-yml | 2025-04-20 07:48:39+00:00
It's a formal model that we can opt into surfacing, or subsume into convenient pre-packaged idioms. For engineering purposes you want to be aware of both.

It's way easier to make sense of why it's relevant to write towards a formalism when you are working in assembly code and what is near at hand is load and store, push and pop, compare and jump.

Likewise, if the code you are writing is actually concurrent in nature(such as the state machines written for video games, where execution is being handed off cooperatively across the game's various entities to produce state changes over time) most prepackaged idioms are insufficient or address the wrong issue. Utilizing a while loop and function calls for this assumes you can hand off something to the compiler and it produces comparisons, jumps, and stack manipulations, and that that's what you want - but in a concurrent environment, your concerns shift towards how to "synchronize, pause and resume" computations and effects, which is a much different way of thinking about control flow that makes the formal model relevant again.
by mcv | 2025-04-20 07:48:45+00:00
We tend to think about life and death as metaphysical states, but life is really just a process. And death the absence of that process.

Or actually, life is a bunch of different processes. It's possible for some to stop while others continue. Some, if stopped, can be restarted again, others can't. It all depends on whether the systems supporting those processes survive is a useable state. Often they deteriorate without the metabolical processes, but some systems are stable enough to survive a long time without the processes that maintain them so the processes can be restarted.

So are you dead when the processes stop, or when the system has deteriorated to the point they can't be restarted?
by throwaway81523 | 2025-04-20 07:48:51+00:00
For $1392/year you can get a Hetzner SX65 which is a fairly beefy server with 4x 22TB hard drives so that beats your Backblaze figure by about 2x, but still, it's far more than thee cost of the drives. There are also bigger models with more drives, where raid-6 overhead becomes less of an issue.

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx/

A 20TiB Hetzner StorageBox (managed Raid-6 storage with scp/Borg access) is $552 a year which is also pretty good compared to Backblaze. I have a 5TiB one and it has been solid, if a little bit slow some of the time.

I think the StorageBox line is about due for a refresh since there has been a big drop in HDD prices lately, despite tariffs or whatever. Are Seagate Barracudas terrible drives, or what? They are $229 for a 20TB unit at Newegg right now.
by Muromec | 2025-04-20 07:49:17+00:00
Fair enough, if you think about it from this point of view -- yes, it's not impossible. To put your 10$ in a perspective, the last thing I heard about corrupt cops (literally last week in the news) was a bro who selling license plate readings for 500 euros through his relative (who was selling drugs). He was also smart about using somebody else's password to get them from the system, because of course requests are logged. This one got caught (obviously, this is how we know) and is getting some free accommodation paid for by my taxes. Obviously there are corrupt cops everywhere, but in Western Europe at least cops are not the underpaid power tripping assholes with guns. They also can't just get employed as a cop in a different village after being kicked out for some cop bullshit.

So maybe it's not impossible, but it's not something you would do as part of normal HR screening.
by toasterlovin | 2025-04-20 07:50:33+00:00
> You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.

I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.

Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.
by herbst | 2025-04-20 07:50:37+00:00
Tell the AI to comment above the include why it uses a specific version, ask it to document the version and it's specific quirks after fixing it with it.

Not sure how o3 is generally at coding, but this kind of meta information works well for me to avoid version missmatches with Claude and Gemini

It's kinda important that the AI finds the issues itself so it can properly document it in her own words.
by steves1189 | 2025-04-20 07:51:05+00:00
A new way to share prompts!

*Not sure if I over-engineered a useless tool, but would love some feedback on my "Google Docs for AI prompts" project*

I built a tool called PromptShare that lets you create and share AI prompts through links – similar to how Google Docs works, but specifically for prompts. The main feature is that when you update the prompt, anyone with the link automatically sees the latest version.

Other features:

* Organise prompts in folders * Tag system for filtering * Set expiration dates on shared links * Track views to see if people actually opened it

I made this because I was tired of re-sending updated prompts to teammates in Slack/Discord, and thought others might find it useful too.

Is this actually helpful to anyone? Or am I solving a problem only I have? Would appreciate any thoughts or feedback from fellow prompt engineers.
by geocar | 2025-04-20 07:51:15+00:00
No. The claim is that it's about as fast as 22519 but stronger than 448, and might be resistant to some specific attacks. If that's true, that is a good thing.

But please do not take this as endorsement: I don't think you or anyone else should use this.

448 and 22519 go to great lengths to "nothing-up-my-sleeves" the parameters, and this one just keeps saying "custom designed" parameters.

This might be my failing to find it, but it's something I've come to expect in serious crypto papers front-and-centre.

It might also be the subject of another paper the author is working on, mere naiveté (on the authors part or mine), or part of a deliberate attempt to infiltrate some other/popular piece of software (like OpenSSL).
by mijoharas | 2025-04-20 07:52:26+00:00
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems that this approach doesn't allow you to store external input that's provided when you transition states.

Say stateB is transitioned to from stateA and needs to store a value that is _not_ directly computed from stateA but is externally supplied at the point of transition.

As far as I understand this isn't possible with the proposed solution? Am I missing something? This seems like a pretty common use case to me.
by renerick | 2025-04-20 07:52:26+00:00
It's hard to debate that mathematical notation has a lot of room for improvement. High level algebra is very cryptic and often looks like an arcane incantation rather than something comprehensible for an unknowing person.

That said, as a person who moderately enjoyed math in high school and university, this functional notation would make me hate math infinitely more. It's would look like Lisp, which, at high level, looks just as cryptic as algebra. The sheer amount of braces and mistakes that would be made when reading and writing them is nauseating.

Infix notation, for all its flaws, provides important visual aid for understanding the structure of the expression (the sum of two fractions looks very different from fraction of two sums for example). Whereas with functional notation it's like working on linear textual representation of abstract syntax tree. Trust me, nobody wants to read, write or transform one by hand
by roenxi | 2025-04-20 07:52:36+00:00
Well, no. It is good to listen to other people even if you think they don't have your best interests at heart. I can certainly see a security argument for restricting foreign media, but to get upset because literally one media source is owned by foreigners is too much.

The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit from the US suffering, much like the US has actually benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.

> Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to affected by propaganda.

Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what the Chinese think without going and listening to and reading things written by Chinese people and pushed by people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-20 07:54:09+00:00
The best solution I've seen is to hit everyone with a proof of work wall and whitelist the scrapers that are welcome (search engines and such).

Running SHA hash calculations for a second or so once every week is not bad for users, but with scrapers constantly starting new sessions they end up spending most of their time running useless Javascript, slowing the down significantly.

The most effective alternative to proof of work calculations seems to be remote attestation. The downside is that you're getting captchas if you're one of the 0.1% who disable secure boot and run Linux, but the vast majority of web users will live a captcha free life. This same mechanism could in theory also be used to authenticate welcome scrapers rather than relying on pure IP whitelists.
by realusername | 2025-04-20 07:54:43+00:00
So who decides that you can be one? Right now it's Cloudflare, a litteral monopoly...

The truth is that I sympathize with the people trying to use mobile connections to bypass such a cartel.

What Cloudflare is doing now is worse than the web crawlers themselves and the legality of blocking crawlers with a monopoly is dubious at best.
by vessenes | 2025-04-20 07:54:53+00:00
i think this is particularly claude 3.7 behavior - at least in my experience, it's ... eager. overeager. smarter than 3."6" but still, it has little chill. gemini is better; o3 better yet. I'm mostly off claude as a daily driver coding assistant, but it had a really long run - longest so far.
by ringeryless | 2025-04-20 07:55:31+00:00
Just to clarify, for the reader, that ansible and python are only required for the deployment host, not it's targets.

being agentless and using ssh for transport, the target hosts need only have an ip address listed in the deployment hosts inventory, aka one can address target hosts directly after creating them, given ssh access.

much of ansibles python issues are just python issues.

ansible is a very flexible tool, and idempotent behavior is largely a factor of playbook design until it hits real world limits.
by kdavidson | 2025-04-20 07:55:41+00:00
Hey HN,

Over the past few years, I’ve sold a bunch of digital products and SaaS, and one thing I kept running into was how barebones Stripe’s hosted payment links are. They work—but they’re not optimized for conversion.

So I built Caart (https://usecaart.com): a tiny layer on top of your Stripe payment links that adds things like:

- Countdown timers (urgency)

- Testimonials (social proof)

- Purchaser counts (FOMO)

- Abandoned cart recovery (via email)

- Support for one-time & subscription payments

- …and more coming soon

The goal is to give you all the conversion-boosting stuff without needing to install a full checkout flow, mess with APIs, or hire a dev.

It’s super simple: connect your Stripe account, customize your Caart page, and go live.

We just finished building it and I’ve been using it for my own sales pages and saw a clear lift in conversion, so I figured others might find it useful too.

Would love any feedback, especially on what you’d want it to do next, or what feels overkill.

We need more early users so we launched with ridiculously cheap pricing just so we can shorten the feedback loop while we learn what works and what doesn't. So for the time being it's $95 for lifetime access. We just want to see if people like it or need it.

Happy to answer anything!
by godelski | 2025-04-20 07:56:06+00:00
What a weird argument by Karpathy. He has a degree in physics. How does this dude not know that radar can see things not possible through camera vision. That argument there doesn't make any sense. That there's supply chains and things break and this makes it unsafe? Well that's true for every single bolt, every nut, ever little thing. I understand a drive to simplicity but you can't just throw fancy words in there like entropy while ignoring the literal physics that says camera + radar is less entropy than camera no radar. There is literally more (unique!) information available to you!
by vessenes | 2025-04-20 07:56:54+00:00
If you like this plan, you can do this from the command line:

`aider --model gemini --architect --editor-model claude-3.7` and aider will take care of all the fiddly bits including git commits for you.

right now `aider --model o3 --architect` has the highest rating on the Aider leaderboards, but it costs wayyy more than just --model gemini.
by croes | 2025-04-20 07:57:01+00:00
Doesn’t claim it isn’t useful just it’s not as useful as they thought.

For instance to me AI is useful because I don’t have to write boilerplate code but that’s rarely the case. For other things it still useful to write code but I am not faster because the time I save writing the code I need to fix the prompt, audit and fix the code.
by bawolff | 2025-04-20 07:57:09+00:00
> For example, I loved learning programming because it’s hands‑on—I can build something and immediately see the results. In everyday life, though, I rarely need more than basic arithmetic or simple sin/cos/tan trigonometry.

Consider doing something that actually needs it. You like computer programming - consider making a game engine. It might be easier to learn when you can actually see that it is useful.

Keep in mind though that math is a lot of things. People obsess over calculus but that is just one type. Math is just as much the different types of symmetry in wall paper patterns as it is finding the derrivative. Don't be afraid to try different areas. If you dont know where to start, consider picking up "A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics" by liebeck which introduces a bunch of different math concepts and see if any feel more interesting to you.
by hn_user82179 | 2025-04-20 07:57:21+00:00
I didn't understand this article at all. It's funny, the author mentions the dunning-kruger effect but I feel like most of the audience of this article will fall into this mental trap of thinking themselves more intelligent that they are (rather, that the article applies to them).

Especially the suggestions addressed to self-identifying smart people:

> 1. Give your ideas away.

> It amazes me how many pious philanthropists give generously to charity but are loath to share the secrets of their success.

Maybe I'm naive but I don't think there are a lot of "million dollar ideas" that are just being hoarded and all people have to do is share them

> 2. Don’t use your intelligence to tear others down.

> Deploying cleverness for one-upmanship, sarcasm, and snark is easy.

This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with negativity (and self-esteem, if someone is tearing others down to feel better about themselves).

The one thing I found interesting was

> the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” ... (They talk themselves into misery.)

That logic doesn't track for me, I feel like simpler explanations could be be that people fall into a lower level of vocabulary (a more common set of words) as they socialize with a variety of people. Or just office workers and academics broadly seem to be more frequently depressed (my theory is partially the sedentary lifestyle and lack of sun) and they have a larger vocabulary from communicating more through writing than orally.
by barry-cotter | 2025-04-20 07:57:31+00:00
The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries.

I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-04-20 07:58:03+00:00
At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd parties in the US have though, right?

Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller.

If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
by achenet | 2025-04-20 07:58:31+00:00
sorry if this is a stupid question,

but can your brother setup a class chat that he moderates?

I'm working on a simple chat app in Go as a learning project [0], you're welcome to use that, but honestly there are almost certainly better solutions out there, which he can actively moderate. Maybe a WhatsApp group, or something that can be used by a web interface (old forum techs?)

Group chats can be nice, I'm part of several acroyoga group chats and they're lovely, probably because adults who practice acroyoga tend to be nicer than middle schoolers.

[0] https://codeberg.org/achenet/go-chat
by john_the_writer | 2025-04-20 08:01:56+00:00
I like the last bit. Hiring would be a nightmare. Most serious BE dev (myself included) don't have time to learn a new language that I can only use at a handful (or single company). I want the language I spend the most time with to be something I could take to a recruiter (should I need to).

I worked at a place that worked with Delphi, and for various reasons I had to use it exclusively for a few years. No recruiter would touch me. Not until I got some time with Rails did I have a chance to escape.

As a former mobile dev, I'd also like to add, being an app dev vs BE dev isn't just about the code either.. It's a very different way of looking at problems. The skills might transfer, but they're living in different worlds. The language isn't the only obstacle.
by HexDecOctBin | 2025-04-20 08:02:34+00:00
> The people who are most skeptical of AI are often those with the highest standards for quality.

From Anger to Denial to Bargaining. And we are starting out with flattery. Masterful gambit!

Instead of participating in slop coding (sorry, "AI collaboration"), I think I'll just wait for the author and their ilk to make their way across Depression and Acceptance.