MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kayson | 2025-04-20 18:13:07+00:00
I really like the idea of immutable Linux and bootable containers. My next project will probably be switching to bazzite. But I took a look at the Containerfile[1], and I have some big concerns about the fragility of their supply chain. It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. They do dump a diff of all package versions in the release notes[2], but I wonder if anyone actually reviews it before release. All it takes is one vulnerability in one repo / package and you can enjoy your new cryptominer.

There's something nice about running Debian and having confidence in all the packages because they're built and maintained by the Debian team. Of course there are exceptions, but in my experience they're rare. The only non-standard repo I regularly use is fish shell, and the updates are so few and far between (and very public) I think the risk is low.

I suppose this isn't strictly a container-specific problem; you could add the repos and install / update all those packages yourself too. But being able to package everything up into a single file that you can then boot into as your OS means you're also packing all the supply chain risk.

Curious if anyone else shares my concern or if I should just put my tinfoil hat back on...

1. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/Containerfile 2. https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/releases/tag/42.20250417
by ksec | 2025-04-20 18:13:27+00:00
>but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible

I am just going to quote what pcwalton said the other day that perhaps answer your question.

>> I’d be much more excited about that promise [memory safety in Rust] if the compiler provided that safety, rather than asking the programmer to do an extraordinary amount of extra work to conform to syntactically enforced safety rules. Put the complexity in the compiler, dudes.

> That exists; it's called garbage collection.

>If you don't want the performance characteristics of garbage collection, something has to give. Either you sacrifice memory safety or you accept a more restrictive paradigm than GC'd languages give you. For some reason, programming language enthusiasts think that if you think really hard, every issue has some solution out there without any drawbacks at all just waiting to be found. But in fact, creating a system that has zero runtime overhead and unlimited aliasing with a mutable heap is as impossible as finding two even numbers whose sum is odd.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726315
by simonw | 2025-04-20 18:13:37+00:00
No idea. MLX is its own thing, optimized for Apple Silicon. Ollama uses GGUFs.

https://ollama.com/library/gemma3:27b-it-qat says it's Q4_0. https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit says it's 4bit. I think those are the same quantization?
by verdverm | 2025-04-20 18:13:53+00:00
I still disagree, being good at a number of tasks does not make it intellectual.

Certainly creativity is missing, it has no internal motivation, and it will answer the same simple question both right and wrong, depending on unknown factors. What if we reverse the framing from "it can do these tasks, therefore it must be..." to "it lacks these traits, therefore it is not yet..."

While I do not disagree that the LLMs have become advanced enough to do a bunch of automation, I do not agree they are intelligent or actually thinking.

I'm with Yann Lecun when he says that we won't reach AGI until we move beyond transformers.
by antonvs | 2025-04-20 18:13:56+00:00
Backdoors in self-hosted systems are one of the major state-level attack vectors, and there are many known examples of this.

The idea that "you should not be exposing these kinds of services to the public internet (or giving them access to the public internet)" is naive. Aside from the fact that this requires every user to show that level of diligence - a completely unrealistic expectation - if a system is backdoored, it can also have means of exfiltrating data beyond just sending it out on the public internet.

And then there's the obvious point that if you suspect a device is compromised, it's completely irresponsible to use it anyway and assume that you're going to be able to prevent unauthorized access.

As some examples, there are documented concerns about Huawei/ZTE routers, which have been banned in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and the US for that reason. Unauthorized third-party code was found in Juniper Networks firewalls. Fortinet had hardcoded admin credentials in its firewalls and VPNs - probably a self-inflicted mistake, but still useful to attackers. Similarly, Western Digital NAS devices had a hardcoded backdoor account. D-Link routers had such a backdoor in their device web interface. There are many more examples like this.

Snowden revealed some of the US government activities in this area. The US, Russia, China, North Korea and other countries have all been involved in attacks involving BIOS/UEFI firmware, router firmware, NAS, and manufacturing supply chains. Covert exfiltration has been involved in many of these cases, using techniques other than transmitting over the internet.

And of course there was the recent (reported late 2024 Salt Typhoon attack by China on US and other Western telecom networks, which relied on these kinds of techniques, and gained access to large amounts of data, including audio and text of targeted people.
by itwillnotbeasy | 2025-04-20 18:13:59+00:00
Weird choice, given Google’s track record on privacy. Gemini uses your chats for training and human review them by default. You can opt out by turning off App Activity, but that disables chat history and integrations, which kinda kinda makes it useless. Claude respects your privacy by default and ChatGPT and Grok have an opt-out that doesn’t totally cripple the app.

So what makes Google less scummy? A cheaper price? I’m sure that won’t last long – they’ve played this game before with YouTube, Google Reader, and Search: hook users, dominate, then enshittify. Same old Google playbook: good → monopoly → crap.
by qsort | 2025-04-20 18:14:32+00:00
I don't think that's a particularly honest line of thinking though. It preempts the obvious counterargument, but very weakly so. Calculators are different, but why? Can an ensemble of a calculator, a Prolog interpreter, Alexnet and Stockfish be considered "jagged superintelligence"? They are all clearly superhuman, and yet require human experience to be wielded effectively.

I'm guilty as charged of having looked at GPT 3.5 and having thought "it's meh", but more than anything this is showing that debating words rather than the underlying capabilities is an empty discussion.
by Retric | 2025-04-20 18:14:34+00:00
> Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!

I think that shows their weaknesses. Propaganda seems to work best when reinforced over long periods. People read a book and get really into something for a while, X is now the one true diet! However, I rarely see longer term shifts without something else reinforcing the ideas.

By comparison the US military has been subsidizing media who want access to military hardware for decades as long as they follow a few guidelines. It’s a subtle drip of propaganda but across America and much of the globe people’s perception has very much been influenced in an enduring fashion. No single episode of talk radio or Fox News is particularly effective but listen for years and you get a meaningful effect.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-20 18:14:35+00:00
I used to think Python had no place in embedded — way too heavy, too dynamic, too unpredictable.

But I’ve been messing around with some ideas that challenge that assumption. If you throw out the traditional VM model and rethink things from the ground up (no VM, no JIT, not even C underneath), it’s surprisingly possible to get Python code close to the metal.
by computerdork | 2025-04-20 18:14:44+00:00
For me, think it's probably more your second idea, that we're not funneling media through a handful of TV channels, newspapers, etc. anymore like we used to. This creates (for better or worse) more of a "group think" mentality, since they've all seen the same tv shows and movies, and become more in sync with their views on all things, cultural, political... So people's sense of fashion is also in sync as well as the need to fit in.
by manyturtles | 2025-04-20 18:15:07+00:00
Yep. Sold in the UK as the Tomy ROBO-1. Had great fun playing with it, never knew people had hooked them up to computers. Echoing others' comments, the drive was noisy even when stationary. And it didn't seem to have any sensors to let it know when it had reached the limit of any particular motion. Instead the plastic gears would start to skip loudly with a usefully intuitive "if you keep doing that I'll break" sound.
by bgnn | 2025-04-20 18:15:12+00:00
I just put them dry, not broken, and overlapping between the boxes such that they cover the surface fully. And yes, the roots can go down, but weeds cannot go past that easily. The theory is yhe upwards growth is weak but downwards growth of the roots are much stronger and they can puncture a wet paper box.

Cover crops: clover, buckwheat and winter rye. Cut before seeding and lay them flat over the surface.
by echoangle | 2025-04-20 18:15:19+00:00
Yes, it’s like people complaining that there was a 90% chance of rain and then it didn’t rain.

Of course in reality you either get killed by your partner or you don’t, every judgement except „negligible“ and „extreme risk“ will be wrong if you need absolute certainty. And if you want to have a false negative rate of literally 0, you need to return „extreme risk“ for every single case.
by antonvs | 2025-04-20 18:15:23+00:00
Attackers, whether state-level, corporate, or criminal, all rely on ignorance like this. It also probably involves denial: you want to believe your systems are safe, so you delude yourself into thinking that minimal protections are sufficient.

I wrote a longer comment about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43745423
by photochemsyn | 2025-04-20 18:15:25+00:00
Odd that an article on healthy soil completely ignores the major health risk from growing food in regions with a long history of industry and mining, eg most of Europe, northeastern USA, etc. - Heavy metal contamination with species like lead, mercury, cadmium etc. There's a huge literature on the subject, but real-world monitoring is pretty light, certainly doesn't look standard:

>"Freslyn Mae, Camata, and Ryna Mae, Capurcos, and Eula Marie, Delino, and Gecelene, Estorico, (2025) Assessing the Sources and Risks of Heavy Metals in Agricultural Soils: A Comprehensive Review. International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology"

https://eprint.ijisrt.org/id/eprint/324/
by pron | 2025-04-20 18:16:51+00:00
Yes!

To me, the uniqueness of Zig's comptime is a combination of two things:

1. comtpime replaces many other features that would be specialised in other languages with or without rich compile-time (or runtime) metaprogramming, and

2. comptime is referentially transparent [1], that makes it strictly "weaker" than AST macros, but simpler to understand; what's surprising is just how capable you can be with a comptime mechanism with access to introspection yet without the referentially opaque power of macros.

These two give Zig a unique combination of simplicity and power. We're used to seeing things like that in Scheme and other Lisps, but the approach in Zig is very different. The outcome isn't as general as in Lisp, but it's powerful enough while keeping code easier to understand.

You can like it or not, but it is very interesting and very novel (the novelty isn't in the feature itself, but in the place it has in the language). Languages with a novel design and approach that you can learn in a couple of days are quite rare.

[1]: In short, this means that you get no access to names or expressions, only the values they yield.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-20 18:17:24+00:00
We had alpha-blockers for a long time now, which prevents ejaculation but not orgasm; read: it can completely block the emission phase of ejaculation, while orgasmic function is retained.

Example: Silodosin.

You need to experiment with it. Sensitive clinical trials measured rates as high as 90-99%.

It is entirely non-hormonal. It does not affect libido (rarely), while hormonal male contraceptives do, and it is reversible upon cessation, without any delay, unlike hormonal male contraceptives.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-20 18:19:16+00:00
I don't use Cursor (I'm on Jetbrains) but from what I read it must be the autocomplete. Github Copilot is literally unusable. I've tried it many times in the last month and everything it suggests is stupid and utterly wrong. The suggestions are not subtly wrong - they often have nothing to do with what I'm working on. It wasn't this bad at the beginning. Mind you, I code mainly in Python, pretty common stuff most of the time.

I keep reading here that Cursor has great autocomplete so we could be talking about a 1000% improvement compared to Copilot rather than 1% as on of the other commenters is positing.
by boulos | 2025-04-20 18:19:33+00:00
> Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.

We did pass gross receipts taxes and do tax payroll for larger businesses. So yes, companies pay more taxes than 2015 (though they didn't choose to) and our budget per person in inflation adjusted terms is up:

A $16 billion question: How did San Francisco’s budget get so huge?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/city-budget-16-billio...

A lot of that is from "self-supporting" segments including SFO.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-20 18:20:23+00:00
Nope, it's not the same. The point of having the Registrar involved is to side-step the problem of validating a cert request is allowed to request the cert. All the CA validation methods are supposed to be verifying your authorization to request a cert, but they don't do that.

They instead verify your authorization to control DNS records, or IP space, or an e-mail address. And there's dozens of exploits to compromise each of those. And they can be chained. And they can be CA-specific.

That's not domain authorization, and each of those verification methods lacks cryptographic authentication. Only the Registrar controls the domain, so that is the only way to know that the request is genuinely authorized. We're playing a game of telephone, it's not secure, and it's unnecessary. Just get the registrar involved.
by camdenreslink | 2025-04-20 18:20:35+00:00
I think there will be an ossification of current languages/frameworks/libraries. The technologies that already have a large amount of documentation, tutorials, example code, etc. will have a huge advantage over a brand new language because all of that content will be in the pretraining for all LLMs. Would you rather use JavaScript/TypeScript and Python (which will work relatively well with LLMs), or some brand new thing that will barely work at all with LLMs.
by osnium123 | 2025-04-20 18:20:52+00:00
In this article, we will discuss 6 reasons why the chip industry is struggling to attract new talent.

Theory-first education: In an effort to build from fundamentals, there is too much emphasis on theory rather than a focus on applications. Compensation myth: There is a feeling that software pays more than hardware. Reality is not so cut and dry. Graduate degrees: A lot more employers ask for graduate level degrees to enter chip design creating bottlenecks in talent supply. Early specialization: Highly niche skillsets are less marketable and career limiting. Documentation shortages: Hardware design is entirely tribal knowledge and hard to self-learn. Chip design culture: Hardware companies have a retro feel to them, deadlines are tight, and mistakes are deadly.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-20 18:20:56+00:00
You could, it’s really a question of what your needs are and what your backup strategy is.

Most people don’t have that much data to back up, I don’t backup movies and shows I download because I can always rebuild the library from scratch I only backup stuff I create, so personal photos, videos etc.

I’m not using a tape backup either, cloud backup is enough for me its cheap as long as you focus your backups to what matters the most.
by blahaj | 2025-04-20 18:20:58+00:00
> In male mice, the drug caused infertility and was 99% effective in preventing pregnancies within four weeks of use.

I don't know if they mean 99% reduction compared to normal or 99% of mice did not cause a pregnancy. Either way this does not mean that every intercourse has a 1% chance of causing a pregnancy. Also you are assuming an unconditional probability. It could very well be a conditional probability. It might completely work for 99% that do not cause any pregnancies at all and not work for 1% that cause pregnancies as without the drug.

Anyway I am looking forward to getting the perl index for humans from clinical trials.

Edit: fixed wrong wording
by Veserv | 2025-04-20 18:21:08+00:00
Coming after Diaz v Tesla [1] where Tesla was found guilty of racial harassment and discrimination in that same Fremont, California plant (as can be seen here on page 3-11 [2]) to a degree that the jury deemed it worthy of a $136.9 million award, the single largest award in a race harassment case in American history [2]. That award was later reduced for procedural reasons as it was beyond the maximum limit the law allows. And further reduced in a subsequent trial evaluating direct damages due to emotional distress and loss of work which, as a matter of law, restricted the maximum allowable punitive damages. Despite that, the jury found it necessary to award punitive damages in excess of the standard maximum of 9:1 [4] which was upheld by the courts as, in the words of the judge: "Tesla’s conduct was reprehensible and repeated"[5] and as such the award in excess of standard maximums was "appropriate in light of the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla’s repeated failure to rectify it"[6].

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06...

[3] https://www.civilrightsca.com/key-verdicts/diaz-v-tesla-race...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Farm_Mutual_Automobile_I...

[5] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 29

[6] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-3_17-cv-06... Page 1 End of Paragraph 1.
by keyringlight | 2025-04-20 18:21:26+00:00
I think that speaks to another aspect, individual apps taking full control over how they're presented instead of inheriting whatever framework the DE is providing or the cohabitation of various KDE/QT/GTK/X/other, or electron framework defaults. Over on windows even when uxtheme skinning was in full swing it was the start of applications doing it themselves (winamp and quicktime come to mind), but I have the impression developers doing so made sure the extra effort had a payoff.
by api | 2025-04-20 18:21:30+00:00
I have never been able to even see SF as a progressive place. It’s progressive in popular rhetoric and that’s it. The goal is to make its rich residents feel good about themselves, not to actually help anyone.

You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.

In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.

Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-04-20 18:21:33+00:00
I do find the juxtaposition of “look at this image of satellites” and “the image is a composition of 360 photographs” to require a certain leap of logic that hasn’t been established. On the one hand, it shows that a lot of satellites are visible throughout the night. On the other hand it’s harder to understand what the broader implications of this are.
by doodlebugging | 2025-04-20 18:21:48+00:00
If it isn't economically feasible for these operators to build fiber out to serve all these rural customers who would love to have the same high-speed options that city folks enjoy then why did they allocate funds to do this at least twice? (USA, not sure about other countries). It is interesting to note that in each occasion the providers basically took the money and invented excuses for not following through.

That's part of what the hell I'm going on about.

Satellite internet is a game-changer but like I said, the internet in general has become a useful tool for propagandists to promote whatever message they need to disseminate in order to gain or maintain control of public opinion, allowing then to gain power or to remain in power.

I totally agree that people who grow food, though they don't grow much of mine since I have a fully functional garden/orchard, should be able to chat with friends or family and stream videos if that's what floats their boats.

Part of my family lives in a highly rural area where bandwidth was an issue for them in their lives and jobs. They had to use expensive line-of-sight internet services that frequently suffered during weather events making it difficult for them to stay online during a workday. Their cell service out there was dicey and complicated by the fact that they live in a metal sided house that they built themselves so there were lots of times that they had to step outside to get a signal to use their phones. They have upgraded to starlink now I think and they have fewer issues.

Another family member loves online gaming and has twice bought a home in a rural area with very limited internet access options. Each time before they bought I have reminded them to check the availability of internet access for the properties. Each time I got to listen to them gripe that the only option out there was thru Hughes-Net or some other expensive provider with severely limited bandwidth.

I understand the issue about rural broadband access a little more than you gave credit for.
by joeevans1000 | 2025-04-20 18:21:52+00:00
This is amazing! Thank you!

It may be in the project as I just scanned through i (but will read through it properly soon), but do you have any of the data for accuracy? Say, over 10M (Or less, if this lidar doesn't work at that distance).

I'm familiar with the FARO scanners which have a different type of mechanism. Their accuracy is good enough for building things.

I've discovered there's several markets for scanners… among those are people who need accuracy and people who are creating content for media like games.

Thank you so much for sharing this project. It's truly unbelievable.
by Y_Y | 2025-04-20 18:22:14+00:00
Here's o4-mini-high solving riddles:

> What weighs more; a pound of courage or a pound coin?

> They weigh the same—each is a “pound.” A pound of courage and a pound coin both come out to one pound in weight!

https://chatgpt.com/share/68053ad0-aae4-800d-95ff-5b5b0a9a38...

I didn't know what AGI is, but I know this isn't it.