MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by solid_fuel | 2025-04-01 22:12:18+00:00
It "still has" ifconfig in the sense that you can install the 'net-tools' package which contains it and then use it, yes. However ifconfig is not included in base ubuntu installs and hasn't been since 18.04. It's marked as deprecated now.

There isn't anything specific that ifconfig can do that "ip" doesn't -- except I have 20 years of muscle memory for ifconfig and zero for "ip". That's my frustration. When I'm at home, just trying to set up Plex or debug a networking issue, and all I need to do is get my current IP address, the last thing I want to do is spend time learning a new interface that isn't necessary.

Again, this isn't really a complaint about the tools - I'm sure that "ip" is great and has more features and etc. But hosting on Linux feels like this about everything. Logs, services, networking, user configuration - the management tools for all these things have been changing quite fast, and in ways that can be hard to follow.

I'm not on the Kernel or Debian mailing lists and I don't think I should need to be to understand how to configure the network on ubuntu 20.04 vs 18.04. When I need to look up user management on BSD, I just look at the handbook. It's up-to-date and informative. Meanwhile in the Linux world these things change so fast that wiki articles from 2 years ago are often useless.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-04-01 22:14:30+00:00
> do I risk a 3rd party back port repo screwing up my system or other services, or upgrade the whole OS just to get one newer package, which comes with similar risks?

In these rare cases I usually just compile a newer deb package myself and let the package manager deal with it as usual. If there are too many dependencies to update or it's unusually complex, then it's container time indeed - but I didn't have to go there on my server so far.

Not diverging from the distro packages lets me not worry about security updates; Debian handles that for me.
by ttul | 2025-04-01 22:14:31+00:00
I remember sitting in front of WordPerfect for many, many hours as a teenager, writing essays and whatnot for school. We were fortunate to have an HP LaserJet at home that my dad used for work. The output looked great and WordPefect’s interface wasn’t terribly hard to get used to.

My more sophisticated friend had Windows 3.1 and blew my mind with the WISIWYG capabilities of early versions of Word.

Ironically, I now do much of my writing in vi.
by lxgr | 2025-04-01 22:15:11+00:00
Learning about Bufferbloat in my undergrad, but more importantly that by running OpenWrt on my €20 home router and simply activating an (at the time) nonstandard queueing policy could make a shared internet connection infinitely more usable, blew my mind.

I never met him, but from what I saw on the relevant mailing lists, Dave was at the center of it all. Rest in peace.
by geocrasher | 2025-04-01 22:15:35+00:00
Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed?

Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".

I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.

We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.
Ask HN: Google Maps directions blocked on latest Android Firefox?
by bookaway | 2025-04-01 22:15:37+00:00
Latest Firefox on Android (v.136) can't open Google Maps directions (car, transit, walking) when user refuses to be redirected to the Maps app and gives Request Cannot Be Completed error.

Can anyone else confirm?

The only way to get it to work seems to be be manually editing out an attribute from the Maps app redirection link?
by danicriss | 2025-04-01 22:16:12+00:00
Navico | New Zealand | Hybrid (2-3 days on-site) | Full-time | https://www.navico.com/about-us

We're a leading marine electronics company developing our own hardware running an Android-based platform. We're also developing sensors and peripherals

This particular role is unusually vertical, dealing with everything from reading sensor data on CAN (C) to business logic (C++) to publishing data via an Android library (Kotlin). We dabble in CI (Android test instrumentation / Jenkins) and have a plethora of mini side projects. They actually make life in this team quite fun

In terms of tech stack, anything Android is what we're looking for, with the ability to go low level (C / C++). Understanding of networking and protocols is essential

You'll join a team of 4 unusually skewed on the senior side. We're pretty collaborative, so experience with pair or mob programming is welcome. Being keen on test automation is a plus. Oh, we're Linux friendly, while staying cross-platform in terms of development

We sometimes get to test on the water

Auckland based and quite flexible - you still have to be able to be on location if need be, though. Please apply only if you're already in NZ and willing to live in Auckland

For details contact nikita.pustovoi@navicogroup.com
by twalkz | 2025-04-01 22:16:18+00:00
> My printer does not print tracking dots. Can I hide this fact?

> If there are really no tracking dots, you can either create your own ones (deda_create_dots) or print the calibration page (deda_anonmask_create -w) with another printer and use the mask for your own printer

The thought of being able to “spoof” the tracking dots of another printer has interesting implications for deniability. Though I guess in this case you’d still need access to the original printer to print the anonmask…
by mmooss | 2025-04-01 22:17:21+00:00
I think you're right about the screenshot resolution.

Something is wrong with the layout that makes it awkward for me to read. The word spacing, at least, seems awful. Look at the lines "meaning behind printed words ..." (near top) and "widely believed that ..." (near bottom) compared to the lines above and below them.

Maybe it's the full justification adjustment - the text in the box is much better. Even the dictionary popover has word spacing problems.

That's a big deal for reading long-form.
Show HN: MatterRank – Build search engines that rank results by your criteria
by mfkhalil | 2025-04-01 22:18:05+00:00
Today, search engines rank results based on broad, one-size-fits-all algorithms like Google's PageRank, optimizing for the "average" user.

We built MatterRank to give you complete control over how your search results are evaluated and ranked. Just use words to specify your preferences and how important each criterion is. MatterRank reranks results based on these personalized settings.

More broadly, we believe consumer software is shifting fundamentally. LLMs mean that anyone that understands language now has the tools to communicate to their software what they want out of it. As such, the role of an engineer will soon no longer be to build deterministic experiences, but to provide the best infrastructure for user customization via language.

We'd appreciate any feedback or criticism.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-01 22:18:19+00:00
> Finally, most of the call for AMD to develop a CUDA alternative is based on a desire for cheaper compute. That's not a good business venture to invest in against a dominate player because price sensitive customers are poor customers.

Nvidia’s gross margins are 80% on compute GPUs, that is excessive and likely higher than what cocaine and heroin dealers have for gross margins. Real competition would be a good thing for everyone except Nvidia.
by moonlighter | 2025-04-01 22:20:15+00:00
Former W.R. Grace employee: Molecular Sieve Desiccant Beads (also manufactured by W.R.Grace) are even more absorbent than regular silica gel. It's found in most double-pane windows inside the metal track between both panes; slowly absorbing any moisture over many years to keep them from fogging/going 'blind'.

You can use MS to dry flowers in record time... and use it to quickly heat up baby food in a pinch if needed... just put a smaller container of food in a bigger pod filled with MS and pour water of the MS... it's ultra-rapid absorption of water creates heat as a byproduct.
by nyeah | 2025-04-01 22:20:49+00:00
I'm surprised that anyone can read this coldly factual post about volunteer work that benefits society and pays next to nothing ... and then somehow come up with an antagonistic response.

YMMV. But I never read about St. Francis, say, and thought to myself "Shut up already. What ever made you think the bird gig was going to pay off?"

EDIT: "Benefits society" in the aggregate. This particular woman may write utterly worthless books that benefit nobody. I don't know.
by Havoc | 2025-04-01 22:21:51+00:00
The upcoming wave on APU like minipcs will be really cool in general.

The mem throughput looks a tad on the low side but combined with MoE style models will still allow for big models to run at reasonable speeds.

Prices will need to drop though. A grand is likely closer to most people budget than 3 for an AI quasi toy.
by mayop100 | 2025-04-01 22:21:53+00:00
Shortwave | Onsite in SF | Full-time | shortwave.com

We’re building Cursor for business communications (starting with email)

We’re currently growing revenue very quickly and are looking to more than double our team in the next 3 months. Hiring AI agent engineers, product engineers, frontend engineers, designers, and customer service & growth content roles. Aggressive comp.

I previously founded Firebase & sold it to Google. Shortwave is going to be much bigger.

Full details: https://shortwave.notion.site/Open-Positions-at-Shortwave-1a...
by fpgaminer | 2025-04-01 22:21:59+00:00
I've been consistently surprised by Gemini's OCR capabilities. And yeah, Qwen is climbing the vision ladder _fast_.

In my workflows I often have multiple models competing side-by-side, so I get to compare the same task executed on, say, 4o, Gemini, and Qwen. And I deal with a very wide range of vision related tasks. The newest Qwen models are not only overall better than their previous release by a good margin, but also much more stable (less prone to glitching) and easier to finetune. I'm not at all surprised they're topping the OCR benchmark.

What bugs me though is OpenAI. Outside of OCR, 4o is still king in terms of overall understanding of images. But 4o is now almost a year old, and in all that time they have neither improved the vision performance in any newer releases, nor have they improved OCR. OpenAI's OCR has been bad for a long time, and it's both odd and annoying.

Taken with a grain of salt since again I've only had it in my workflow for about a week or two, but I'd say Qwen 2.5 VL 72b beats Gemini for general vision. That lands it in second place for me. And it can be run _locally_. That's nuts. I'm going to laugh if Qwen drops another iteration in a couple months that beats 4o.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-01 22:22:10+00:00
I hope it doesn't contain any water at all!

Dry Powder or CO2 is what you need for energized electrical equipment. And considering there's potential lithium involvement, you might want something more specialized (e.g. F-500 Encapsulator Agent). I agree anything more than a small-scale incident you're just getting the heck out of dodge. I'd have built something along the lines of a concrete bunker, with an automated suppression system to buy time.
by paxys | 2025-04-01 22:22:53+00:00
There are an estimated 4 million books published every year. Not all of them are "volunteer work that benefits society". I'm going to go ahead and assume it's a very, very tiny minority of them. Most writers (and certainly every single one I know) have nothing to contribute to society except their own vanity.

I have nothing against creative expression, but when people start splashing a bucket of paint on a canvas and going "I'm an artist, I deserve to have a comfortable life" I can't help but roll my eyes.
by vkou | 2025-04-01 22:22:58+00:00
It's closer to exposing a first year CS student who has never touched a computer before to Windows, when the work is supposed to be done on Linux, and the TA is hemming and hawing, and insists that the reason the sudo command isn't working is because the student is not following the steps correctly.

It's a problem that's obvious to diagnose... If you already have passing familiarity with the material. Most people do not have passing familiarity with electronic components when they step into an engineering program.
by maxwelljoslyn | 2025-04-01 22:24:58+00:00
That's really cool, Elias. I keep seeing people try to put LLMs into the role of the GM. But I think you're doing something new and important by working to have the rules available to it.

Is your project available anywhere? Best of luck!

If you're interested, because I kept seeing "LLM as GM" projects, I got curious about how well it would work to have LLMs as players instead. So I made this:

https://github.com/maxwelljoslyn/gm-trainer

It's a training ground for GMs to practice things like spontaneous description, with 4 AI players that get fed what each other say so they act in a reasonably consistent manner. It's not perfect, but I've gotten some good use out of it.
by dli123 | 2025-04-01 22:25:21+00:00
thanks! we just use good old fashioned postgres running on azure, paired with a node server and blob storage in r2. i like how simple it is, and logs show up in places i'd expect without having to remember how to navigate some ui. queuing was something that took a bit to figure out correctly, but pg-boss ended up being the most straighfoward/easy to deploy on our infra.
by starburst | 2025-04-01 22:26:15+00:00
I feel like they could’ve innovated using novel technique, like 3D gaussian splatting (and upscaling the video or better yet record new videos). The vast majority of the time, you’re still pretty much locked unable to move when those CGI character show up, except for turning the camera around (from what I remembered). It could’ve been faked and still work and be much better as I felt it was the only downgrade to an otherwise fantastic remake that I really enjoyed.
by IvyMike | 2025-04-01 22:26:17+00:00
The github references this document: Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-138.

There is a copy here: https://ericbalawejder.com/assets/hexview/Forensic-Analysis-...

Table 1 (manufacturer, #of printers analyzed, dots found): Brother 1 no Canon 10 yes Dell 4 yes Epson 8 somemodels Hewlett-Packard 43 somemodels IBM 1 yes KonicaMinolta 21 somemodels Kyocera 4 yes Lanier 1 yes Lexmark 6 somemodels NRG 1 yes Okidata 9 somemodels Ricoh 6 yes Samsung 5 no Savin 1 yes Tektronix 4 no Unknown 1 yes Xerox 15 somemodels

It sounds like they mostly understand the dot patterns wherever they found them, with some caveats that are explained in the paper.
by maxwelljoslyn | 2025-04-01 22:26:22+00:00
I feel the same way about Tailspire as I feel about pretty much every other VTT. They might do okay, even pretty well, at combat maps and/or character sheets, but I want is the whole game world in the computer. Maps are just a fraction of what I need as a GM. I need data on economics and population numbers and power structures. And I need computation over all those things.

For instance, my game rules include an economic subsystem, which takes in the production of goods and services at hundreds of in-game cities, and computes prices for over a thousand player-purchaseable goods. The "second app" that I referred to above allows players to (among many other things) purchase stuff at the market nearest their current location and have those items go straight into their character sheet. If the "item" is actually an animal, a hired mercenary, etc. then a different subsystem generates a new NPC with the right statistics and attaches the player to it as owner/liege.

I could write an extension for a VTT that talks to my economic system over an API, and throws items up on screen, lets players purchase them, moves them into their character sheet using the right function calls in the VTT's extension library, etc. But every step of the way, I would be fighting to cram this subsystem into the VTT's conception that gameplay begins and ends with maps and char sheets.
by westurner | 2025-04-01 22:26:46+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 :

> There are default gcc and/or clang compiler flags in distros' default build tools; e.g. `make` specifies additional default compiler flags (that e.g. cmake, ninja, gn, or bazel/buck/pants may not also specify for you).

Is there a good reference for comparing these compile-time build flags and their defaults with Make, CMake, Ninja Build, and other build systems, on each platform and architecture?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306658 :

> From "Building optimized packages for conda-forge and PyPI" at EuroSciPy 2024: https://pretalx.com/euroscipy-2024/talk/JXB79J/ :

>> Since some time, conda-forge defines multiple "cpu-levels". These are defined for sse, avx2, avx512 or ARM Neon. On the client-side the maximum CPU level is detected and the best available package is then installed. This opens the doors for highly optimized packages on conda-forge that support the latest CPU features.

But those are per-arch performance flags, not security flags.
by tzs | 2025-04-01 22:26:48+00:00
> I always think it is weird that so many people that don't work in government have this odd belief that government work should basically be a vow of poverty. To pretend that people pursuing positions of power would accept universally that they should be poor is to deny human nature, which never works.

Members of Congress make $174k/year, with the Majority and Minority leaders making $193k, and the Speaker of the House around $223k. They also get various allowances for expenses related to doing their job such as a travel allowance.

They get good healthcare benefits and a pension that vests after 5 years.

Restricting their stock trading while in office is not going to plunge them into poverty.
by MBCook | 2025-04-01 22:28:46+00:00
> put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler

I kind of suspect all they have had at at this point is the over compressed video files that must have been what, 240p at most?

I suspect it may have been just so low that even if they wanted to they would have no choice but to recast and reshoot.

At least they got to reuse the original audio, IIRC.

I’m guessing the original video source was either lost or also possibly low quality/degraded.
by zahlman | 2025-04-01 22:29:55+00:00
If I'm being entirely honest, in the general case I don't.

But I don't particularly care, either. After a couple tries I decided it's better not to point at object examples of suspected LLM text all the time (except e.g. to report it on Stack Overflow, where it's against the rules and where moderators will use actual detection software etc. to try to verify). But I still notice that style of writing instinctively, and it still automatically flips a switch in my brain to approach the content differently. (Of course, even when I'm confident that something was written by a human, I still e.g. try to verify terminal commands with the man pages before following instructions I don't understand.)

Of course, AI writes the way it does for a reason. More worryingly, it increasingly seems like (verifiably) human writers are mimicking the style - like they see so much AI-generated text out there that sounds authoritative, that they start trying to use the same rhetorical techniques in order to gain that same air of authority.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-01 22:30:29+00:00
Idlewords has devoted an entire essay to the topic, "Dabblers And Blowhards" (2005). As a callout quote, and one immediately preceding a long list of specific issues with pg in his own essay Maciej Cegłowski is critiquing:

It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered...

<https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm>

From a flagged subthread here, several prior criticisms on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515252

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43526888

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527106

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515723

(From: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43529517>.)
by Shog9 | 2025-04-01 22:31:29+00:00
Bigger, fewer, more chill cells, fairly robust trenchcoat.

(IIRC, these packs are 16 100ah LiFePO4 cells in a steel case w/ built-in fuse, breaker, and BMS that monitors individual cell health and pack temperature, w/ automatic cut-off if any of that goes out of spec. The weakness is primarily the MOSFETs on the BMS potentially failing shorted. Fortunately, they've added some sort of additional fire suppression beyond just "steel case" in recent-ish versions of these packs)
by blatantly | 2025-04-01 22:35:05+00:00
If I did a book for money (bad idea yes!) I'd try at least to self publish and make it a premium thing with upsells. Like the Total Typescript course.

Selling 100 for $50 (no mean feat but still modest) copies would probably beat any publisher earnings!

You could also get away with less perfect grammar etc. BYO editor or just edit yourself. The goal is to teach after all.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-01 22:35:21+00:00
Hire an electrician please, I sell and run electrical work and a generator installation is not something you should take on yourself.

If you want to have a few electrical loads on a generator backed panel, you have an electrician install the generator, automatic transfer switch, and a subpanel that is fed by the automatic transfer switch, which is fed by both utility power (from a breaker in your main electrical panel) and generator power. If you’re using natural gas or propane to power the generator, a pipe fitter will need to run the gas line.

Then you tell the electrician to move the circuits you wanted backed by a generator from your main panel to the subpanel fed by the ATS. The subpanel receives power from the utility until the ATS detects an outage, which fires up the generator and transfers the power feeding the subpanel to the generator.

Generators can use gasoline, diesel, natural gas, or propane, or a combination of any of the aforementioned fuels. Ideally you’d have a multi fuel generator hooked up to a natural gas utility with a backup propane tank in case the natural gas service goes down.

You can also get a whole house generator and have the ATS feed your existing electrical panel, you’ll need a 24kW 120/240V for a 100A service or 48kW 120/240V for a 200A service

I’d recommend a Generac generator if you do get one, Costco sells them and will connect you with an installer.

If you want to get crazy, you could add a 50kva single-phase 120/240V UPS and the UPS would keep the power on while the generator starts up but that would be serious overkill (and tens of thousands of dollars).
by cardanome | 2025-04-01 22:36:07+00:00
This is way some countries like Germany have fixed book prices. They set a minimum price that the book needs to be sold at.

This helps authors and also prevents smaller book shops from being out competed by price.

It is a pretty great system. Sure German books tend to be significantly more expensive than the English counter part but its not like I don't have already enough books in my pile of shame. And for those tight on money there is always libraries.