MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thangalin | 2025-04-17 02:34:27+00:00
On a related note, Birth-Death Formalism connects Jaynes' Prior Probabilities in a paper, "Do SETI Optimists Have a Fine-Tuning Problem?"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07097

One of the authors posted an approachable video explaining how the ideas connect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-9Hq8dV_4
by jonahbenton | 2025-04-17 02:34:36+00:00
Warren Buffett is the legitimacy canary for any claims related to "bringing manufacturing/heavy industry/etc back to America." If there were any kind of non-bullshit plan to support the deployment of blocks of $10B to $100B on anything other than chips and data centers- which for damn sure we need- he would be first in line. But no. So he gets to sit around, eat his burger and coke, and collect $15B in interest on that cash.
by daxfohl | 2025-04-17 02:35:48+00:00
> switch

Hmm, that hit a bit of a nerve. My experience with switch blocks is it can be a gateway drug for teams A, B, C to add their special-case code to team D's repo within a `switch(calling_service)` block. My read of the presentation is more, factor your stuff so that any "switch" is a higher level concern that consumers can do in their own services. Then if you start to see all your consumers write very similar consumption logic, then start thinking about how to pull that down into the library/service itself.

But beyond that trigger nerve, agreed.
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-17 02:35:57+00:00
The goal isn't to build perfect assistants with LLM. The goal is to build something that is just good enough to be useful. It doesn't need to be even a full fledged conversational LLM. It could just be an LM.

Lots of tasks don't require knowledge to be encoded into the model. For example "summarize my emails" is a task that can be done with a fairly small model trained on just basic text.

There are also unexplored avenues. For example, if I had the hardware to do this, I would basically take an early version of GPT, and then start training it on additional data, and when the training run completes, I would diff the model with the original version, and use that as the training set of another model. Basically build a model on top of GPT that can automatically adjust parameter weights and encode it into the model, thus giving it persistent memory.
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-17 02:37:38+00:00
I am using multithreaded static backend, I only use json plain text i/o and plain text pages. Frameworks such as this have no good reason to exist as they are far too reductive and not accomodating to commonly understood complexities on the frontend later on. As an example with recharts, I'd not waste my time rendering charts on the backend when they need to be redrawn, I do not care if you can do things "at edge" it is idiotic to constantly send a packet back and forth to a machine to operate on data a user already has. I speak from experience it's a waste of time.
by jetsnoc | 2025-04-17 02:40:22+00:00
They need to implement secondary and tertiary domains—with diverse registrars and hosting infrastructure—for the Zoom client’s calling home. Maybe even a fallback anycast ip address for service discovery. Given how much companies like mine pay for service, it’s reasonable to expect that level of engineering foresight. But hindsight will do—let’s get it fixed. #HugOps to all employees working overtime and taking care of this.
by skylerwiernik | 2025-04-17 02:41:17+00:00
I bought my first domain from GoDaddy in high school. I remember them having the slowest dns portal in the world, and having to call support at least once about something they screwed up. Don't really remember the details, but I remember them causing problems and losing my business within a year. I've used at least 3 other registers since then and never had a single problem.
by awb | 2025-04-17 02:41:33+00:00
There’s no evidence yet, but we also haven’t looked very carefully or in very many places. And we only know to look for planetary life as we know it.

The middle of the galaxy could have a wildly different composition and habitat for life than the outer reaches where we are.

Time is also another factor. Maybe the galaxy is perfect for complex life, we just happen to be early on the timescale and in another billion years or two life will be clearly abundant everywhere.

For some perspective, if you take the size of the Milky Way (100k light years) and relate it to the size of NYC (~30 miles), then 120 light years ends up being ~190 feet in NYC, or less than a city block.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-17 02:41:43+00:00
I think the "0" prefix for octal (as used in the C programming language) is not so good and that "0o" is better; so, if octal literals are implemented then "0o" is better.

For non-Unicode text, probably the simplest thing would be to treat the input as a sequence of bytes instead of Unicode characters; or equivalently to treat it as ISO-8859-1 (although programming it to use ISO-8859-1 may be less efficient then just using bytes, possibly; I don't know much about the working of Rust programming, so I don't actually know if it is or not).

By "non-Unicode text", I did not mean character mapping, although character mapping is another feature that would be useful to implement, similar to what you mentioned although it could be made more efficient (like you mention). Some way to map a input sequence of bytes (whether or not it is valid UTF-8) to a output character code, would work, probably.
by kypro | 2025-04-17 02:43:17+00:00
If you assume life is very likely then the Great Filter has to be an almost perfect filter to explain the Fermi Paradox. With fewer civilisations in the galaxy (<50) you might be able to assume that if 95% of them destroy themselves it would be unlikely we'd ever find life. If we assume 170 civilisations then the great filter would have to be something akin to a natural law.

My gut says that the Great Filter is real but probably doesn't filter more than 99% of civilisations. Were I to guess complex life is uncommon, and intelligent life very uncommon. The majority of planets which do develop intelligent life destroy themselves fairly quickly.
by sema4hacker | 2025-04-17 02:43:21+00:00
The first Windows machine I ever bought was a cheap advertised 386 deal at the San Jose Fry's in the 90's. The sales guy took me around to load up a shopping cart with chassis, mother board, memory, hard disk, floppy, etc., with each item stocked in separate store departments. Probably around $200 total. Took it all home, put it together, and it worked reliably for years.
by milesrout | 2025-04-17 02:43:27+00:00
The Flynn effect is about the change in measured intelligence through the 20th century. It tells us precisely nothing about the difference in intelligence between the 13th century and today, let alone going back before the Bronze Age Collapse or agriculture.

A large part of the Flynn effect may be due to reductions in environmental pollutants, which would mean it would be a reversal of the effect of the industrial revolution. Or it may have been due to people being much more used to taking tests. Or it may be due to nutrition. It is unlikely to be due to modern education forcing people to "learn to reason abstractly from an early age" because schools don't require students to learn to reason abstractly from an early age.
by rmason | 2025-04-17 02:44:17+00:00
Loyal customer of the Detroit area Micro Center. Thought I was the furthest customer that day when I bought my last laptop there coming ninety miles. Salesman said he's sold two machines that day to customers from Grand Rapids and one to someone from Muskegon! That Muskegon customer had travelled nearly 400 miles roundtrip to buy a laptop. I'm fairly technical and yet I haven't ever found a question my salesman couldn't answer.
by jiveturkey | 2025-04-17 02:45:44+00:00
well yes! that is the entire point / methodology of TLS. Because you have a trust anchor, you can be sure that at the app layer the connection is "secure".

of course the L3/L4 can be (non) trivially intercepted by anyone, but that is exactly what TLS protects you against.

if simple L4 interception were all that is required, enterprises wouldn't have to install a trust root on end devices, in order to MITM all TLS connections.

the comment you were replying to is

> How is an attacker going to MITM an encrypted connection they don't have the keys for

of course they can intercept the connection, but they can't MITM it in the sense that MITM means -- read the communications. the kind of "MITM" / interception that you are talking about is simply what routers do anyway!
by Terr_ | 2025-04-17 02:45:49+00:00
> Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.

The ocean floor has plenty of stuff to dig into, pick up, and manipulate, along with un-anchored things like mats of seaweed.

> Land animals are more likely to develop hands.

I can easily imagine sea-creatures making the same kinds of assumptions in reverse: "Sir Blub-blub, while this hypothesis of 'land' animals is indeed intriguing, they would undoubtedly be primitive, far less likely to develop intelligent grabbers. After all, there will be nothing worth grabbing but hard 'dry' rocks! They wouldn't even be useful for propulsion, given the intangibility of this 'air'."
by anonfordays | 2025-04-17 02:46:22+00:00
>They should be multiplicative.

That doesn't make any sense.

>Everyone is supposed to pay capital gains.

Not true. You don't pay if you have capital losses, nor do you pay if you have capital gains in tax sheltered accounts, etc.

>They're both percentage taxes.

No one claimed otherwise.

>It's not supposed to be "pick one".

That's exactly how it is in many cases, even income taxes have been that way for decades (though SALT deduction now limited). Read up on double taxation and why it's typically avoided.
by frogeyedpeas | 2025-04-17 02:46:26+00:00
Chemistry and reactions would absolutely still be a thing. Reactions happen underwater all the time such as the complex decay of organic matter.

The fire meta get's postponed until trapping air inside bags happens (could be seaweed/skin based bags).

Then you need to make a habit of collecting a bunch of air and trapping it and then can begin exploring chemical reactions in the air.

ex: take dead but not decomposed organic matter, dry it out in hot air bag (maybe cover the bag in black squid ink and float the bag of air in the ocean out in the sun's rays for day to warm it up.

Then eventually you need to have the insight to do friction based experiments in the bag with dried materials and then one discovers fire in a massive breakthrough not dissimilar to when humans created Bose Einstein Condensates for the first time in highly specialized environments.

Nothing here says "impossible" to me. I bet if whales had fingers to easily manipulate matter they might've already done all this by now.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-04-17 02:47:51+00:00
This is a very skewed reading of actual history.

The USA's efforts in South America (for example) were not aimed at spreading liberal democracy - the USA routinely intervened after democratic elections appointed leaders they didn't like, and installed military juntas or dictators that they did like. There was an overt tendency in US foreign policy to install right-wing leaders where possible, partly as a defence against Cold War Communism.

The wars that the USA engaged in since WW2 have not been about promoting liberalism, or removing totalitarian regimes. They have been explicitly about protecting US economic interests abroad, and generally feeding the military-industrial base as Eisenhower predicted.
by 9rx | 2025-04-17 02:48:44+00:00
Halting normally implies that the program has finished executing. Maybe, as your tricks suggest, SIGKILL is a little grey area, but I think it is fair to say that its intent is ultimately to kill the program even if it hasn't finished executing, thus in a typical scenario it wouldn't see the program halt. Rebooting or otherwise terminating execution of a program at the hardware level before a program has finished is even clearer that the program hasn't halted, at least as the term is typically understood.

But something like SIGINT is at the discretion of the program. If it chooses to accept the signal and halt it is entirely because the program decided it was finished.
by leetrout | 2025-04-17 02:50:43+00:00
My favorite which is also up to date is the ClickHouse playground.

For example:

SELECT * FROM hackernews_history ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 10;

https://gh-api.clickhouse.tech/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRl...

I subscribe to this issue to keep up with updates:

https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec...

And ofc, for those that don't know, the official API https://github.com/HackerNews/API
by signal11 | 2025-04-17 02:51:42+00:00
From the linked article

> This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Markmonitor is used by some fairly large corps and web properties. It’ll be interesting to find out exactly what this miscommunication was.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-17 02:51:44+00:00
I mean, if what you want is P4-class performance, the modern semiconductor industry is excellent at delivering that with low TDP. An Apple A18 Pro [1] gives you over 7x the single thread performance of a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition [2] at 8 W TDP, compared to 115 W for the latter.

[1]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro&id=62...

[2]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+3.7...
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-17 02:52:10+00:00
Getting agreement on a better scoring system for CVE's will be hard enough, assuming it's possible at all given the competing interests.

It makes a top down imposed set of technical fixes for a lot of things broken in our industry look at best like an impossible dream. If anyone claiming they have an oracle that tells you how much effort should be put into QA for any given piece of software is a bullshitter. If you let the bullshitters loose they will create quagmire of rules leading to a huge amount of busy work that mainly benefits them.

A huge amount of experimentation is required to figure out what approaches work. Granted, that experimentation isn't happening now. That's why EU's approach looks like the right one to me. Prevent vendors from shrugging off all liability to defects in their product in their licences, which gives bugs (of all sorts) potential for a serious financial bite. The severity of the bite is determined largely by the customer - did it hurt so badly perusing the vendor in the courts (perhaps via a class action) is worth it? That IMO is where the severity should be determined. Vendors and bug hunters have their own agendas that numerous examples have shown seriously compromise their ability to grade bugs. Finally it leaves the software developers free to experiment and invent their own responses. That's far better than giving handing that responsibility to bureaucrats. There are far more computer engineers out there, and their solutions will be much better at making their products reliable than forcing them to follow some universal set of rules, no matter how well intentioned those rules may be.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-17 02:52:54+00:00
Similar... spent hours and hours at the one in Canoga Park during the 90s. (Sometimes DAK too.) Believe it had an "alice in wonderland" theme. Can't even remember what I bought but even perused the magazine section while there.

Oh wait, I do remember buying a 20? foot long (several meter) orange crossover ethernet cable! Then I punched a hole thru the drywall in my apartment and connected my two PCs. One of which had dialup internet, so I could access it and my .mp3s from the other. Pre-wifi by about 5-10 years. :-D
by frogeyedpeas | 2025-04-17 02:53:29+00:00
There's only the fact that we probably just CANNOT perceive extremely advanced civilizations.

An insect crawling around a 75 year old brick house that is covered in ivy and moss will have NO idea that the object it is walking upon is NOT part of it's natural environment. That brick house seems as natural to the environment as the grass, and trees, and rocks, and streams nearby it -- to the bug at least.

Similarly we take our telescope out and see what looks like a natural organic universe with organic galaxies and normal looking stars etc...

Because we don't have solar system sized brains and billion year life spans we are absolutely hopeless to realize that theres' a lot of massive artificial structures in this universe. We're too bug-like to even be able to perceive them from our natural environment.

*we do know of massive cosmic structures like filaments, voids, and the great wall. So it is possible we as humans are starting to notice the "house" in the woods since our theories of physics cannot really explain why these structures exist at these massive scales (we would expect uniformity at those scales). See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cosmic_structu...)
by dmboyd | 2025-04-17 02:54:55+00:00
Totally get where you're coming from — I had a similar experience when going through Teach Your Child to Read with my eldest. The book’s emphasis on phoneme recognition over rote memorization really worked for us too. That said, we hit a bit of a wall in that transitional stage in terms of reading content — our kid was still relying on those visual cues (like ligatures and vowel variants), and jumping straight to standard text was a stretch.

To bridge that, I actually built a font that keeps those phonics-aligned features and allowed us to use stories from things like Project Gutenberg. It’s based on the open-source TeX Gyre Schola, ( kind of like what is used in the Spot books) with OpenType features that auto-connect common digraphs (like “th”, “sh”, “ch”)— but in a way that can gradually phase out. Just put it up on GitHub if you're curious: Reading Guide Font. Open for any feedback or criticism!

https://github.com/dmboyd/Reading-Guide
by shagie | 2025-04-17 02:55:18+00:00
The option is common (its particulars of the award is at https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70RCSJ24FR0000019... ). The fact that the option needed to be done rather than DHS continuing to support CVE and related programs is an abandonment of the responsibilities of the organization to try to keep computer systems secure.

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/directives/bod-22-01-reduci...

A binding operational directive is a compulsory direction to federal, executive branch, departments and agencies for purposes of safeguarding federal information and information systems. Section 3553(b)(2) of title 44, U.S. Code, authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop and oversee the implementation of binding operational directives. Federal agencies are required to comply with DHS-developed directives. ... Remediate each vulnerability according to the timelines set forth in the CISA-managed vulnerability catalog. The catalog will list exploited vulnerabilities that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise with the requirement to remediate within 6 months for vulnerabilities with a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID assigned prior to 2021 and within two weeks for all other vulnerabilities. These default timelines may be adjusted in the case of grave risk to the Federal Enterprise.

If there's no catalog that the government is maintaining for "these things need to be fixed to run on federal systems" ... then how do you ensure that the federal computers are secure?
by timewizard | 2025-04-17 02:56:10+00:00
"It would be amiss not to start without a reference to AI, as 2024 saw the movements toward legal definitions and prohibited AI practices with the EU’s AI Act. 2024 also saw more innovative integration of AI into registrars’ service offerings, from “chatbots” to registration process flow to domain name generators. We also witnessed the rise of LLM (or Large Language Models) being used in Brand Protection Services and the identification of abusive registrations. This trend will definitely be increasing in 2025."

https://www.markmonitor.com/blog/2024-markmonitor-year-in-re...
by rappatic | 2025-04-17 02:56:30+00:00
At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps. And that's the bar for music. I can deal with a little added latency vs. Netflix on a Plex server or something. But I'm not willing to compromise with music.

This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting. The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists, stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features, Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.

When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-hosting is a no-brainer.
by pzo | 2025-04-17 02:57:22+00:00
This is still useful if you combine this method with other methods to make depth map more dense and metric e.g. photogrammetry or ML depth estimation model. AFAIK this is how apple depth api works with their lidar.

Here bytedance release very good model that combine their depth anything v2 with such low density apple lidar depth map: https://promptda.github.io/
by bigmattystyles | 2025-04-17 02:57:31+00:00
What always bugged me about Fry's at the end was how disrespectful people eventually got to the sample goods on the floor. I swear, every motherboard had their pins smooshed in. Maybe this is `old man remembers` but it wasn't that trashy in its heyday, when admittedly, I was a kid so maybe I didn't notice. Maybe it's because they had to pivot hard to cheap trinkets towards the end and that brought in a different crowd, I'm not sure.
by ulech | 2025-04-17 02:58:12+00:00
recent memory update and this all points to the same direction; openai is first trying to lock-in their users via personalization.

this specifically targets general users with low privacy sensitivity, who don't mind chatgpt knowing their personal details, then network-effect. not sure how the new joint social network for ai and humans will be, though i doubt it will be dystopic like we can easily imagine; rather i see a network where humans talk to each other (like we do in any other sns) and can call an ai to "chime in" to the conversation.

ai will moderate / reference other posts, users / and so on. like X with grok but where users ask more than "explain this meme".

one thing is, privacy sensitive individuals will find it difficult to convince themselve to participate in the network as long as openai remains close (ironically). though we shall wait as they planned on revealing an open source model soon.