MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tabemann | 2025-04-14 22:56:46+00:00
I largely agree with this article's assessment. As a machine the Jupiter Ace was simply too little, too late. Had it been more powerful, with more RAM and better graphics, it could have given the Speccy a run for its money, but rather it was already obsolete, being positioned as a competitor for the ZX81 when the ZX81 was already very dated and where it had little in the way of a cost advantage over the far superior Speccy. Running BASIC rather than Forth would not have saved the Jupiter Ace, and rather if the Jupiter Ace had had specs that compared with those of the Speccy it could have given it a run for its money.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-14 22:57:14+00:00
> Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.

These are mergers that were allowed, but probably shouldn't have been because their industries were already quite consolidated by that point.

The ones that should be okay is when e.g. a company with 4% market share wants to buy a company with 0.5% market share. Companies merging when they each already have double digit percentages of the market is craziness.

> It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.

This sort of thinking is a demonstration of incompetence. AMD and Intel can both design competitive processors. AMD sold their fabs and now has the processors made by TSMC. Intel still makes them but their manufacturing process has fallen behind, to the point that they too have used TSMC to make some of their products. Saddling AMD with Intel's uncompetitive process would only put them both at a disadvantage against other competitors using TSMC.

The real problem here is that Intel was too vertically integrated and focused on producing only its own designs on its fabs, and then abandoned the low end of the market to sustain its margins. Which allowed TSMC to capture enough market share that the larger volume gave them enough capital to take the lead.

What the US needs is not mergers but the opposite -- its own TSMC as a competitive contract fab that can do the volumes needed to sustain a state of the art process.
by modeless | 2025-04-14 22:57:45+00:00
Thanks, that's interesting info. It seems to me that such tuning, while making Aider more useful, and making the benchmark useful in the specific context of deciding which model to use in Aider itself, reduces the value of the benchmark in evaluating overall model quality for use in other tools or contexts, as people use it for today. Models that get more tuning will outperform models that get less tuning, and existing models will have an advantage over new ones by virtue of already being tuned.
by tptacek | 2025-04-14 22:58:18+00:00
Nobody is being paid by CAs. CAs and browser root programs are basically natural enemies.

Three big problems faced browsers that tried to roll out DANE:

1. DNSSEC adoption on high-traffic/"important" domains is stubbornly very low (this used to be harder to quantify, but there's the Tranco list now; you can just take the top N of it and loop `dig ds` over it to get a %).

2. Middleboxes hassle DNSSEC queries, not everywhere but enough that the browsers need a fallback for browsers on network paths that won't transact DNSSEC, and once you have that fallback you have to account for an adversary who simply downgrades you to the fallback; this is the "you had 10,000 CA certificates, now you have 10,001" problem --- it's also the core of the drama behind the DANE "stapling" fiasco.

3. Browsers were able to get the WebPKI transparency ecosystem deployed using market levers they had over CAs, but they don't have the same leverage over DNS TLD administrators, so there's no "DNS transparency" on the agenda, nor could one plausibly be deployed. Similarly, you can revoke certificates (including CA certs) in ways you can't revoke DNS domains.

It's kind of funny to look at short-duration certificates and ask "why didn't DANE save us from this", because a security engineer might look at this and think "thank God DANE failed an kept us from 30 more years of dangerous, error-prone manual key management".
by bo1024 | 2025-04-14 22:58:51+00:00
It's not a very good analogy because federally-funded research is a public investment, a public good like roads. The research is supported by the public (the government) and becomes available for anyone to use, learn from, and build off of. And in fact most successful U.S. business are built on the backs of technological innovation that was originally funded by the government, or at the very least, innovation from PhD's whose educations were largely federally funded. (Disclaimer: federally funded researcher)

You couldn't replace that with a private company "buying" research and expect the same societal benefits.
by alp1n3_eth | 2025-04-14 22:59:40+00:00
I'd say it doesn't exactly meet the minimum standard for a CVE, as it's more of a technique vs. an actual vulnerability in an application/library. If there was a repo that had a vulnerable component that was currently infected through the manner described, that specific instance would probably qualify as a CVE.

Since this is a technique / overarching issue, it leans more towards being a CWE. Maybe something like:

- CWE-506: Embedded Malicious Code or - CWE-829: Inclusion of Functionality from Untrusted Control Sphere or - CWE-1395: Dependency on Vulnerable Third-Party Component

From Snyk's docs they also explain it: https://github.com/snyk/user-docs/blob/main/docs/manage-risk...

"In almost all cases, malicious packages are not assigned a CVE ID."
by the_clarence | 2025-04-14 23:00:12+00:00
What's the argument exactly? What prevents competition from starting a new social network or a new messaging app?

Indeed there is a huge number of successful messaging apps (imessage, signal, telegram, wire, wechat, kakao) and social networks (tiktok, snapchat, linkedin, reddit)

I know we're supposed to hate on facebook but what exactly is anti competitive?
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-04-14 23:01:05+00:00
> You don't want your scheduled lunch to move from 12 to 1 because it's DST.

Yes, therefore you won't store lunch as `datetime` you will store it as `time` and on "render" you will make sure it is 12th hour for localized datetime. Look at RFC 5545. If you move from Japan to Romania, you'll again on render (with stored 12 as `time`) display lunch at 12th hour. The only thing one stores is daily occurrence and 12th hour, with careful interpretation what is a boundary of a day and what is 12th hour. `datetime` does not help, similar to how it does not help with DST issues for workshifts (which are again `time`).

> If my calendar goes 2 years in the future, these datetimes live for 2 years at least.

Why would you materialize recurring events, if you move from Vietnam to Spain, how will all those lunches become Spain lunches? Just recompute the whole future? Sounds like a mistake of storing long-lived objects that should have been replaced with computation with short-lived ones.

> It sounds like you're arguing that datetime libraries don't need to exist.

Steelman me. 2 individuals tried to expand to include you into discussion, you seem to go in the other direction every time.

I am not implying that. I'm implying that I don't understand the performance implications, given that I'd expect to work with efficient UTC most of the time, with only a constant amount of stuff going from datetime-with-tz to UTC. I cannot imagine a case where you'd abundantly store datetime-with-tz, it sounds like a mistake.

My own impression is that majority opinion is that going from datetime-with-tz to UTC and then doing comparisons, filtering, bucketing, aggregating is somehow flawed? If I need 24 hour buckets, I can do it through UTC, if I need "daily" buckets, I can still do it through UTC -- with short-lived datetime-with-tz to UTC computation, yet UI will still have to deal with 23/25 hour days, `datetime` does not solve that problem. I understand monthly buckets, still easy to do through UTC with short-lived conversion. (go from datetime-with-tz to UTC that's used to filter/group entries in db)
by aurumque | 2025-04-14 23:01:23+00:00
Having been through a few acquisitions myself, I think there is a perverse incentive where buying and destroying any competition (real or imagined) leads to positive enough outcomes that it doesn't matter if the underlying asset is destroyed. Nobody would come out and say that, but when an acquisition is tossed aside there may not be enough repercussions to prevent it from happening again.
by smj-edison | 2025-04-14 23:01:47+00:00
I'm just a casual observer, but I'm pretty sure one hard thing about FPGAs is preventing abuse. A customer could easily set up a ring oscillator that burns out all the LUTs. Another thing is FPGAs are about 10x slower than dedicated logic, so CPUs/GPUs beat them for a lot of applications. Plus, there's not a lot of logic designers in the first place. Software skills don't transfer over very well. For example, a multiplier is about the size of 8kb of RAM, so lookups and complex flow are way more expensive than just multiplying a value again (kinda like GPUs, except if you only had an L1 cache without main memory).
by killjoywashere | 2025-04-14 23:02:04+00:00
No but their earnings are mainly in their companies, and those can hire fleets of tax attorneys and accountants to crush their tax burden.

Once the money is in stocks, it doesn't get taxed unless you draw on it, but the billionaires can use strategies like buy, borrow, die (which last I checked only really works if you're north of ~ $300M) to avoid personal taxes.
by tptacek | 2025-04-14 23:02:32+00:00
I don't think the agenda is at all secret: it's a push to move the WebPKI to full automation, and to eliminate sites where administrators fetch certificate files and install them on servers. If you were an engineer and had to choose one over the other, you'd choose the former too: it's much more agile and it's less exposed to the large-scale distributed systems problem of revocation.
by Freedom2 | 2025-04-14 23:02:38+00:00
As dang said,

> what it proves is that users will flag unsubstantive flamewar posts on Hacker News, regardless of the topic or the commenter's position on the topic. This is a good thing!

I think it has to pass the moderators bar for acceptance: is this just antoher "MOT", or will it generate "curious" discussion. Combine that with the fact that the HN site gets a lot of these submissions and it's sort of a phenomenon that I like to call "no one goes there, it's too crowded!".
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-14 23:03:51+00:00
Not true. They do not address the question of whether there is an agreement or the terms of it because it is immaterial to the case before them.

Xinis and Thacker represent that an AP article referenced a memo that refers to an agreement.

This is immaterial to the case before them, it is not immaterial to the falsity of your comments.
by syndeo | 2025-04-14 23:03:51+00:00
I mean, maybe.

But these folks living on the smolweb can tend to over-estimate their importance/influence. I say this after spending a decent amount of time there, even building Gopher and Gemini (as in the protocol, not Google) clients of my own.

Some Gemini protocol enthusiasts actually think Google renamed Bard out of fear of being subverted by them, as a play to intentionally destroy any name recognition.

TBH, these folks are likely not even a blip on Big Tech's radar.

That scene from Endgame comes to mind:

"You took everything from me!"

"I don't even know who you are."
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-14 23:04:26+00:00
>> what is unconstitutional about a wealth tax?

Article I, Section 9, Clause 4:

"No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken"

A wealth tax is generally considered to be a direct tax. If you wanted to enact one at the federal level, my understanding is that it would have to be done in proportion to the census. So, given that Mississippi is around 1% of the total US population, Mississippi would have to pay 1% of the wealth tax. Mississippi is the poorest US state, so that would be a very regressive tax.

An income tax is also considered to be a direct tax, that's why it took an amendment to the Constitution to enact one.

The Constitution applies to taxes at the federal level, not state. States could enact a wealth tax the same way they enact property taxes now (depending on their state Constitutions). The problem for them is that wealth is a bit more mobile than property.

And yes there are arguments about what a direct tax really meant in the language at the time the Constitution was written, there are arguments that the income tax should have been legal without an amendment. But that's not how it went down.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-14 23:05:16+00:00
Sometimes the IRS is wrong, too, and you just mail them proof. Like if you forget to report your cost basis for a stock sale, they'll send you a letter and say "We're assuming the cost basis is zero, so here's what you owe!" and you just respond back with a letter that says "This is the cost basis, and here's a copy of my brokerage statement." and that's that. I've found dealing with the IRS actually quite straightforward and non-scary. As long as you have your paperwork in order. If you're careless about your records, then you're going to have a bad time.
by acmj | 2025-04-14 23:07:20+00:00
People here have little idea about how Harvard works. Harvard is financially vulnerable. It is currently running on a deficiency considering the endowment. And Harvard can't freely use most endowment for personnels anyway. If the government takes away funding, Harvard will have a financial crisis. I guess the leadership made the decision in hope someone could stop the government before bad things happen but when bad things do happen, you will probably see mass layoffs of researchers in particular in life sciences and biomedical research.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-14 23:07:58+00:00
The current admin is openly anti-intellectual.

Edit:

"We need to attack the universities in this country"

"The professors are the enemy"

Specific clip https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ichg58/ya...

If you want the full speech it's on YT so if you reply with "context" you should back that up
by londons_explore | 2025-04-14 23:08:20+00:00
"We have something that would be of interest to the open source community, but it needs a lot of tidying to even run outside our company, and we don't have the manpower to properly maintain it when released".

Plenty of companies are in this position.

Please just open source anyway with a note saying "we won't be maintaining this, but feel free to fork!"
by shreezus | 2025-04-14 23:08:51+00:00
There are so many interesting, off-label novel uses for drugs that have already been developed. Recently my wife & I adopted a kitten that developed FIP, a disease caused by a feline coronavirus that was nearly 100% fatal up until just a few years ago.

Turns out, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences (GS-441524) which is the active metabolite of remdesivir, is remarkably effective at treating the disease. It's a nucleoside analog, so it essentially is a slightly modified adenosine molecule which disrupts the virus RNA replication process.

Within 12 hours of the first dose our cat went from dying to making a full turnaround and complete recovery following treatment. For us it was truly a miracle drug, and it only gained awareness recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. It still isn't technically "approved" for this use case, but is prescribed off-label by vets as of 2024 once the FDA relaxed its position [2]. Folks needed to seek it out on the black market (and still do in some areas).

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/remdesiv...

[2] https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/cvm-updates/fda-announ...
by tux3 | 2025-04-14 23:09:31+00:00
FPGA dev is just much more painful and more expensive than software dev at every step.

That's in no small part because the industry & tools seem to be stuck decades in the past. They never had their "GCC moment". But there's also inherent complexity in working at a very low level, having to pay attention to all sorts of details all the time that can't easily be abstracted away.

There's the added constraint that FPGA code is also not portable without a lot of extra effort. You have to pick some specific FPGA you want to target, and it can be highly non-trivial to port it to a different one.

And if you do go through all that trouble, you find out that running your code on a cloud FPGAs turns out to be pretty damn expensive.

So in terms of perf per dollar invested, adding SIMD to your hot loop, or using a GPU as an accelerator may have a lower ceiling, but it's much much more bang for the buck and involves a whole lot less pain along the way.
by killjoywashere | 2025-04-14 23:10:09+00:00
Recommend James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State" to learn more about the evolution of property valuation and rights. The systems of land rights in up to the 1500s-1800s were quite complex. The modern state imposed a uniform system of free-hold tenure which shifted the complexity to the downstream consequences.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-14 23:10:32+00:00
large scale for me is every house has water tank, which can drain tens of kwh every day. cars which sit on parking lots for 80+% of day... 11kw charger can supply 30 miles of range per 1 hour of shopping, bowling, movie watching... and you do not need V2X, just plug with relay/lock. (esp32+nfc reader for billing)
by kyleee | 2025-04-14 23:10:38+00:00
I don’t believe there was any claim of asylum, rather he was ruled to be deported in around 2019, and held to be deportable on appeal, and then he failed to deport and was once again apprehended in 2025. His status changed when MS13 was designated a terrorist group (he was adjudicated to belong to MS13 during the deportation proceedings) which did away with his special request to not be sent to El Salvador.
by inverted_flag | 2025-04-14 23:11:15+00:00
Trump is beginning to tick all the boxes in the grievances section of the Declaration of Independence:

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

> He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

> He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, [...]

> For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world

> For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
by mianos | 2025-04-14 23:11:19+00:00
I agree. I use it a lot but there is endless frustration when the C++ code I am working on gets both complex and largish. Once it gets to a certain size and the context gets too long they all pretty much lose the plot and start producing complete rubbish. It would be great for it to give some measure so I know to take over and not have it start injecting random bugs or deleting functional code. It even starts doing things like returning locally allocated pointers lately.
by canjobear | 2025-04-14 23:11:38+00:00
Probability is a bunch of numbers that add to 1. Sometimes you can use this to represent subjective beliefs. Sometimes you can use it to represent objectively existing probability distributions. For example, an LLM is a probability distribution on a following token given previous tokens. If two "observers" disagree about an LLM's probability assigned to some token, then only at most one of them can be correct. So the probability is objective.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-14 23:12:06+00:00
There is nothing quite like gcc or LLVM for FPGAs yet. FPGA tooling is still stuck in the world of proprietary compilers and closed software stacks. It makes the whole segment of the industry move slower and have higher friction. This is just starting to break with Yosys and related tools, which are showing wild advantages in efficiency over some of the proprietary tooling, but still only support a fraction of available chips, mostly the smaller ones.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-14 23:12:25+00:00
Not only is it material, it's a lynch pin to the entire case! If you keep reading:

>Considering these facts, and with no evidence to the contrary provided by the Government, the district court properly determined that “just as in any other contract facility, Defendants can and do maintain the power to secure and transport their detainees, Abrego Garcia included.” Dist. Ct. Opinion at 12. In its filings before this court, the Government makes no more than a naked assertion that Abrego Garcia “is in the custody of a foreign sovereign over whom America has no jurisdiction.” Mot. for Stay at 9. But the record demonstrates otherwise. There is no indication that Abrego Garcia has been charged with a crime in El Salvador or is being held there pursuant to the laws of El Salvador. On the contrary, Abrego Garcia is a detainee of the United States Government, who is being housed temporarily in El Salvador, “pending the United States’ decision on [his] long term disposition.” S.A. 149. Thus, the district court’s order does not require the United States to demand anything of a foreign sovereign.

Instrumental here is 'contract facility.'

The District court and Thacker's quote cite the El Salvador facility as a 'contract' facility. On that basis they argue it is not a demand on a foreign sovereign, but rather a detention by the USG.
by tristor | 2025-04-14 23:13:47+00:00
No, they weren't.

Link Prefetching was in Firefox 1.0 and DNS Prefetching was added in Firefox 3.5. Both were supported in the first release of Chrome, but DNS Prefetching hadn't ratified as a standard yet. The first stable release of Chrome was on December 11th, 2008. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9th, 2004 and Firefox 3.5 came out on June 30th, 2009. Firefox 2 (October 24, 2006) already had support for the control headers for DNS Prefetching, but the standard wasn't ratified until later, which is when Firefox brought it into support.

That's not to say that Chrome didn't have different approaches to predicting and triggering prefetching compared to Firefox, and that in some ways those methods were better, but both Link Prefetching and DNS Prefetching were ideas before Chrome exists, Link Prefetching was ratifed and in Firefox before Chrome existed, and DNS Prefetching was shipped in Firefox as soon as the standard was ratified (Chrome shipped it in the first release before the standards process had concluded).
Show HN: A 'swipe'able, minimal and installable Hacker News client for mobile
by evenoroddman | 2025-04-14 23:14:02+00:00
Hey HN folks, I built a simple, minimal and 'swipe'able HN interface to glance through HN posts on mobile.

It is a PWA, so feel free to install and use it. Any feedback is welcome!

Cheers!
by omneity | 2025-04-14 23:14:14+00:00
What you're describing as "needle in a haystack" is a necessary requirement for the downstream ability you want. The distinction is really how many "things" the LLM can process in a single shot.

LLMs process tokens sequentially, first in a prefilling stage, where it reads your input, then in the generation stage where it outputs response tokens. The attention mechanism is what allows the LLM as it is ingesting or producing tokens to "notice" that a token it has seen previously (your instruction) is related with a token it is now seeing (the code).

Of course this mechanism has limits (correlated with model size), and if the LLM needs to take the whole input in consideration to answer the question the results wouldn't be too good.