MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-05-31 19:05:04+00:00
I consider the disk space issue a bug in Gitea. When someone downloads a zip, it should be able to stream the zip to the client, but instead it builds the zip in temporary space, serves it to the client, and doesn't delete it.

I solved it by marking that directory read-only. Zip downloads, obviously, won't work. If someone really wants one, they can check out the repository and make it theirself.

If I really cared, of course I'd fix the bug or make sure there's a way to disable the feature properly or only enable it for logged-in users.

Also I server-side redirect certain user-agents to https://git.immibis.com/gptblock.html . This isn't because they waste resources any more but just because I don't like them, what they're doing is worthless anyway, and because I can. If they really want the data of the Git repository they can clone the Git repository instead of scraping it in a stupid way. That was always allowed.

8 requests per second isn't that much unless each request triggers intensive processing and indeed it wasn't a load on my little VPS other than the disk space bug. I blocked them because they're stupid, not because they're a DoS.
by greatgib | 2025-05-31 19:05:14+00:00
Looks totally stupid in my opinion...

After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today.

This will not work except if you are completely shifted with the local time when you travel. If you change of timezones, the sun will not raise and go down at the same time in UTC obviously. So you will go to sleep in the middle of the day. Also, when you are at home, everything will be in local time anyway, you will not see the difference, and going abroad you will constantly have to do conversion in your mind from local time to UTC otherwise you will not know when shop open and close, the train will leave, ...

You can complain and work on improving a tool that will covert badly, but for me it is kind of transparent with recent technology. Phone and watch update themselves automatically when you leave an airplane in a different time zone country and most tools look at your location to show you relevant time.

If you say that it will make it more convenient to work with people in other timezones, that's not even the case, because UTC will not tell you if a time is a good time or not regarding local time. So someone giving you his country/timezones is enough for you to select a right time.

Let's imagine I'm working with you that is located a quarter of the world away, how do I know in UTC what time is the work day morning proper time for a meeting? 11h UTC? 22h UTC? 4h UTC?
by schrodinger | 2025-05-31 19:05:21+00:00
Says the guy living 3 hours off UTC.

It's a little different when going to bed one day and waking up another doesn't happen anymore. And small numbers aren't morning, big numbers aren't night.

I hate this form of nerd clickbait. tech bro discovers UTC, thinks he’s cracked the code of the universe, and writes a navel-gazing manifesto about how changing his watch changed his life. of course it ends in a SaaS plug.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-31 19:05:31+00:00
From the article:

A recent survey suggests I’m not alone – that almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet.

A recent survey suggests contains a link but it's not a link to the study. It's a link to an article about the study. And that article likewise doesn't link to the study.

Study w/ report: https://www.bsigroup.com/siteassets/pdf/en/insights-and-medi...

The study org also released a PR about the study. IMO, the PR is comfortable with conclusions (ex:addiction) that overreach the study data: https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/insights-and-media/media-cent...
by atrettel | 2025-05-31 19:06:36+00:00
No worries, I appreciate that you took the time to read and respond!

When I first read "Originality and Contribution" at [1], I actually assumed it was a plagiarism check. It did not occur to me until now that you were referring to novelty with that. Similarly, I assumed "Impact and Significance" referred to more about whether the subject was appropriate for a given journal or not (would readers of this journal find this information significant/relevant/impactful or should it be published elsewhere?). That's a question that many journals do ask of referees, independent of overall novelty, but I see how you mean a different aspect of novelty instead.

I'm not opposed to testing your system with a manuscript of my own, but currently the one manuscript that I have approaching publication is still in the internal review stage at my national lab, and I don't know precisely when it will be ready for external submission. But I'll keep it in mind whenever it passes all of the internal checks.

[1] https://github.com/robertjakob/rigorous/blob/main/Agent1_Pee...
by amai | 2025-05-31 19:08:10+00:00
"I’m particularly struck by our findings on the diseconomies of scale, with projects exceeding 1,561 megawatts in capacity demonstrating significantly higher risk of cost escalation,” says Hanee Ryu, second and corresponding author and a visiting researcher at IGS...

What this could mean, Ryu explains, is that smaller, modular renewable projects might not only bring environmental benefits, but also potentially reduce financial risk and offer better budget predictability."

The diseconomy of scale is something I don't read very often. Interesting!
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-31 19:08:12+00:00
That's fun. I try to always have at least five unpopular opinions. You never know when unpopular takes can turn into competitive advantage.

Here are some:

1. Pure capability based security doesn't work and such ideas are a dead end. [1]

2. Companies writing eng blogs about trying to to scale Postgres should just rent an Oracle Database instead. [2]

3. There are no approaches to concurrency any better than others. Locks are just as good as actors.

4. Inheritance is a good language feature and languages without it have made a mistake. Exceptions are a great language feature and languages without them have made a big mistake!

5. People should write more desktop apps.

A lot of opinions being posted to this thread are actually quite popular opinions, but I'm sure most/all of the above would be considered obviously stupid by most developers.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074506
A good coding bootcamp question
by andrewfromx | 2025-05-31 19:08:29+00:00
this came from a question on reddit about a good coding bootcamp. Which one someone ask? i said the school of roll up your sleeves and do it. Watch youtube videos, try lots of stuff yourself. The money you spend on claude-code is better investment than any school. IMO.

Then they asked "Do you have links to those videos that would be helpful for the OP? The ones that you learned from?" So I made this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KlnceGn2Y4

Orig reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1kz3sma/comment/mv9otbl/?context=3
by Lu2025 | 2025-05-31 19:08:48+00:00
don't think that the white collar layoffs of the last 3-4 years are due to AI. The tech layoffs of 2022 are explained in part by the impact of 2017 tax reform. Before 2022, the research and development expenses could be written off taxes as a tax credit in the same year. It's a dollar to dollar reduction of tax liability. Tech companies classify a lot of their work as R&D. So those overpaid Facebook coders are essentially public charges! Somebody up thread said that programmers are disproportionately highly compensated in the US. They are, because it's not companies who pay for them, it's taxpayers, indirectly. Starting 2022, the deal became a bit less sweet. R&D expenses had to be amortized over 5 years. What happened next is a collusion in response to Great Resignation. Several large tech companies conspired to have layoffs at the same time as a salary compression move. The AI statements are mostly a scare tactic to put pressure on employees. For some industries and applications AI is revolutionary, but for coding it's good at autocomplete and not much else.
by danielbln | 2025-05-31 19:09:05+00:00
Everyone (teachers, mainly) always told me this but I could never see it in myself. I always learned better when I typed, and not when I hand wrote things. Hand writing just slowed me down, which for many is part of the point ("it forces you to think about it!") but I never got that either. It's just slow. I do wonder how many there are where this adage of "write by hand, learn better" just doesn't hold true.
by mdnahas | 2025-05-31 19:09:34+00:00
I’m convinced we need to move to a world time. The Internet is part of life and we have people coordinating around the globe. Time is time everywhere.

Sunlight is different everywhere. But not everything timed is tied to sunlight. There is no reason that the time should be 12:00 at peak sunlight locally.

UTC is an issue near the international date line. I could see residents of Pacific islands wanting to not have the date change mid-day. Should think about adding hours 24, 25, 26, etc. to Wednesday that are equivalent to hours 0, 1, 2, etc. on Thursday.

(And as a quant who did a lot of time programming for financial markets, fuck Daylight Saving Time and the leap second.)
by atrettel | 2025-05-31 19:09:36+00:00
You raise a good point overall. I was just trying to respond to the idea of it replacing a human entirely, as if the authors submit it to the system and a journal editor has to made the decision to publish it or not. I would love to focus more on the big picture stuff, but in my experience most peer reviews amount to "Could you phrase this different?" rather than "Is this a good idea?". I think the latter is a much better better question to ask.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-05-31 19:11:10+00:00
I complain about people complaining about grammar.

For the most part I really like the UK, but one thing I can't stand is how they think that their English is "the real one". I once used the American "gotten" in the above construction and was "corrected" by a British person. I think that correcting other country's variants as if your country somehow had the objectively correct variant, makes you sound provincial.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-31 19:11:20+00:00
I think this step towards a more immerse virtual reality can actually be dangerous. A lot of intellectual types might disagree but I do think that creating such immersion is a dangerous thing because it will reduce the value people place on the real world and especially the natural world, making them even less likely to care if big corporations screw it up with biospheric degradation.

It seems like it has a high chance of leading to even more narcissism as well because we are reducing our dependence on others to such a degree that we will care about others less and less, which is something that has already started happening with increasingly advanced interactive technology like AI.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-31 19:11:26+00:00
Have you read Michael Pollen’s books?

It’s actually trivially simple to define what is food, and what you should be eating. Every vegetable and fruit on the planet. Grains, rice, nuts. Chicken , meat, seafood, etc Put simply: it grows.

This is what all mammals have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years. We know it works. They have one ingredient. They have existed for at least as long as humans.

Then it is trivially simple to define what is not good, and no mammal should ever consume. (But realistically we will just minimize as much as possible). Coke. Fairy floss. MSG. HFCS. These things were grown in a lab. They have very minimal nutrition value, and often a host of negatives. They have only been concocted in the last century, and a massive number of severe health problems have come along with them. These things have many ingredients. They did not exist 100 years ago.

Then there is an enormous grey zone in the middle that people will argue about till the end of time.

It’s not worth your time. Just eat what is clearly food and pretend the rest doesn’t exist. The fact twizzlers and KFC exist have no impact on my life, and I am much healthier for it.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 19:11:26+00:00
The rule set is simple: "Don't be biased." What does that mean? And that is the problem. It's hard (read: impossible) to define in technical, formal terms. That's because bias is at the root a social problem, not a technical one. Therefore you won't be able to solve it with technology. Just like poverty, world peace, racism.

The best you can hope for is to provide technical means to point out indicators of bias. But anything beyond that could, at worst, do more harm than good. ("The tool said this result is unbiased now! Keep your skepticism to yourself and let me publish!")
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-05-31 19:11:57+00:00
I had to look it up, an IBM card format 80x12 is 187x83 mm. Roughly 0.06 bits/mm^2. The CR80 is 86x54mm for the 128bits, 0.03 bits/mm^2. Not a terrible difference for accommodating hand tools.

Edit: If my first search results are to be believed, the first magnetic hard drive had a density of 3.1 bits/mm^2
by Mawr | 2025-05-31 19:12:49+00:00
> Declaring constants right next to where they’re used once isn’t giving you anything but the opportunity for naming issues and rigidity in how you combine them. If they aren’t passed in or repeated, then I wouldn’t pull them out;

Using magic numbers all over the place is the mark of a novice who lacks understanding that the meaning behind the numbers he knows in his mind will not magically transfer over to other people reading the code. Advising this approach is an interesting call.

Specifically here, we've got these at the beginning of the function:

const ( maxAttempts = 10 baseDelay = 1 * time.Second maxDelay = 60 * time.Second )

If I went out of my way to look at this function, these are probably the values I'm interested in changing, and look, they're right here, at the top. Neat. It's obvious how to adjust the values to get what I want. I can stop reading the function right there.

Without these declarations, how would I know that "10" midway through the function is the number of attempts? I'd have to read and understand the entire logic first. Great. Now multiply this effort by the amount of programmers on the team and the amount of magic numbers.
by c0redump | 2025-05-31 19:13:08+00:00
I mostly agree with you, but i think there’s something you got wrong. The democrat establishment didn’t abdicate their pro-labor position for reasons of racial equity- this was only ever a cover story.

The real reason is that they are totally beholden to powerful business interests that benefit from mass immigration, and the ensuing suppression of American labor movements. The racial equity bit is just the line that they feed to their voters.
by mortenjorck | 2025-05-31 19:13:33+00:00
I kept expecting that to happen, but it apparently has some mechanism to persist context outside the user’s FOV.

In a way, that almost makes it more dreamlike, in that you have what feels like high local coherence (just enough not to immediately tip you off that it’s a dream) that de-coheres over time as you move through it.

Fascinatingly strange demo.
by Veserv | 2025-05-31 19:13:55+00:00
VM sandbox escape is just "perform a hypercall/trap to pass specially crafted data to the hypervisor and trigger a hypervisor bug". For virtual machines, the hypervisor is the privileged host and now the host is compromised.

There is no inherent advantage to virtualization, the only thing that matters is the security and robustness of the privileged host.

The only reason there is any advantage in common use is that the Linux Kernel is a security abomination designed for default-shared/allow services that people are now trying to kludge into providing multiplexed services. But even that advantage is minor in comparison to modern, commonplace threat actors who can spend millions to tens of millions of dollars finding security vulnerabilities in core functions and services.

You need privileged manager code that a highly skilled team of 10 with 3 years to pound on it can not find any vulnerabilities in to reach the minimum bar to be secure against prevailing threat actors, let alone near-future threat actors.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 19:14:41+00:00
>because the algorithms they're talking about depend on the Lipschitz property, not the differentiability.

That is why the definition should not contain the differentiability condition. It is violated by the examples and irrelevant.

My point is that the Lipschitz property, as defined e.g. in the Wikipedia article, is the important part. Also assuming differentiability is unhelpful, because it misses the point and is even violated by the rest of the article.
by qyckudnefDi5 | 2025-05-31 19:15:13+00:00
For point 1 I recall the creator of Age, Filippo Valsorda suggesting something similar:

>The .age-recipients files also include the public key for an offline disaster recovery key. I generated the key with age-keygen, encrypted it with age -p, printed the ciphertext as a QR code, and wrote the random passphrase in pen. This is a bit convoluted, but I don’t trust printers. All this was done in a tmpfs, so nothing reached storage. Only had to do this once, and have been using that key as the anchor for all my disaster recovery data. https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/passage/
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-31 19:15:15+00:00
> Cool but wouldn’t you forget how to decode it after some time?

Not necessarily.

First of all there isn't much decoding to be done: if one follows the recommendation, and one uses the hex input variant as the password (or secret), then decoding is as simple as just writing the number is binary base. For example this password `d74ae47dc6f599d3f9cb847bd77d6b7c` can be recovered by simply starting a Python interpreter and writing `"%032x" % b1101011101001010...`

Moreover, by just providing the card to a computer science graduate / enthusiast, his first hunch would be to just try to convert the bits into a number and use that (either base10 or base16), perhaps after rotating / flipping the card (if he didn't knew about the alignment). (This can easily be deduced because there are 2 groups of 8x8 bits.)

(Alternatively, if one scratches on the card the URL `purl.org/999/1`, provided Archive.org, which currently hosts PURL.org, doesn't delete the links like Google just did with `goo.gl`. I intend to update the redirect from this PURL to a page hosted by Archive.org.)

> I.e. wouldn’t engraving regular characters be simpler?

The first, and perhaps greatest issue, is that not many people have access to engraving hardware. One could go to a shop and have the characters engraved, but then they wouldn't be secret.

So, the main purpose is this: how could one with minimal access to power or precision tools, create the sturdiest physical backup of a small piece of information.

Thus this proposal: with a sheet of metal, a nail, and a hammer, one could just encode the 128 bits by banging with the hammer on the nail through the sheet of metal. :)
by Slow_Hand | 2025-05-31 19:15:31+00:00
Not to undercut your point - because you’re largely correct - but this is my reality. I have a decent-paying job in which I work roughly 15 hrs a week. Sometimes more when work scales up.

That said, I’m not what you’d call a high-earning person (I earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes’ vision is a reality, but it’s a mindset and we also have to know when enough wealth is enough.
by efitz | 2025-05-31 19:16:07+00:00
A server cannot make a client behave a certain way. Explicit doesn’t matter in this case, and as many of the comments said, most of the time the best thing to do for the server is to spread retry load randomly over an interval. Explicit is bad for the server.

The only thing (IMO) explicit retries are good for is to make client state more deterministic on the client, but there are many ways of doing that other than hard coding retry intervals. For example, use asynchronous patterns for networking APIs and allow querying state of API-calls-in-progress.
by vidarh | 2025-05-31 19:16:14+00:00
It's a lot faster compared to new developers who still cost magnitudes more from day 1. It's not cost effective to hand every task to someone senior. I still have juniors on teams because in the long term we still need actual people who need a path to becoming senior devs, but in financial terms they are now a drain.

You can feel free not to believe it, as I have no plans to open up my tooling anytime soon - though partly because I'm considering turning it into a service. In the meantime these tools are significantly improving the margins for my consulting, and the velocity increases steadily as every time we run into a problem we make the tooling revise its own system prompt or add additional checks to the harness it runs to avoid it next time.

A lot of it is very simple. E.g a lot of these tools can produce broken edits. They'll usually realise and fix them, but adding an edit tool that forces the code through syntax checks / linters for example saved a lot of pain. As does forcing regular test and coverage runs, not just on builds.

For one of my projects I now let this tooling edit without asking permission, and just answer yes/no to whether it can commit once it's ready. If no, I'll tell it why and review again when it thinks it's fixed things, but a majority of commit requests are now accepted on the first try.

For the same project I'm now also experimenting with asking the assistant to come up with a todo list of enhancements for it based on a high level goal, then work through it, with me just giving minor comments on the proposed list.

I'm vaguely tempted to let this assistant reload it's own modified code when tests pass and leave it to work on itself for a a while and see what comes of it. But I'd need to sandbox it first. It's already tried (and was stopped by a permissions check) to figure out how to restart itself to enable new functionality it had written, so it "understands" when it is working on itself.

But, by all means, you can choose to just treat this as fiction if it makes you feel better.
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-31 19:16:25+00:00
My first instinct is to agree, but I'm not sure actually. What I really want when learning a new area of math is the full motivation for the tricky definition, taking as much time as needed to follow the dead ends of easier but worse definitions. Then I get the whole picture. IMO the motivation is the key thing for students, not the definition being easy.

Though maybe the way this course would work is in fact by proceeding through a series of easy but explicitly flawed definitions, and proving both real results and nonsense from them, so you see why the real definition is justified.
by kiitos | 2025-05-31 19:17:14+00:00
> data races are generals properties of programs that people can and do discuss in language-agnostic contexts

"Data race" is a specific property defined by a memory model, which is normally part of a language spec; it's not usually understood as an abstract property defined in terms of outcome, at least not usefully. If you talk about data races as abstract and language-spec-agnostic properties, then yes, you're assuming a memory model that's shared across all programs and their languages.