MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spauldo | 2025-05-03 23:51:44+00:00
QMODEM didn't connect to the Internet. It had no IP stack.

It could connect you to a machine that had Internet access. Some ISPs offered that as a service (you'd get some kind of BBS-like interface or - if you were lucky - a UNIX shell), but that's not the same thing.

QMODEM was essentially just a terminal emulator that used a serial port and understood how to control a modem.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-03 23:51:53+00:00
With my Medicaid insurance carrier, long ago their automated system quit recognizing my member number, whether I recited it carefully, or typed it on the keypad. It would steadfastly pretend not to understand me. And I believe that this was somehow deliberately configured in their system, perhaps as an anti-fraud measure or perhaps just to spite/stymie me from frequently calling in. And it certainly would slow me down, especially when I was in a public place and valiantly trying to get something done by reaching out to them (their services included arranging rideshares/taxis, and so it was not unusual for them to fuck that up, thereby prompting me to call in and try to unfuck my ride home from the dreary, awful, vampiric medical clinic where they'd dumped me.)

So I have become accustomed to feeding it gibberish. I will type-in or recite nonsense numbers. It always takes 3 tries, 3 identical failures, before it routes me to a human anyways (the gatekeeping is simply an attempt at automatic authentication before the manual, human auth kicks in.) The most efficient way to get beyond that gatekeeping is by triggering unambiguous failures to authenticate.

And it is kind of funny; I don't know what is supplied to the humans' screens, but they are sometimes perplexed when they receive my call and I've just finished spouting gibberish to their ignorant robot bitch.
by wenc | 2025-05-03 23:52:00+00:00
> My idea was to distribute an e-zine as a QWK packet.

What a cool idea! I would have loved something like that.

This hearkens back to the day of Byte and PC Magazine where I would actually buy paper magazines to learn about the latest tech -- and I wondered, why couldn't there be an electronic version of this? (the QWK downloadable e-zine idea sounds so ergonomic). But eventually the Internet happened and we got these in the form of websites.

But I feel websites still lack the nice offline, self-contained natures of a magazine. Links on a website feel dispersed. Whereas an offline packetized magazine would have a linear nature to it, and you'd be able to browse in one sitting. And look at full page glossy ads (hey, I looked at the ads -- they were so cool back in the day with Gateway and Dell feuding).

Ah water under the bridge now...
by freeqaz | 2025-05-03 23:52:00+00:00
As somebody working in AI Security: There isn't one currently. If you're feeding untrusted inputs into an LLM (today), you have to treat the entire prompt as radioactive.

That means: - Limit the potential for a malicious prompt to do anything bad - Scope permissions to the lowest level you can

There are some other mitigations (moderation APIs using a 2nd LLM), but in general they're not 100% solutions. You really need to design your systems around accepting this limitation today.

More info on this wiki here: https://github.com/tldrsec/prompt-injection-defenses
by rsync | 2025-05-03 23:54:34+00:00
"Americans basically live like energy is unlimited, free and has no side effects ..."

Agreed - and guilty as charged which is why we're switching entirely to solar.

(I will also note that my household "cheats" by living in California where we need relatively little heat and do not even own an air conditioner so our path is, perhaps, a bit easier)

My main point is that whether you're a frugal EU council house or a profligate Texas McMansion, we - all of us - will continue to invent new demands for energy and continue to trend towards more energy used per person per unit time.

Therefore, if you're looking ahead to deployment of solar resources you should be realistic about that trendline.
by shermantanktop | 2025-05-03 23:54:36+00:00
No condescension intended. I think I understand the appeal, in the same way I understand Jack London stories, Joseph Conrad novels, Survivor, Fight Club, and that bear movie guy. We’re too civilized, we’re hothouse flowers, and a little danger makes you feel alive. Especially if you are raised with traditional masculine values.

If you could have the same solitude, sweeping views, natural beauty, cameraderie, etc., but without real danger, would it have the same appeal?
by XorNot | 2025-05-03 23:56:38+00:00
I've been pretty happy with nikola[1]

The only thing I really wanted was 1 command to publish (which is does great) and an easy way to drag and drop images into posts (which I can do via the publish jupyter notebook function).

What I absolutely did not want was anything where "send HTML to clients" created any sort of overhead like a database.

[1] https://getnikola.com/
Ask HN: What Problem Would You Solve with Unlimited Resources? [May 2025]
by hedayet | 2025-05-03 23:56:38+00:00
I love the innovative ideas and unexpected insights from HN citizens. Let’s go deep—what challenge would you tackle if you had unlimited resources, like boundless funding, talent, or time?

Why would you choose to solve it? Do you actually need unlimited resources to start?
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-03 23:57:55+00:00
GS pay raises are only time-based in-grade, called steps. Each grade has 10 steps [0] and if you start at step 1 it can take up to 18 years to reach step 10 (less if you have good performance because then you can get a bonus step increase). Most people don't start at step 1, though, so maxing out typically takes less time.

There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.

[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
by int_19h | 2025-05-03 23:58:34+00:00
The oldest web apps - web email clients being probably the canonical and most familiar example - didn't do dynamic refresh at all, because there was no way to fetch data from the server, so you couldn't do it even with JS. Any user action that required any part of the page to be updated involved a (very visible) whole page refresh. You could limit the scope of refresh with frames to some extent, but it was still very noticeable.

Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest in 2000 for this exact reason - its original purpose was to allow the newly introduced Outlook web UI to fetch data from the server and use that to update the DOM as needed. This was then enthusiastically adopted by other web app authors (most notably Google, with GMail, Google Maps, and Google Talk), and other browsers jumped onto the bandwagon by providing their own largely compatible implementations. By 2006 it was a de facto standard, and by 2008 it was standardized by W3C.

The pattern was then known as AJAX, for "asynchronous JS and XML". At first web apps would use the browser API directly, but jQuery appeared right around that time to provide a consistent API across various browsers, and the first SPA frameworks showed up shortly after (I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think GWT was the first in 2006).
by lxgr | 2025-05-03 23:58:45+00:00
It’s easily possible to jam a frequency spread signal from a satellite, assuming you can get the directionality right (i.e. you need to be in the beam of whoever you’re trying to jam, or you’ll need even more power to overcome their receive directionality, which is never perfect).

Signal strength (satellites are power constrained) and distances involved are tough.

GPS uses frequency spreading too, and locally jamming that (even the military version with a secret/unpredictable spreading code) is trivial, for example.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-03 23:59:32+00:00
>> Flat Rate called to tell me a five-person team would arrive. When the crew arrived, it wasn’t Flat Rate. It was a team of two from Esquire Moving Inc

Yup. 1988 "Moving" staring Richard Pryor had a scene about exactly this. Freedom of contract. Whoever you think you have a contact with will no doubt sublet it to someone else.
by simonw | 2025-05-03 23:59:51+00:00
I still don't really understand what Vertex AI is.

If you can ignore Vertex most of the complaints here are solved - the non-Vertex APIs have easy to use API keys, a great debugging tool (https://aistudio.google.com), a well documented HTTP API and good client libraries too.

I actually use their HTTP API directly (with the ijson streaming JSON parser for Python) and the code is reasonably straight-forward: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/blob/61a97766ff0873936a...

You have to be very careful when searching (using Google, haha) that you don't accidentally end up in the Vertext documentation though.

Worth noting that Gemini does now have an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint which makes it very easy to switch apps that use an OpenAI client library over to backing against Gemini instead: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/openai

Anthropic have the same feature now as well: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/openai-sdk
by TZubiri | 2025-05-03 23:59:54+00:00
Maybe you can:

A- Limit the capabilities of users. B- Help users limit the capabilities that they to their sub-users, whether they be per-program capabilities or per dependency capabilities.

I think B is the path forward, if you give a user access to emails and files and ChatGPT, then he can give ChatGPT access to emails and files and do damage that way.

With B you can give the user access to ChatGPT and email and a file system, but help him configure fine grained permissions for their experiments.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-04 00:01:10+00:00
Are people on this site just stuck in the 90s or something? The product I work on is nowhere near Figma or Google Docs level of complexity, but we're still MILES away from "just rendering text on screen".

That's about as absurd a statement as saying all of Backend is just "returning names matching a certain ID" for how out of date and out of touch it is.
by ryao | 2025-05-04 00:02:21+00:00
I have not pushed my local commits to GitHub lately (and probably should), but my experience with the Gemini API so far has been relatively positive:

https://github.com/ryao/gemini-chat

The main thing I do not like is that token counting is rated limited. My local offline copies have stripped out the token counting since I found that the service becomes unusable if you get anywhere near the token limits, so there is no point in trimming the history to make it fit. Another thing I found is that I prefer to use the REST API directly rather than their Python wrapper.

Also, that comment about 500 errors is obsolete. I will fix it when I do new pushes.
by simonw | 2025-05-04 00:02:25+00:00
With Gemini 2.5 (both Pro and Flash) Google have regained so much of that lost ground. Those are by far the best long-context models right now, extremely competitively priced and they have features like image mask segmentation that aren't available from other models yet: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/18/gemini-image-segmentat...
by fynd_dating | 2025-05-04 00:04:17+00:00
Meeting people in real life sounds ideal, but it's often inefficient, limited by proximity, and shaped by chance rather than intent. Whether you're socially skilled or not, real-world interactions don’t automatically lead to meaningful, long-term relationships. Most people aren’t walking around advertising their values, goals, or readiness for commitment.

Tech, when used thoughtfully, gives everyone the ability to filter for what truly matters: long-term compatibility, shared outlooks, and aligned goals. It's not about replacing human connection. It's about helping people connect with the right ones.

I agree that commodification and profit motives have corrupted much of dating tech. But the answer isn’t to get rid of the technology. All we need to do is remove the for-profit incentive.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-05-04 00:04:22+00:00
I don’t think those details are what the author is trying to draw attention to.

They’re saying that treating the “minus M” part of C+I+G+X-M is just an accounting step so that you don’t need to manually subtract imports from each of C+I+G (ie. the weighing yourself analogy; instead of taking your clothes off and weighing yourself, you can weigh yourself and subtract the weight of your clothes).

Everything you said is correct (and means that the statement “imports subtract from GDP” is even more wrong) but not what the author is pointing out.
by drewcoo | 2025-05-04 00:05:26+00:00
> Everyone thinks their early 20s were the golden age of the place they lived

Nope. This person is not terribly insightful.

> the more rigid monochronic frame that dominates the rest of the country. In polychronic cultures, time is seen as cyclical and relational rather than fixed

Maybe in brand new suburbs, but where else? This person is detached from the rest of our communal reality and is inventing a new one!
by bArray | 2025-05-04 00:06:00+00:00
One problem I ran into a long time ago (2021) is that MathML was not well supported in Chrome and other browsers, but seemed well supported in Firefox.

After trying many Pandoc options [1] I ended up selecting a very small implementation by Preet [2] which was some ~70kB [3] compared to other implementations at about 10x (i.e. MathJax [4]). I use it with the Polyfill to check if it is already supported. If you checkout the torture test, it really performs quite well [5].

In the future I still want to convert to SVG vectors (with bitmap backups) and include those instead, but I'm not yet pleased with the offerings. My concern with JS is that it seems to be on the way out, I think it will eventually go the way of Flash in favour of something else.

With the current solutions for rendering equations you either have this ridiculous wrapper around LaTeX or similar, or some other weirdness. If I get bored for a few days I might end up writing a parser to convert MathML to such outputs. It shouldn't take insane efforts to pass some torture tests.

[1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/mathml-render.html

[2] https://github.com/pshihn

[3] https://github.com/pshihn/math-ml

[4] https://www.mathjax.org/

[5] https://pshihn.github.io/math-ml/examples/torture.html
by danans | 2025-05-04 00:06:05+00:00
> This is about soft power, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

> These days, it's K-pop that's super popular all over Asia and it's catching on throughout the rest of the world too.

And K-pop owes its roots to American pop and hip-hop, which itself descends from Americana/Roots music, so these things go full circle.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-04 00:06:07+00:00
We have very detailed continental weather readings for over a century and can build very good statistical models. So you just ask a supercomputer to find the lowest cost solution for 99.99% electrical coverage without using any carbon sources.

It's quite possible -- over the previous 30 years we've never had an hour where there was no wind & sun anywhere in Europe. So we could theoretically solve it without storage, but that would require an insane amount of overbuild and interconnect. Imagine supplying all of Europe's electricity needs with just wind power from the south shore of Ireland.

Adding a few days worth of storage reduces the interconnect & overbuild needs dramatically, putting 99.99% carbon free within the realm of the possible.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-05-04 00:06:14+00:00
this is the message i got when i clicked on the link:

>Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act

The Online Safety Act imposes new compliance duties on web sites with the potential for staggering penalties. I'm concerned my blog might fall under the OSA's definition of a Part 3 regulated user-to-user service. It might also qualify as a Part 5 service which provides pornography. Unfortunately, Ofcom's guidance for small services has been exceedingly vague.

I don't have the time, money, or interest to set up highly effective age assurance on a personal blog; nor do I care to spend any more of my nights and weekends working through thousands of pages of guidance and writing up risk assessments. I'm geoblocking the UK instead; Ofcom indicates that's sufficient to comply with the law.

Geoblocking is not precise. If you are not in the UK and seeing this message, you can use Tor or a VPN service to access aphyr.com.

There's a lot of uncertainty among small sites regarding what the OSA means and how Ofcom will enforce it. If you run a web site and you're struggling to interpret the OSA guidance, you might want to reach out to Ofcom's Online Safety team at OSengagement@ofcom.org.uk.

I know it's off topic but i think it has some relevance since it shows how this poorly conceived law is actively degrading my experience online, as was predicted here on hn.
by gosub100 | 2025-05-04 00:06:42+00:00
I don't say this to victim-blame, but for anything that costs over 5-figures it makes sense to have an attorney review it. I'm not sure if that would have prevented this catastrophe, but a lawyer might be able to jump in and help make decisions (like who to sue, or whether to turn away the subcontractors).

I recently learned that the company I work for incurred a delay on a quarter million dollar shipment of computer parts because the courier didn't know we took deliveries on the weekend (normally we don't but for $250k of stuff headed straight for production we did). I said "next time use airport to airport shipping" to cut out the courier altogether. What's another $400 on top of $250k? It's common sense to me.
by sohkamyung | 2025-05-04 00:06:43+00:00
I'm currently reading "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" by Jesper Juul [1]. An interesting look at the history and influence of the C64 in games, the Demoscene and as a retro computer. He also has a companion website [2].

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5883/Too-Much-FunThe-...

[2] https://jesperjuul.net/c64/
by neom | 2025-05-04 00:06:50+00:00
Sure, NRX and NRU were research rigs running experiments far outside normal reactor envelopes. And I think it's amusing that it's considered INES-5 when very little actually happened and there was...no..wider...events... literally. If the worst we can cite is a 70 year old research accident that killed no one and ultimately produced design fixes we still use, you have a the strong case for nuclear safety...Anyway: The Walrus needs to find some new civic interest story around Barrie to write about or something, it's an awful rag. We could decarbonize our grid completely with 15 new reactors, if I was PM we'd be popping them up like it was CANDU Christmas.
by krick | 2025-05-04 00:06:54+00:00
It makes me realize how ignorant about power grid I am. It is kinda unfathomable to me, that 2 countries completely black out for 10 hours, then somewhat "magically" go up again, and a week later nobody knows what went wrong and how it got fixed. Or maybe someone knows but doesn't want to say? Anyway, it makes an impression that the whole power grid is this magical black box that somehow works on its own, breaks, fixes itself, and humans can only pray gods to let them have good harvest and uninterrupted electricity next summer. Maybe it's time to renew sacrifices at the temple of Jupiter or somebody else.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-04 00:07:01+00:00
Honestly the best way to move is to sell or donate everything and buy new for your new place. Get down to suitcases or stuff you can pack and ship via UPS.

Yeah some stuff has sentimental value but try to get past that as much as you can. It’s just stuff.

When my uncle moved when he retired he took what would fit in his car. I have never gotten that lean but I admire him for it.
by jasonfarnon | 2025-05-04 00:07:25+00:00
sites that myspace and orkut, which were already moribund by 2010, were popular under any normal definition eg alexa ranking. FB had 500mm users and a hollywood movie about it come out by 2010, a year or 2 later it had a billion users. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Sure it got steadily more popular, so what she means is "It was the early 2010s, and social media reached the point that it was replacing all social interactions..."
by yesco | 2025-05-04 00:08:29+00:00
It's easy to underestimate just how slow digital systems are in many real time scenarios compared to analog systems.

Consider it in the context of camera based self-driving cars, it's tangential to this discussion but it's an easy to visualize metaphor:

- A car traveling 60mph is traveling at 88 feet per second

- Assuming a 60hz camera, there would be a 16.67 ms gap between each frame

- The car is traveling 1.5 feet between each frame interval

- A certain amount of exposure time is necessary for the camera to generate even 1 frame or it will be blurry

- High framerate cameras often work around this by staggering/interlacing multiple sensors, but doing this implicitly increases the latency of each frame

- A 120hz camera might deliver double the frames per second, but each frame could be arriving 4 frames late in exchange

- 4 frames would be imperceptible to humans, it would be 3 feet for the car

- You haven't even processed any of these frames yet.

- Your off the shelf library introduces a random 1 second delay for some reason and costs you 88 miles in processing time

- The car can drive as fast as 120mph

All digital sensors implicitly have a sampling frequency, and the fundamental disconnect is always high sampling frequency =/= low latency. People constantly make this mistake over and over, and by the time you notice you are already too deep into development to make a change.

Decreasing latency is expensive, and requires specialized knowledge. Often you get expert software engineers who end up bottlenecked by the hardware limitations they can't even comprehend or the reverse, hardware guys bottlenecked by the software they can't introspect. The latency is only truly understood when you get to integration testing.

Nearly every step of the way you discover you need specialized hardware, software, operating systems, sensors. Every part of the chain each costing you more latency. It's like it's own ecosystem where almost everyone writes everything from scratch and doesn't share anything. It's gotten better in recent years though.

Full disclosure: I work in medtech and don't actually deal with cars, but it's a very similar problem space. We often use the same hardware/software cars use for this reason.
by invalidator | 2025-05-04 00:09:01+00:00
It's not the same.

For a simple example, let's say you are simply driving in a circle. The car wants to lean toward the outside. The linear motors can provide a countering force, lifting the outside, lowering the inside, so the car stays level. Variable damping can only control the rate that it rolls. It will still roll in sub-second timescales, unless it completely locks down the suspension, which is terrible for both handling and comfort.

For another simple example: going over a speed bump. Linear motors can lift the front wheels over the bump, and then the rear wheels, so the body stays level the whole time. An active damper can go full-soft the moment the wheel hits the bump, but the compressed spring will still start lifting the front of the car. An active damper can do a better job managing the rebound on the far side so it doesn't oscillate, but it can't entirely prevent the bump from pitching the body up and down in the first place.

That's not to say it's worthless. Very fast active dampers can improve both handling and comfort. It's just nowhere near the level which is possible with linear motors.