MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-05-05 17:13:32+00:00
No, the cryptographic hash functions are not slow by design. This is a nasty misunderstanding which leads to stuff like MD5(password) in PHP [not the PHK MD5 crypt() algorithm used in Unix systems in the 1990s, this was literally MD5(password) and it's a bad idea, do not do]

The cryptographic hash functions such as the SHA-2 family resist construction of a second pre-image, given N and H(N) there's no way for me to make M such that H(M) == H(N) but M != N that'll be faster than brute force trying all possible values for M. So far everything we have which achieves this is markedly slower than say FNV-1 which would once have been the most likely hashing algorithm for a hash table.

The one way password hashes, some of which are based on the cryptographic hashes, are slow by design. You should not use passwords, but on HN this seems like a lost cause so, assuming you insist on using passwords these algorithms are specifically what you need. Fighting about which one to use ("oh no, PBKDF2 isn't memory hard, blah blah blah") is also a bottomless hole of HN nonsnse, so, fine, pick whichever of them you're certain is the only correct one.

But we do ideally want some cryptographic properties for a hash to be used in a hash table and your instinct that just using a random factor and hoping won't work was correct. You need a correctly designed function, which is what SipHash is. What you want is some keyed function with a key K such that if I know N and H(K,N) but not K, I can't guess an M such that H(K,M) = H(K,N) but M != N except by brute force.

> Many programming languages do not use open addressing and prefer chaining (Java, C#, Golang, std::unordered_map in C++) for simplicity

This was true in Golang but today the map in Go is a modified Swiss Table which of course delivers improved performance. We've seen why Java is stuck where it is. The C++ std::unordered_map is known to have poor performance, C++ programmers have many alternatives [including of course Swiss Tables], such as a really nice modern offering from Boost.

I'm actually not sure about the guts of the C# hash tables at all, it's a complicated beast full of conditionally defined elements because it's reused by CLR internals as well as provided as a type for us users. It's not a conventional design of any sort, there seems to have been (which is common for Microsoft) some degree of Not Invented Here - just make it up as we go along. It's storing pre-calculated hashes with each key->value pair, it's tracking how many collisions it has, I dunno, I wouldn't do this, don't copy it without seeing hard numbers for why this is good.
by elbasti | 2025-05-05 17:14:18+00:00
I found the truly irreplaceable apps to be:

- Uber

- Banking

- Google Maps

For a camera, I suggest buying a real, standalone camera (I have a fuji x100). The photos it takes are VASTLY better than an iphone. For something smaller that fits in a pocket, people say great things about the Ricoh GR III.

Unfortunately, I found that being out without a smartphone did cause certain anxieties for me: What if I forgot about an appointment? What if I get an urgent email or whatsapp?

The answer would be having an actual assistant (ie, a secretary). Someone I could call to order me an uber or look up a restaurant, and someone who could call me to say "hey, X just sent you a whatsapp message that seems pretty urgent."

I that an AI powered assistant that communicates via phone or text could be a great use for AI and something I hope to code up whenever I have some spare time.
by codedokode | 2025-05-05 17:15:25+00:00
It is different thing. When you copy data into computer's RAM, that might be copying as defined in law [1]:

> Using software almost always involves creating copies, even though many of these copies only exist for a very short time. For example, executing a program means copying it from the hard disk into RAM so that the CPU can interpret the instructions. Because of this, the right to run a program is considered to fall under the copyright of the author.

For comparison, when a human looks at the letters, there is no copying.

Also, models can reproduce text verbatim which proves that they store it.

So it is unfair when ordinary folks got sued for this and Zuckerberg wants to get away with a million times larger violation. He must go directly to jail.

[1] https://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/software/rights/
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-05 17:15:55+00:00
You are absolutely right. I should have phrased that differently. Derivative work is a legal term, but I misused it above. I should have either used another term or been clearer.

If the work is "derivative" in the legal sense it is copyrighted, and you may not create derivative works without the copyright holders permission.

What I should have said is that simply being inspired by a work or copying unprotectable elements (like facts or ideas) does not create a derivative work.

For example, if ChatGPT were to generate Star Wars, except with Dookies instead of Wookies, that might be illegal. If it were to learn what a spaceship is from Star Wars and then create something substantially new it would not. The key is is that it must not be substantially similar to the original. You must add enough value that it becomes something new, not just rehash the original.
by mrlongroots | 2025-05-05 17:16:17+00:00
> "Likely the idea that filesystems should run as userspace / unprivileged (or at least limited privilege) processes which would make them, ultimately, indistinguishable from a form of database engine."

"Userspace vs not" is a different argument from "consistency vs not" or "atomicity vs not" or "POSIX vs not". Someone still needs to solve that problem. Sure instead of SQLite over POSIX you could implement POSIX over SQLite over raw blocks. But you haven't gained anything meaningful.

> Persistent file systems are essentially key-value stores

I think this is reductive enough to be equivalent to "a key-value store is a thin wrapper over the block abstraction, as it already provides a key-value interface, which is just a thin layer over taking a magnet and pointing it at an offset".

Persistent filesystems can be built over key-value stores. This is especially common in distributed filesystems. But they also circumvent a key-value abstraction entirely.

> IMO a big problem with POSIX filesystems is the lack of atomicity

Atomicity requires write-ahead logging + flushing a cache. I fail to see why this needs to be mandatory, when it can be effectively implemented at a higher layer.

> This and a complete lack of consistent networked API

A consistent networked API would require you to hit the metadata server for every operation. No caching. Your system would grind to a halt.

Finally, nothing in the POSIX spec prohibits an atomic filesystem or consistency guarantees. It is just that no one wants to implement these things that way because it overprovisions for one property at the expense of others.
by danudey | 2025-05-05 17:16:49+00:00
magic(5) is a system for determining the type of a file by examining the 'magic bytes' at or near the start of a file.

For example, POSIX tar files have a defined file format that starts with a header struct: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Standard.h...

You can see that at byte offset 257 is `char magic[6]`, which contains `TMAGIC`, which is the byte string "ustar\0". Thus, if a file has the bytes 'ustar\0' at offset 257 we can reasonably assume that it's a tar file. Almost every defined file type has some kind of string of 'magic' predefined bytes at a predefined location that lets a program know "yes, this is in fact a JPEG file" rather than just asserting "it says .jpg so let's try to interpret this bytestring and see what happens".

As for how it's similar: I don't think it actually is, I think that's a misunderstanding. The metadata that this vector FS is storing is more than "this is a a JPEG" or "this is a word document", as I understand it, so comparing it to magic(5) is extremely reductionist. I could be mistaken, however.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 17:16:56+00:00
Yes and no.

The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.

Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:

<https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/gates-foundation-i...>

The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.

But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:

<https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiny-spark/id505053432>

So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-05 17:17:17+00:00
https://manpages.org/magic/5 is a database of file types, used by the file(1) command. I don't exactly follow how it's the same though; it would let you say "what files are videos" but not "what files are videos of a cat". Which is sort of related but unless I missed something there is a difference.
by elbasti | 2025-05-05 17:18:34+00:00
Ah. Well I didn't mention all the benefits, but what I was referring to here were future decisions, not past ones. Decisions I had put off taking because they caused me great anxiety but that nonetheless had to be done, and the sooner the better.

Other benefits:

- Vastly improved mood

- Renewed interest in creative endeavors, specifically writing

- A sense of well-being

- A "the scales have fallen from my eyes" realization/epiphany/gnosis around the nature of reality and the effect "weaponized language delivery mechanisms" (ie, social media) have on our perception of it.

Pretty fucking worth it, if you asked me. And yet I fell off the wagon and have a smartphone again.
by throwaway290 | 2025-05-05 17:18:55+00:00
If you made a durable copy of a book in your example to keep for yourself and use later that's already a grey area. But no one does it with books. People do it with other media tho, and big surprise get prosecuted for it. As you may know, in developed countries people get served notices for torrenting

But if you make books contents available online via some service that regurgitates its contents you would be totally sus because you can be considered in a business of selling derivative works.
by overu589 | 2025-05-05 17:19:29+00:00
Let’s see, free will vs determinism. I first call foul that modern man’s misconceptions muddle the question.

I hereby drive a nail in the coffin of determinism. All theoretical physicists shall tremble. Decay and the interference of exogenous influence (stray particle or otherwise) precludes no model may sustain the variable expanse of existential reality (for existential reality is potential continuously resolving to state, not merely state bouncing around.)

“Free will” is a mind trap of self deception. It is not that it cannot be influenced or derived from preceding factors, or deceived, or misinformed, or wrong. It is that your will (“determination of resolve in the moment of now”) is uncoerced or obstructed.

It is that “will” is the “determination of resolve”, and free means that in the moment of now, to your utmost awareness (which may very well be compromised) it is yours to apply or abstain.

You’re also backwards about “feel consciousness.” Consciousness allows you to feel. Consciousness is like an analog hologram dancing on the superfluid lack of resolve in the potential bound to whatever atomic substrate (those micro-tubes perhaps.) All this animated by the feedback loop with our fleshy extremeties.

Sensing is obviously an important part (the IO layer with existential reality after all) yet only one aspect of the consciousness technology.

We are animated existential reality, not the sum of arranged states.
by alexpotato | 2025-05-05 17:19:46+00:00
This pops up in low latency HFT specifically with networking cards.

Certain network cards have either a bug or combination of features that work in an interesting way to the benefit of the trading firm.

These bugs (and features too) sometimes get removed in favor of either getting rid of the bug or those features are seen as not needed for the larger market etc. Therefore, firms will sometimes attempt to buy up all available supply of certain models.
by sandeep_kamble | 2025-05-05 17:19:55+00:00
CVE-2025-2783 is a high-impact vulnerability in the Google Chrome web browser, specifically affecting the Mojo inter-process communication (IPC) component on Windows systems. The flaw is rooted in improper handle validation and management in Mojo, which allows a remote attacker to craft a malicious payload that, when opened in Chrome, escapes the browser’s sandbox.
by buu700 | 2025-05-05 17:20:01+00:00
There's no "tricking" involved, and no basis for your assumption that LLMs lower the quality of work. I would suggest that what you and the author are observing is actually the opposite effect: LLMs broadly help improve the quality of work, all else being equal. The caveat is that when all else is not equal, this manifests in bad work being improved to a level that's still bad. The issue here is students using advanced tooling as an excuse to be lazy and undercut their own learning process, not the tool itself. LLMs are just this generation's version of Wikipedia and spell check.

As much as the author rightfully complains about the example in the post, a version that only said "explain the downsides of Euler angles in robotics and suggest some alternatives" would obviously be far worse. In this case, the AI helped elevate clear F-level work to maybe a C. That's not an indictment of AI; it's an indictment of low-quality work. LLMs lower the bar to produce passable-looking bad work, but they also lower the bar to produce excellent work. The confirmation bias here is that we don't know how many cases of B-level work became A papers with AI assistance, because those instances don't stand out in the same way.

In the audit example, LLMs aren't doing the audit. They synthesize my notes into a useful starting point to nullify writer's block, and let me focus more of my time on the hard or unique aspects of a given report. It's like having an intern write the first draft for me, typically with some mistakes or oversights, occasionally with a valuable additional insight thrown in, and often with links to a few helpful references for the customer that I wouldn't necessarily have found and included on my own. That doesn't lower the quality; it improves it.

As far as the legal example, it really depends on the complexity of a given instance and the guidance you've provided to your lawyers. A good lawyer won't sign off on something that fails to meet the requested quality bar (if anything, the financial incentive would be for them to err on the side of conservatism and toss out the draft you'd provided). But of course this all depends on you having a clear enough understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, and enough familiarity with legal documents and proficiency with language to shape everything into a passable first draft. AI speeds this up, but if you don't know what you're doing then the AI won't solve that for you. It's a tool like any other, and can be used properly or improperly.
by jjulius | 2025-05-05 17:20:05+00:00
>You are now the weirdo with something to hide when you are not on Instagram or Tiktok.

You might call me a "weirdo", but this has absolutely not been my experience whatsoever. Friends, family and coworkers don't really give a shit that I don't participate in social media, and I haven't been treated any differently for it.

Edit: And hell, generally, what's life without a bit of weird? The homogeneity of everyone doing the same thing together all the time sounds boring as hell. Here's to the weirdos!
by simion314 | 2025-05-05 17:20:19+00:00
>It's 20PB of examples used to form the shape of a 20GB model. You could show it 5GB of training data or 500EB of training data and it would still be 20GB - because it is not a compression algo, it's a 20GB shape formed by external data.

You can compress 20PB of text to 20Gb or even less, if input is super repetitive. So the same with images, if 50% of the images are cats then you learn how to represent the cat pixels with a few vectors and then you could represent all the cats int he world doing all possible cat actions.

But please have the courage to respond to this, when the AI is caught regurgitating the exact text from a popular book, the exact verses from a poem, the exact code function from some code , then how can you defend that is not memorizing things? If a human uses my poem(after they read it) and signs his name under it would you defend them?
by leovander | 2025-05-05 17:21:08+00:00
Don't read too much into what I am saying. I am not even talking about the AI piece.

I download a torrent with movie that I didn't pay for. If I don't allow to seed it, then I don't get in trouble. If I let it seed either during the download process or after, I'd get a DMCA notice if that torrent/magnet link was getting tracked.

I don't need a hypothetical book, that is just how it works if I were to download illegally obtained documents/media.

As technical as people are in this thread, easy to tell when folks didn't have their parents wondering why they were getting scary letters from the ISP.
by Bluestein | 2025-05-05 17:21:08+00:00
To wit:

11. Governing Law. For Services provided to, on, or in orbit around the planet Earth or the Moon, this Agreement and any disputes between us arising out of or related to this Agreement, including disputes regarding arbitrability (“Disputes”) will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Texas in the United States. For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
by jampekka | 2025-05-05 17:21:20+00:00
There are plenty of students studying out of interest. It's very common to e.g. study excess courses. Many doing their theses can work very independently and go way beyond what's required.

Highly self-driven students are a minority, but not a rarity. People do things out of being interested and enjoying learning. It shouldn't be a surprise in a website called hacker news.
by Twirrim | 2025-05-05 17:21:23+00:00
I use both, blocking all sorts of non-browser traffic. I find I can tell whenever the pi-hole isn't running.

On the "less maintenance" front, I honestly don't pay any attention to the pi-hole in any given month. It has automatic updates running, and reboots when it needs to. It pretty much just works and I forget about it.
by danudey | 2025-05-05 17:21:40+00:00
Not OP, but despite working in an all-Go shop I just wrote a utility in Python the other week and caught some flak for it.

The reason I gave (which was accepted) was that the process of creating a proof of concept and iterating on it rapidly is vastly easier in Python (for me) than it is in Go. In essence, it would have taken me at least a week, possibly more, to write the program I ended up with in Golang, but it only took me a day to write it in Python, and, now that I understand the problem and have a working (production-ready) prototype, it would probably only take me another day to rewrite it in Golang.

Also, a large chunk of the functionality in this Python script seems to be libraries - pillow for image processing, but also pytorch and related vision/audio/codec libraries. Even if similar production-ready Rust crates are available (I'm not sure if they are), this kind of thing is something Python excels at and which these modules are already optimized for. Most of the "work" happening here isn't happening in Python, by and large.
Show HN: Filmle – Wordle for Films/TV Shows
by Haris1245 | 2025-05-05 17:22:10+00:00
Hello HN! I am Haris and recently i have gotten addicted into making little web games!

A couple of days ago i made Cryptle(https://cryptle.site), which is like Wordle, but for cryptography!

Today I made Filmle, Wordle, but for Films and TV Shows!

Would love if you check it out!
by jordanb | 2025-05-05 17:22:41+00:00
> the Starship - which at least in expendable form, is ready now

After 8 tries starship hasn't successfully gotten its second stage to orbit. The starship-based plan is the most bonkers part of Artemis. They haven't gotten the "easy" parts done (getting to orbit and getting back again) and haven't even started on the "hard" parts (in-flight refueling, a launch cadence to overcome boil-off, actually landing on the moon and taking off again, etc).
by dghughes | 2025-05-05 17:23:10+00:00
My story is when my Dad died and my family looked for a nice picture of him to use in his obituary it was difficult to do. Why? Nearly all pictures were birthdays, Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving, repeat. No spontaneous pictures just the basic holidays.

I'm sure I did sneak a few candid pictures over the years but that leads to another issue a sea of unsorted pictures on who knows what media.

Also elderly people not good with technology, the cost of it, may be embarrassed to say often no longer take pictures.
by m000 | 2025-05-05 17:23:17+00:00
RPi5 is definitely a huge overkill. Plus, it needs a power adapter, probably some cooling, and some space to seat it.

Pi Zero 2W + micro usb ethernet adapter works perfect for Pi-Hole, and has an almost invisible physical footprint: Small enough to hot-glue on the back of your router, happily runs with power from one of the router's USB ports, and you get a 10cm ethernet cable to avoid network cable management.
by the_dude_ | 2025-05-05 17:23:28+00:00
it's a good post, however I agree with the comments there and here that a raspberry pi 5 with 8gb ram is an overkill for just running pihole. a good old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with 1gb ram it's enough and it will still have capacity to run other things there. And of course pihole can run on an old laptop or desktop box you already have so no need to buy a device just for the sake of it. I would rather not run it as a docker container thou but that's just my preference
by vhodges | 2025-05-05 17:23:30+00:00
Current ones I know about:

* https://industryarcade.ca/ (New West Sapperton-ish) * https://www.capcityarcade.com/ (Also New West Sapperton) * https://www.castlefunpark.com/ (East Abbotsford, just off the #1 @Whatcom Road exit)

I played at Lesters a few times.

There used to be a Chuck E. Cheeses in Burnaby (near where Lougheed Mall Skytrain is now) that I also used to play at. There's a current one in Langley that I've not been too so I am not sure if they have any games or not.