MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seanhunter | 2025-05-06 06:09:48+00:00
There is a huge amount of mathematics that initially seems as though it could not possibly have any practical application that later turns out central to all sorts of things in the real world.

The most obvious examples are number theory and group theory, which are respectively the study of numbers and how they behave under basic operations like arithmetic, and the study of a type of set with a single operation that satisfies very basic rules[1]. How could this possibly have any relevance or practical application? And yet it turns out they are central to cryptography and information theory. Joseph Fourier trying to solve the equations that govern how heat diffuses through a metal came up with the theory that forms the basis for how we do video and audio compression (and a ton of other things).

Finally mathematicians don’t speculate about how many dimensions the universe has, they study 4- and higher- dimensional objects and spaces to understand them. This theory is used all over the place. You can’t have a function like a temperature map without 4 dimensions (3 for the spatial coordinates of your input and one for the output).

[1] this turns out (non-obviously) to be the study of symmetry.
by mmooss | 2025-05-06 06:09:56+00:00
> Your recipient could get out a camera and take a photograph if that's what it comes to.

You are making the perfect the enemy of the good. As I said, two comments up: "I suppose I must trust other users - they could always screenshot a conversation. But while I trust them not to intentionally cheat me, I shouldn't have to trust them to accurately evaluate the security implementation of a software application - something most people can't do, Mike Waltz being the most famous example."

IT security professionals do use retention settings for security; it's not perfect, as you say, but it's very helpful. For example, many businesses auto-delete messages after a certain period except messages that the user intentionally preserves.

And as I said, there are other security functions in Signal that users must trust their apps to handle correctly.
by yojo | 2025-05-06 06:10:13+00:00
You are not denying food to the parents, you are denying food to the children. They did not choose to be born, and they certainly didn’t choose the fiscal responsibility of their parents.

Maybe there is room in there to shame the parents or give them a slap on the wrist, but the kids are blameless and denying them food makes you probably a monster.
by n_ary | 2025-05-06 06:10:46+00:00
Cursor is gated, Aider is too open and unlocked. Also, Cursor starts with a subscription for basic tier which equates to proven revenue and revenue is proof of demand. Aider is… a product of love and is not valuable to investors.

Locking down Aider will result in backlash and driving all potential users to cursor/windsurf.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-05-06 06:11:11+00:00
As we've seen this countless times, it still has the same problems:

> taking our work, [...] and giving nothing back

That's the BSD license for you. Following is a lot of FUD about what you can or cannot do, and what is open-source at all.

> the new branding clause [...] incentivizes individuals and organizations to actively contribute back

Not anymore with a CLA. I understand that they want money, but it never works by semi-closing open-source projects. It doesn't seem to be a famous project but I still expect the usual small forks while the real projects contributions slowing down because of the CLA.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-06 06:11:45+00:00
> Agricultural work is seasonal

There's much more work to do as a subsistence farmer than just harvesting the crops! There are stuff like housebuilding (you either build/fix your own, or help one relative do so) or cloth making/refurbishing. Also in winter, you need to get wood for the fireplace and this can easily be a full time job.

It was estimated that in the late 19th century France (still mostly rural until mid 20th century despite the industrial revolution taking place) people spent around 40% of their awake lives working, as opposed to 15% in today's France.
by ReptileMan | 2025-05-06 06:13:30+00:00
At some point we have to face the truth that the only well organized and ran country in the world is Singapore. European governments had barely any right influence and they manage to evolve their own disfunction quite well. It seems that for some reasons the states after WWII just lost their capacity to build things. If you watch Oppenheimer - one of the things in the background is how staggeringly competent were the administrative guys. There is no such things now. Any government project both big and small is expected to be cost overrun, delayed and if ever finished is a cointoss if it will make things better or worse. It is a global malaise.
by geysersam | 2025-05-06 06:13:37+00:00
Isn't the question you're posing basically Pascals wager?

I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small. That said I'm sure we're going to have a lot of useful intelligence. But nothing general or self-conscious or powerful enough to be threatening for many decades or even ever.

> Predicting the future is famously difficult

That's very true, but that fact unfortunately can never be used to motivate any particular action, because you can always say "what if the real threat comes from a different direction?"

We can come up with hundreds of doomsday scenarios, most don't involve AI. Acting to minimize the risk of every doomsday scenario (no matter how implausible) is doomsday scenario no. 153.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-06 06:14:01+00:00
> That is why so called derivative works are allowed (and even encouraged).

Derivative works are not "allowed (and even encouraged)" without a license from the copyright holder. Creating a derivative work is an exclusive right of the copyright holder just like making verbatim copies and requires a license for anyone else, unless an exception to copyright protection (like fair use) applies.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
by JohnKemeny | 2025-05-06 06:14:05+00:00
The main issue is that students don't have original ideas, at least not way into their master's project.

This means that every single thing they write throughout their studies is some regurgitation of stuff they find elsewhere.

To avoid having a reference after every single sentence, we need to allow them to pretend that some of the stuff they read is common knowledge, and can thus be passed on as such, without reference.

But if someone else actually wrote the sentence, that would be plagiarism, hence writing it in your own words.
by wtmt | 2025-05-06 06:14:10+00:00
Add to this the APAAR ID — which is linked to the biometric based Aadhaar number — which is being coerced by colleges and schools to obtain and share with them. Centralized surveillance combined with poor (or close to no) security measures never had it this easy as it has been in India over the last decade and a half. The government itself violates the privacy of residents and puts them in danger through these.

On paper, APAAR ID and Aadhaar are optional. But on the ground, things get very hairy and difficult if you do not submit yourself, get those and provide those everywhere. As a school or college student, imagine not being allowed to appear for important exams or not getting your certificates without providing these.

Culturally, there is no concept of privacy and there is no sizable movement for privacy in the country. Privacy intrusions are easily dismissed as “western concerns”.
by atoav | 2025-05-06 06:15:19+00:00
> To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals. > > It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.

In Austrian civil service I worked with kids who had special needs and were predominantly from poor social backgrounds. I made homework with them, drove them to school and back from day care in a bus, and I prepared food with them, had them deal with the dirty dishes, etc.

Most of the kids totally crazy behavior immidiately made sense once you met the parents. In fact there were only two kids where this wasn't the case and the first had PTSD of a life-changing magnitude (fled the Syrian war) and the other had good parents but a mental condition (I suspect severe ADHD).

Most of those kids would have been classified by the general public as hopeless cases.

I cooked with them, did the dishes, baked, regularily. Even kids that get beaten at home or were riddled with war trauma are surprisingly reliable if you just give them a task they understand. And turns out tasks they do every day are easy to understand after a week.

If those kids could make it, I am not the least worried about kids in better circumstances. Will it always be 100% perfect when kids do it? Will every kid be at it with full effort every day? Will a new kid grok it instantly? No. But that is okay. What is the worst that can happen? They go without food as a consequence? Other Kids show them how?

You're making it sound as if preparing food together is some unnatural herculian challenge while preparing food together was probably the most common act humanity has ever shared doing throughout its history.

No it must not be everyone. Prepare food? Get food. Pretty simple. Waste food? That was yours. And the other kids also don't like to see that.

The rason for having a society is to deal with those kind of differences. If you teach kids how to get structure into their lives and how to eat healthy the wasted food will easily be saved in future costs in the health and social systems.

Also: my kids could do this, US kids can't. What does thst mean for the US economy 4 decades down the line in comparison? You really think the US can afford to "educate" kids that way?
by KingOfCoders | 2025-05-06 06:16:49+00:00
From the article,

"That DNA is inherited directly from World War II, when bunkers were already an established part of Swiss military strategy. In the early ‘40s, when neutral Switzerland was entirely surrounded by Axis powers, the army famously stocked the Swiss Réduit (“National Redoubt”), a series of military fortifications in the central Alps dating to the 1880s, with supplies and ammunition to prepare for a potential Nazi invasion."

From my post,

"Founded in the idea to make it too expensive for Nazi Germany to invade."
by todotask2 | 2025-05-06 06:17:29+00:00
When I tested mine, I got the following:

Built on Astro web framework

HTML: 27.52KB uncompressed (6.10KB compressed)

JS: <10KB (compressed)

Critical CSS: 57KB uncompressed (7KB compressed) — tested using this site for performance analysis.

In comparison, many similar sites range from 100KB (uncompressed) to as much as 1MB.

The thing is, I can build clean HTML with no inline CSS or JavaScript. I also added resource hints (not Early Hints, since my Nginx setup doesn't support that out of the box), which slightly improve load times when combined with HTTP/2 and short-interval caching via Nginx. This setup allows me to hit a 100/100 performance score without relying on Critical CSS or inline JavaScript.

If every page adds 7KB, isn’t it wasteful—especially when all you need is a lightweight SPA or, better yet, more edge caching to reduce the carbon footprint? We don’t need to keep transmitting unnecessary data around the world with bloated HTML like Elementor for WordPress.

Why serve users unnecessary bloat? Mobile devices have limited battery life. It's not impossible to achieve lighting fast experience once you move away from shared hosting territory.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-06 06:17:29+00:00
> Devices trying to use DoT or DoH??? Blocked, PiHoles take over.

How? I can see you only allowing some ports through the firewall, but presumably TCP 443 is one of those. According to Cloudflare [0] DoH uses that. What if Samsung uses that, or figures DoT on port 443 works better? Do you only allow specific destinations for these devices?

I actually use a similar setup, only I removed pihole and just use some lists in my opnsense's unbound (didn't notice much difference).

My "smart" TV is pretty awful, so it's just unplugged (which makes it dumb, so now I love it). I've tried putting it on a dedicated VLAN with no internet access so I could try using the built-in Chromecast functionality – didn't have much luck. I've set up the mDNS repeater and allowed ports through, but that doesn't seem enough.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/encryption/dns-ove...
by abhisek | 2025-05-06 06:18:26+00:00
I think you are only looking at Kubernetes for running and updating container images. If that’s the use-case then I guess it’s overkill.

But Kubernetes does much more in terms of providing the resources required for these containers to share state, connect to each other, get access to config or secrets etc.

That’s where comes the CPU and memory cost. The cost of managing your containers and providing them the resources they need.

> basically acts as a giant while loop

Yep. That’s the idea of convergence of states I guess. In a distributed system you can’t always have all the participating systems behave in the desired way. So the manager (or orchestrator) of the system continuously tries to achieve the desired state.
by goku12 | 2025-05-06 06:18:45+00:00
> I'm wondering at which point will we reach that utopic nirvana when HN and internet users in general will be able to google something they find perplexing/unreal before asking others to do it for them.

Look. Perhaps you should use a bit more discretion before you decide to come out all guns blazing on sarcasm and condescendation. I have some professional experience in the field - and it tells me there are many inconsistencies in your argument. And yes, I did 'the google' before typing the previous reply. I could of course be just ignorant about the latest achievements. But that's where references matter. That's all I asked for.

So here is the problem. Operation Ivy Bell happened in mid 1960s to mid 1970s. If you knew the communication infrastructure of that time, you would have realized that it was distinctly NOT optic fiber. Those came much later. But what really confirmed that doubt is that they used the induction principle of a transformer to tap the cable. That won't work on optic fibers. That's not how the EM field propagates in an OFC - they're more similar to waveguides than telephone cables.

And this distinction certainly matters here. Today's world is certainly not the same as in 60s. The sort of high-volume communication didn't exist back then. Neither did the ability to listen to or manipulate so many people all at once. Today's dangers - like the one with email messages - didn't exist back then. Back then 'cable' leaks like this used to happen. But have you heard of anything similar to Hillary's email leak or the Halloween mails?
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-06 06:18:46+00:00
My question was honest:

What urtext - to someone who moved from org-mode to Obsidian - seems to do is

* chain you to a proprietary text editor that does some python interpreting. I wonder which use cases would want me to have my document change itself (or even change its own changing logic).

* highlights 'features' that really do not live in the document itself but rather in the editor's logic (like timestamp handling)

* introduces a complex structure to express 'nodes', which appear to be essentially text anchors.

But anything else, the editing, the easy-UI-free syntax, markdown has done ten years ago.

So it is not a text format, because it lives in a very specific editor. It is not a fully-fledged software package either. It sounds a lot like some sort of macro language which woke up one day and decided to rather be a text repository.

If you (speaking of a general you, not you specifically) wanted to convince people to make the switch, a list of barely described features is insufficient. You need to sell a solution, not a product.
by mlyle | 2025-05-06 06:19:53+00:00
I don't know what the correct answer is.

The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload.

So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Embarrassing the kid ideally would not be part of it.

California pays for it all, but California is a pretty rich state. And if you're a poorer state, you have the choice between eliminating this problem, or addressing many other types of educational need.
by efortis | 2025-05-06 06:20:02+00:00
You can allow safe inline CSS with a nonce. For example:

<style nonce="sha256-Ce2SAZQd/zkqF/eKoRIUmEqKy31enl1LPzhnYs3Zb/I="> html { background: red } </style>

And a CSP like this

default-src 'self'; style-src 'sha256-Ce2SAZQd/zkqF/eKoRIUmEqKy31enl1LPzhnYs3Zb/I='

Here's how I automate mine:

https://github.com/uxtely/js-utils/blob/ad7d9531e108403a4146...
by pembrook | 2025-05-06 06:21:07+00:00
You bring up the example of an extinction-level asteroid hurling toward earth. Gee, I wonder if this superintelligence you’re deathly afraid of could help with that?

This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown.

How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance you could get hit by a bus?

If your tribe invented fire you’d be the one arguing how we can’t use it for fear it might engulf the world. Yes, humans do risk starting wildfires, but it’s near impossible to argue the discovery of fire wasn’t a net good.
by pastage | 2025-05-06 06:22:29+00:00
And it is also easy to waste time on multi year projects that does not fit you current audience. If you present the result you need to slant it in the correct way to sell subscription. This is very visible with journalist that live on the whim donations.

You see people become more and more extreme because that is what get them donations. This might just be what works with humans.
by fpoling | 2025-05-06 06:22:44+00:00
At some point I tried to run a few small websites dedicated for activism (couple of Wordpress instances, a forum and custom PHP code) using docker. It was time sink as updating and testing the images turned out to be highly non-trivial.

Eventually I replaced everything with a script that generated systemd units and restarted the services on changes under Debian using the Wordpress that comes with it. Then I have a test VM on my laptop and just rsync changes to the deployment host and run the deployment script there. It reduced my chores very significantly. The whole system runs on 2GB VPS. It could be reduced to 1GB if Wordpress would officially support SQLite. But I prefer to pay few more euros per month and stick to Mariadb to minimize support requirements.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-06 06:22:55+00:00
> Another (simpler) control we offer users is, to drop all connections made to IPs that the user-set resolver did not do name resolution for.

This sounds good, and I've wondered how I could implement such a thing.

However, with the clearly hostile approach all IoT appliances are taking, I wonder if they'll actually fall back to a "degraded" (for them) config with the network-provided DNS, or whether they'll just fail and complain the network is broken or something.
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-06 06:23:19+00:00
To expend on sibling comment, sweeping generation has never been the goal neither most Muslims, sports enthusiasts or vegans want to force everyone live like they do. However when someone finds something incredibly valuable ( > projective judgement) they’ll try to share that with everyone else. It’s a generosity act!

The reasons themselves can be anything. Ethic is a powerful one, we often see life changes for psychic and/or physic health, time gain (time/benefit of an activity), money, whatever. Those methods are tools to self-help achieve your own goal. When it worked, we’re proud and keen to share it with friends and the world.
Show HN: App to facilitate language learning on Youtube
by yunusabd | 2025-05-06 06:23:42+00:00
Hi HN, I think many are aware how useful Youtube is for language learning. This app that I'm building helps you get the most out of it.

In its simplest form, it's simply a mobile UI for Youtube that lets you copy text from the transcript (Youtube's app doesn't let you do that).

More advanced features are a built-in dictionary and translator, web search for names, slang etc. and a flashcard system that creates exercises from your saved words.

It's using AI in different places, but I'm making sure that it's always grounded with a lot of real world data, to avoid hallucinations. I think it works pretty well.

It's currently available in Test Flight (iOS) and in the Google Play Store, if you register as a tester. There's also a Chrome extension that's already live. Let me know what you think!
by cornholio | 2025-05-06 06:24:03+00:00
A 20 page document on how to use basic variables, function calls and methods. Except for the threading paragraph, which is hard in any language, this is all complexity and refactoring pain that Rust hoists onto every programmer every day, for relatively modest benefits, somewhat improved performance and memory usage vs the garbage collected/ref-counted version of the same code.

Essentially, you wouldn't and shouldn't make that tradeoff for anything other than system programming.
by fasouto | 2025-05-06 06:25:56+00:00
This is a bit random, but when I was an intern at CERN I spent a summer living in an old civil defense bunker near Geneva.

Short-term accommodation was notoriously expensive for students back then (probably even worse now), and I didn't hesitate when they offered me this unconventional housing opportunity.

The bunker had a decontamination zone, air filtering system, massive concrete doors, a large communal kitchen, and numerous small bunk beds. It was adequate for short-term use, but we encountered two main issues:

- It's remarkably easy to lose track of time without natural light cues

- Even with the air filering system wet clothes wouldn't dry properly inside
by djmips | 2025-05-06 06:29:07+00:00
Somewhat related but I just remember when Numega had a color image digitizer with a black and white camera and color filters for the Amiga. I guess the idea is very old because IIRC the very first color photos were taken that way. And speaking of projectors - I think there were projectors / projection TVs that used three black and white CRTS with filters that were merged to produce the final image. Could be higher resolution that way.
by mtnGoat | 2025-05-06 06:30:04+00:00
Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. This is not a political issue in my mind, but a basic humanity issue. A child with hunger pangs isn’t focused on learning, if you can’t cover the basic need, the rest is a waste. The haves, selfishly don’t want to help subsidize the have nots. Which I get, BUT these are kids, we as adults should leave them out of it, sack up, and deal with it.

You are correct, my dad was a civil engineer, he very much could afford it. I guess he thought high end alcohol and golf were better expenditures. I found it interesting that the article mentions a lot of the debt isn’t from the lowest income brackets.