MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skissane | 2025-05-21 22:33:14+00:00
> What is in the SDR is public information, so if you wanted to track them, it's not that hard.

The problem is the contents of the basket changes every 5 years. It is trivial to build your own “emulated SDR” just by holding appropriate amounts of the underlying currencies; but the problem is that in 2027 the IMF is scheduled to change the weights of the basket again; that means you may have to execute some (potentially very big) currency transactions to rebalance your “emulated SDR” to match the real one, and there’s a risk you won’t be able to do so at the rates the IMF assumed when it decreed the reweighting, especially since it doesn’t use spot rates, it uses 3 month average rates.

One option is to treat each edition of the SDR as a separate currency, so you might offer 2022 SDR and 2016 SDR in parallel. Another would be to have your “eSDR” aim to converge to parity with the SDR in the long-run, but allow it to temporarily deviate from parity whenever the basket updates.

SDR issued by the IMF don’t have this problem-whenever the definition changes, they all update accordingly-they are to a certain degree a “fiat” currency. There are two problems though-the first is that only sovereign states and certain international organisations established by treaty are legally allowed to possess them, private individuals and companies cannot. Some would like the IMF to change the rules to allow private ownership, but the US always blocks that because they are afraid of the SDR competing with the USD as the de facto global currency-and the IMF’s rules were architected to give the US a veto over all major decisions. The second issue: if you legally own SDR, you can take them to the IMF and ask to swap them (e.g.) for USD, and the IMF will work with the US Fed to ensure the transaction happens at the current official USD-SDR exchange rate. The problem is, the IMF rules only let holders carry out these transactions under quite restrictive conditions, meaning the SDR isn’t in practice freely convertible with its basket currencies-again, the IMF could loosen those rules, but the US would likely veto it.

Ultimately, some kind of private edition-based SDR emulation, or even a continuous emulation which closely tracks the SDR but temporarily diverges from it around reweighting time, is entirely feasible for a private actor (such as a bank or ETF issuer) to issue. I think the main reason why they don’t, is there just isn’t market demand for it - and an emulated SDR issued by a private actor is potentially at the regulatory mercy of the country to which that private issuer belongs, to a much greater extent than real SDRs would be.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-21 22:33:27+00:00
This isn't an exclusive, or new

DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage (652 points, 2 days ago, 183 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036647

TeleMessage, used by Trump officials, can access plaintext chat logs (262 points, 15 days ago, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909220
by gnabgib | 2025-05-21 22:34:28+00:00
This isn't an exclusive, or new

DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage (652 points, 2 days ago, 183 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036647

TeleMessage, used by Trump officials, can access plaintext chat logs (262 points, 15 days ago, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909220
by frollogaston | 2025-05-21 22:35:11+00:00
Also, the O(1) random memory access assumption makes it easy to take memory for granted. Really it's something like O(n^(1/3)) when you're scaling the computer to the size of the problem, and you can see this in practice in datacenters.

I forget the name of the O(1) access model. Not UMA, something else.
by Fabricio20 | 2025-05-21 22:35:33+00:00
The main annoying thing about piHole with a non-technical family has been that it blocks google shopping.

You know, when you search for a thing you want to buy and google shopping shows a list of common stores on top of the search results like a bunch of little cards? Yep. Clicking one there causes a failure because that link is a google ad link. Same thing if you tab into "Shopping". All links are broken.

Otherwise, it's been 4 years and no other complaints at all.
by kragen | 2025-05-21 22:35:52+00:00
Community energy makes sense for 2,000,000-watt windmills like the ones in your first article, but not for a 600-watt rooftop windmill that's less than a meter across. The 2,000,000-watt windmill ought to cost less per watt, but it requires successfully coordinating the community to support it (cf. the note in your third link about a "de facto ban on new onshore wind projects" being lifted). And looking at https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/chart-wind-turbine... it looks like over the period 02015 to 02022 the prices of big windmills consistently stayed in the range of 80¢ to 130¢ per peak watt, which is actually more than the 50¢ per peak watt of the mail-order Amazon rooftop windmill. (The rooftop windmill will probably enjoy significantly lower capacity factors, but it's clearly in the same ballpark.)

This was surprising to me, since I thought big windmills were much cheaper per watt, so I dug a bit further. The figures check out. The current https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80kv5d7lp7o says a £40 million (US$52 million) onshore Manx wind farm might have "up to 5 turbines", and thus up to 10 megawatts, putting the total project cost closer to US$5/Wp. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... from 02019 has a capital cost breakdown of a 200MW hypothetical wind project costing US$253 million, consisting of 71 2.8-MW windmills, totaling US$1265/kW (127¢/Wp). About 60% of that (80¢/Wp) is "WTG [windmill] procurement and supply". A 50MW hypothetical wind project in the next section comes in at 168¢/Wp, and a 400MW hypothetical offshore wind project in the next section is 438¢/Wp.

So it's not at all clear to me that community wind energy, or utility-scale wind energy in general, is even cheaper or more efficient than mail-order rooftop windmills. It might be more expensive!
by gist | 2025-05-21 22:35:54+00:00
Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)

I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
by xp84 | 2025-05-21 22:37:04+00:00
Seeing the meth addicts and schizophrenics (and probably some who are both) who get so out of hand that police get called, dealing with them is a dangerous job. I'd rather train police better, than get body armor for a psychiatrist so they don't get bitten by someone having a "mental health crisis." Also highly trained mental health professionals are going to cost a lot more than police, and they probably won't want to work nights and weekends.

Also, when cops are called due to a "mental health crisis" that is sometimes because that person has caused enough alarm that the people around them are in legitimate fear for their safety. Unless the "mental health crisis squad" has lights and sirens and 911 can dispatch them quickly at all times, they won't be sufficient to deal with the problems. When they can't talk them out of their delusions and get physically threatened as well, they'll probably just call the police.

DTP is operating from an attitude which assumes that police can't be better trained and that this other group of highly educated professionals should be turned to instead -- explicitly to replace police jobs, which is to be expected since it's a philosophy primarily promoted by the elites (college educated). Al lot of law-abiding regular people of many races and backgrounds, actually don't have toxic relationships with the police and don't want less policing.
by YoumuChan | 2025-05-21 22:38:35+00:00
Like Raft is a "special case" of Paxos, this feels like a "special case" of CRDT.

It has all the flavor of CRDT, but adds a leader and a different way for the total ordering (basically using leader's local lamport clock to break tie).

Throw in leader reelection and some ledger syncing and then give everything some other names, I bet you can have "collaborative text editing on one page".
by duneroadrunner | 2025-05-21 22:38:37+00:00
So I don't write much C code these days, but I recently encountered strtol() again and am I mistaken or does the interface also violate const correctness? I mean it takes a const char* as the first parameter and then gives you back a (non-const) char* potentially pointing into the same string, right? Like, does strtol() get a pass because it's old, or is const correctness (still) not generally a concern of C programmers?
by layoric | 2025-05-21 22:38:46+00:00
Source? They did a $40B funding round for which Softbank is on the hook for most of it, and they are going into debt cause they don't have the cash either [0]. IMO, these acquisitions are due to the fact they know just selling the model isn't where the huge margins are, selling the verticals is.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/softbank-...
by diasf | 2025-05-21 22:39:04+00:00
After thinking for sometime it seems like even though Sam doesn't have any stake in io, he might have a stake in the Thrive fund that invested in io. Put $50M in a Thrive fund, which is used to invest in io that ultimately gets acquired by OpenAI at a really high valuation. Joshua from Thrive anyways wanted Sam to have some stake and the numbers being floated around was of the order of $7B. The whole thing seems absurd and makes me trust OpenAI even less.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-21 22:41:38+00:00
They used log10, so each step is 10x the previous, so in a linear sense, it would double when going from about 29.7 to 30. But it seems that humans tend to improve tech at exponential rates, where we are constantly making improvements here and there that keep stacking up, when it comes to things that are actually in a developmental stage anyways.

Say your "endstage" goal is GPU with 200 billion transistors. Using linear scale, the current biggest GPU is only halfway there, and it took all of human civilization to get this far, and it will take another civilization to get to 200b. In reality, we'll have that in a couple years with our current civilization.
by eximius | 2025-05-21 22:43:13+00:00
As I read the paper, you would be able to detect it in a couple of ways

1. possibly high loss where the models don't have compatible embedding concepts 2. given a sufficient "sample" of vectors from each space, projecting them to the same backbone would show clusters where they have mismatched concepts

It's not obvious to me how you'd use either of those to tweak the vector space of one to not represent some concept, though.

But if you just wanted to make an embedding that is unable to represent some concept, presumably you could already do that by training disjoin "unrepresentable concepts" to a single point.
by api | 2025-05-21 22:43:51+00:00
The thing that made x86 take over the world was the immense scale and volume it got from the PC clone and small PC-based server (NT and early Linux) market. It allowed huge R&D investments and let x86 eat more expensive workstation and server CPUs from the bottom up, eventually conquering the server and then cloud.

ARM got the same thing from the mobile phone market, allowing it to eat x86 from the bottom up in exactly the same way. It went from phones and IoT, to laptops and small servers, and now to large cloud servers.

ARM does have a small advantage from its ISA being much easier to decode, especially with a wide decoder, but x86 engineers have shown that they can stay competitive.
by thombles | 2025-05-21 22:44:53+00:00
Bingo. Furthermore, the annoying things that MS does are predictable and usually not directly harmful. Yeah they want telemetry, they want to encourage me to use expensive autocomplete everywhere, but ultimately the range of bad stuff is "oh dear the corporation is trying to upsell me nonsense I have to turn off", not "my OS is the combination of thousands of distinct software packages where I have to trust literally everybody with code execution... I sure hope this keeps working out".
by browningstreet | 2025-05-21 22:45:43+00:00
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.

..

OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.

..

OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”

https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
by vintagedave | 2025-05-21 22:45:47+00:00
Even if implementation was painful, did it work well? It sounds good, in making managers accountable and encouraging servant leadership, but I lack the understanding of psychology and unfortunate management to know /how/ it could go wrong, yet have the experience to say as gut instinct, this could go wrong.

Or was it positive but just tone-deaf that they introduced random drug testing at the same time?
by smj-edison | 2025-05-21 22:46:00+00:00
Thanks for the warning :) I have responded to mast cell stabilizers and H1/H2 blockers, which is one reason I'm pursuing further treatment. I've also read Dr. Afrin's 70 page paper on MCAS diagnosis, so I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't MCAS. And after 6 years of pursuing and failing to find treatment, I've also got fairly good at avoiding quacks...

> There are also a lot of people who believe they have MCAS despite negative labs, non-traditional symptoms and a non-response to medication

Will agree on non-response, but the typical blood test (tryptase) is not accurate in many cases[2]: "For example, in contrast to proliferative mastocytosis which usually drives significantly elevated tryptase levels, relatively non-proliferative MCAS usually presents with normal tryptase levels;"

> When people start claiming they have a long list of hard to diagnose conditions (MCAS, Ehlers-Danlos, CCI, etc)

Yes and no. [1] is a recent review that finds that these things really are quite comorbid with ME/CFS. All of them at once? Probably not, but a couple is common.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.27.24317656v...

[2] https://www.mastcellaction.org/assets/_/2021/09/18/b74c0e90-...
by simpaticoder | 2025-05-21 22:46:12+00:00
>this Chrome graph with 140k nodes would also be too much

I've heard the rule of thumb from Tufte is that a visualization cannot have more than 1000 elements and still be useful. However, I'm not sure he said that and I cannot find supporting evidence...but it seems right to me.

Consider that mapping programs maintain the same level of information density at every level of zoom. I'm not sure, but this might be called "semantic zoom". I remember Microsoft doing a demo of Photosynth (now defunct) years ago which demonstrated impressive results.

One approach would be to play around with grouping nodes in useful ways, perhaps even dynamically according to user input, such that the resulting bundles represent ~100 raw nodes on average yielding ~1000 bundle nodes in the top-level visualization.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-21 22:46:43+00:00
I don't see how the "different data" aspect is evidenced. If the "modality" of the data is the same, we're choosing a highly specific subset of all possible data -- and, in practice, radically more narrow than just that. Any sufficiently capable LLM is going to have to be trained on a corpus not-so-dissimilar to all electronic texts which exist in the standard corpa used for LLM training.

The idea that a data set is "different" merely because its some subset of this maximal corpa is a difference without a distinction. What isnt being proposed is, say, that training just on all the works of scifi fiction lead to a zero-info translatable embedding space projectable into all the works of horror, and the like (or say that english-scifi can be bridged to japanese-scifi by way of a english-japanese-horror-corpus).

The very objective of creating LLMs with useful capabilities entials an extremely similar dataset starting point. We do not have so many petabytes of training data here that there is any meaningful sense in which OpenAI uses "only this discrete subspace" and perplextiy, "yet another". All useful LLMs sample roughly randomly across the maximal corpus that we have to hand.

Thus this hype around there being a platonic form of how word tokens ought be arranged seems wholly unevidenced. Reality has a "natural arrangement" -- this does not show that our highly lossy encoding of it in english has anything like a unique or natural correspondence. It has a circumstantial correspondance in "all recorded electronic texts" which are the basis for training all generally useful LLMs.
by okanat | 2025-05-21 22:48:35+00:00
We did have GUI installers in 2005. At least SUSE did. Linux hasn't made much significant changes to its core architecture. There are better implementations for many things like Pulseaudio and Pipewire or Wayland compositors are a bit more streamlined than X11.

The core issues existed in 2005 still exist in exact form: how do you make money for the software devs on Linux, how to bring good closed-source software support for decades. If Linux cannot solve those two problems, it will not replace Windows. I think, without changing the software architecture to look more Windows-like, the latter problem cannot be feasibly solved.
by evil-olive | 2025-05-21 22:49:20+00:00
> Segregation was an invention of the state. In northern states where it was not the law of the land people freely mixed or didn’t in some cases. People in New York in 1950 were no less racist, they just didn’t have legally mandated segregation.

you are choosing to define segregation very narrowly - as in a government law requiring individuals to be segregated (attend separate schools, or use separate bathrooms, etc)

that is an absurd definition to use in this context, because the original example from Friedman's quote is a different type of segregation - a business owner hanging out a sign that says "we're hiring, but only white people".

redlining [0] created segregated neighborhoods, but not via government mandate, just from banks and mortgage lenders "voluntarily" deciding that certain neighborhoods should be whites-only. there were also housing covenants [1, 2] that enforced segregation via contract law.

if your definition of segregation does not include those practices, your definition is worthless.

0: https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2015/10/history_of_red...

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/racism-home-de...

2: https://archive.is/T4eHk
by xp84 | 2025-05-21 22:50:05+00:00
What’s a “moon” versus a “planet”? Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not?

We already have the word "satellite" for "things that go around other things" right? I think "moon" is just "satellite of a planet" for convenience in discussing that subset.

> Why is having a lot of planets a problem in the first place?

I think keeping the number manageable is explicitly something we keep around to help kids grasp the main entities in the solar system. If we just said "there are 235 planets" it would be silly to try to teach them all, so we'd probably just settle for "The top 10 biggest planets" or something. Having a definition instead of a number to bound the set isn't much less arbitrary than teaching the "top 10," but since the long tail clearly starts after #8, "Top 8" would be the only guaranteed stable set to give special treatment to, which is what we've arrived at with the official definition.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-21 22:50:16+00:00
https://theicct.org/publication/ze-mhdv-market-china-2024-ma...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/half-chinas-heavy-tr...

https://electrek.co/2025/05/18/autonomous-electric-haul-truc...

I cannot overstate how much battery manufacturing capacity China is building.

https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
by duxup | 2025-05-21 22:50:52+00:00
> Trump's executive orders appear to support CREW's argument by suggesting "that USDS is exercising substantial independent authority," Cooper wrote. "As the Court already noted, the executive order establishing USDS 'to implement the President's DOGE Agenda' appears to give USDS the authority to carry out that agenda, 'not just to advise the President in doing so.'"

The whole administration is often inconsistent in even saying who is doing what. Dodge does something, Trump says Dodge did it, a department head says they don’t know, and they tell the court something else….
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-21 22:51:27+00:00
Look, this is prima facie a scandal, but I can assure you that the insurance carrier is dealing with a real issue.

Basically the road to hospitalization is paved with Vaseline and gingerbread cookies. In my experience, every effort is made at every level to unfailingly recommend a hospital visit at every opportune moment, regardless of the underlying medical necessities.

Surprisingly some of the most neutral situations I've encountered are 9-1-1 calls to my home. Being conscious and responsive, the EMTs will determine I'm stable, and then the $64,000 question: "Do You Want To Go To The Hospital?" and all you need to say is "no".

Once I visited a mini-clinic in a pharmacy. Not Urgent Care, no emergent condition, just a clinic visit with a nurse to check my BP. After reading my BP the nurse informed me she was duty-bound to contact 9-1-1. No fewer than seven extremely buff and very male EMTs poured into the tiny exam room and very insistently tried to induce me to go to the hospital with them. I became obstinate and told them that they were the only cause of my stress at that point. They finally dialed the attending physician and made me listen to him read off all my risk factors before they relented.

I've been at Urgent Care telemedicine visits and if I admit to the wrong symptom they will immediately shut down the call and refer me directly to E.R.

I was once signing admission papers to a BH hospital. I was conscious and responsive and arguably quite sane. The papers had a series of agreements which included one blanket consent to transfer me to any other facility they pleased. The ensuing argument and the occurrences within the BH facility led me to believe that this is a cash-cow kickback arrangement for them to funnel mentally ill patients into the "real" physical hospital with flimsy pretenses. Every medical-based exam I received seemed oriented to finding a reason to send me out there, but they would've discovered that I never granted them the consent to do so.

Often, I would say that LTC and palliative care facilities may not have staff equipped to determine necessity for going to the hospital. If they have an issue with a resident and they don't know what it is, or they're feeling over their head, they're going to just punt to 9-1-1 and let the hospital figure it out on their end, and you can be sure the hospital can find stuff in a patient population like that.

Every time I read about someone lamenting how medical "care" was denied by insurance, I simply consider how many medically unnecessary propositions have been placed before me, and I needed to be the voice of reason, to shut those down, before I was exploited and viewed as a cash cow to slip claims past the insurance company.