MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hannob | 2025-05-23 11:58:35+00:00
> Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they > don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.

Honest question:

* Do you understand OS syscalls in detail?

* Do you understand how your BIOS initializes your hardware?

* Do you understand how modern filesystems work?

* Do you understand the finer details of HTTP or TCP?

Because... I don't. But I know enough about them that I'm quite convinced each of them is a lot more difficult to understand than ACME. And all of them and a lot more stuff are required if you want to run a web server.
by ordu | 2025-05-23 11:58:46+00:00
> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results

I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.

Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.

OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
by Bender | 2025-05-23 12:00:39+00:00
That annoyed me as well given the wording on the ZeroSSL site suggested one has to create an account which is not true. I had hit an error using DNS-01 at the time. They have an entirely different page for ACME clients but it is not or was not linked from anywhere on the main page.

If anyone else ran into that it's just a matter of adding

--server letsencrypt
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-23 12:01:04+00:00
The trouble understanding isn't the issue - the lack of curiosity is. They're English majors, on an education level whose purpose is to teach you how to learn. They did not learn or wante to learn, they guessed.

Ignorance is fine, unwillingness to admit you don't know and lack the will to learn is not IMO.
by d--b | 2025-05-23 12:01:33+00:00
Well well well.

The donut vs donut hole debate is a trap, though, that even the most brilliant breakfast-savvy mathematician fall into.

Truth is, the original flat flakes had infinitely more glaze than either the donut hole or the donut, mathematically speaking.

But because Kelloggs compared the donut hole to the donut, people are easily tricked into settling for the most optimal of these two shapes, while completely ignoring that either shape is a massive step backward for any cereal lover out there.

This is blatant case of enshittification, Kellogg's. It's not Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat.
by noir_lord | 2025-05-23 12:01:39+00:00
I knew all three but I had some advantages - English is my first language, I'm British and mire (Quagmire is still used to describe a bad situation that's hard to escape from as well as it's original meaning - so not a huge leap to what mire is) and blinkers (idiomatically - "he had his blinkers on" is still used for example) are still in use (I wouldn't say common use but not extinct either) and Michaelmas comes from liking history and looking up the term at some point in the last 30 odd years.
by gjvc | 2025-05-23 12:02:22+00:00
this sort of thing https://www.oracle.com/uk/autonomous-database/what-is-autono... ?

"An autonomous database is a cloud database that uses machine learning to automate database tuning, security, backups, updates, and other routine management tasks traditionally performed by DBAs. Unlike a conventional database, an autonomous database performs all these tasks and more without human intervention."
by vhantz | 2025-05-23 12:02:54+00:00
> why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way chromium is?

Ease of integration. It's impossible to integrate Firefox compared to chromium. Unless this is solved, Firefox will die. The hope is new engines like Servo (maybe ladybird), where they are actually putting time and resources to make it easy to integrate. I'll never switch to chromiumia, but as soon as one of those new engines is mature enough, I'm definitely dropping Firefox.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-05-23 12:02:56+00:00
it's interesting to try to guess *how* the mistakes got made as they are

e.g. in "as if ... , and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" that subject saw the comma as the end of hypothetical - and meeting a dinosaur isn't that strange in our contemporary storytelling. "This is too strange" failsafe has disappeared?

"addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" - I have no idea if subject didn't know what advocate is, but advocate being an animal wouldn't be strange nowadays (in fantasy).

"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall" - I managed to misread this sentence twice: first with "Michaelmas' term" (as in someone's term in power) and then "inner hall". Had I been the one explaining, I'd say "I have no idea who these 2 are, but I'll wait later in the text to find out that mystery"... Point against me, I guess?

Also, it's a bit sad that "-saurus" doesn't get recognized as dinosaur anymore :(

---

but my personal, internal, experience - is that I would skip (at least in my mind) the text that was displayed in here. I'd want to find who is the hero, and what's the plot about - letting the "it was muddy, but in 1000 words" pass me by
by rollcat | 2025-05-23 12:03:38+00:00
I like it that Apple's Calendar app now includes scheduled TODOs from Reminders.

I love checklists (early adopter and fan of Trello; sadly it's well past its peak), so Reminders is now a natural way to organise them. I can add a due date (and optionally, time), when I will get a notification. Overdue reminders still show up in the "today" view.

So for things like "lunch with a friend", I just set due date to whenever I should follow up, postpone until actually scheduled, and it continues to show up both in my reminders and in the calendar. It works for me.

As for the more free-form stuff, I keep a journal in Notes. I have a shortcut that looks for today's note in the "journal" folder, and if none is found, creates it; then it inserts the current timestamp. I can just start writing whatever comes to my mind.

Since the journal is already organised by date, I can always look back. I only wish I could run the shortcut straight from the Notes app.
by card_zero | 2025-05-23 12:05:22+00:00
Hmm, no. There's a hazard of false positives here (which is why I had mistakes to fix previously). It's not all about the number 3; you don't want to multiply columns by 3², 3¹, 3⁰. Instead you want the remainder of the division of (ten to the column number) by seven (or whatever divisor you're checking).

That's a repeating pattern. In the case of 3 the pattern has length 1, and it goes (1, 1, 1, ...). In the case of 7 the pattern has length 6, and it goes (1, 3, 2, 6, 4, 5), starting at the units column. If that looks a bit pseudorandom, there's a good reason, it's vaguely similar to an old-fashioned PRNG.

(The pattern starts again with 1 in the millions column, because 142857 * 7 = 999999. Hence 2 million divided by 7 has remainder 2, 3 million divided by 7 has remainder 3, and so on.)

So 371 should be understood as 3*2 + 7*3 + 1*1, which is 28.

Or as another example, 6993 => 6*6 + 9*2 + 9*3 + 3*1, which is 84.
by andy_ppp | 2025-05-23 12:06:34+00:00
Sure, I understand what the terminology means but I don't believe we get to AGI without some ability to translate the learning of say using a mouse to using a trackpad in a simple way. Humans make these translations all the while, you know how to use a new room and the items in it automatically but I personally see the systems we have built are currently very brittle when they see new environments because they can't simplify everything to its fundamentals and then extrapolate back to more complex tasks. You could train a human on using an Android phone and give them an iPhone and they would do pretty well, if you did this with modern machine learning systems you will get an extremely high error rate. Or say you train an model on how to use a sword, I'm not convinced it would know how to use and ax or pair of crutches as a weapon.

Maybe it will turn out to simply be enough artificial neurons and everything works. But I don't believe that.
by arp242 | 2025-05-23 12:09:07+00:00
I replaced it with a better-known dinosaur because Megalosaurus is not widely known today. I had to do a quick check to verify it actually is a dinosaur.

Looking a bit more, it seems that in 1800s there was the (mistaken) belief that Megalosaurus was amphibian. I thought it was a bit odd to reference a dinosaur there, but it makes more sense now. So to properly understand that reference you need to know about the state of dinosaur knowledge in the 1840s.
by noir_lord | 2025-05-23 12:09:48+00:00
They have a few of them in very cold climates as well, schools, shops, medical clinics and housing all in one building.

For the simple practical reason of going outside is somewhere between deeply unpleasant and actually dangerous.

Whittier, Alaska is a good example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naPguX84Amg
by liampulles | 2025-05-23 12:09:55+00:00
I appreciate the author calling this stuff out. The increasing complexity of the protocols that the web is built on is not a problem for developers who simply need to find a tool or client to use the protocol, but it is a kind of regulatory capture that ensures only established players will be the ones able to meet the spec required to run the internet.

I know ACME alone is not insurmountably complex, but it is another brick in the wall.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-23 12:09:58+00:00
One of the things this gestures at might as well get a brief refresher here:

Subject Alternative Name (SAN) is not an alternative in the sense that it's an alias, SANs exist because the X.509 certificate standard is, as its name might suggest, intended for the X.500 directory system, a system from the 20th century which was never actually deployed. Mozilla (back then the Netscape Corporation) didn't like re-inventing wheels and this standard for certificates already existed so they used it in their new "Secure Sockets" technology but it has no Internet names so at first they just put names in plain text. However, X.500 was intended to be infinitely extensible, so we can just invent an alternative naming scheme, and that's what the SANs are, which is why they're mandatory for certificates in the Web PKI today - these are the Internet's names for things, so they're mandatory when talking about the Internet, they're described in detail in PKIX, the IETF document standardising the use of X.500 for the Internet.

There are several types of name we can express as SANs but in a certificate the two you'll commonly see are dnsName - the same ASCII names you'd see in URLs like "news.ycombinator.com" or "www.google.com" and ipAddress - a 32-bit integer typically spelled as four dotted decimals 10.20.30.40 [yes or an IPv6 128-bit integer will work here, don't worry]

Because the SANs aren't just free text a machine can reliably parse them which would doubtless meet Rachel's approval. The browser can mindlessly compare the bytes in the certificate "news.ycombinator.com" with the bytes in the actual DNS name it looked up "news.ycombinator.com" and those match so this cert is for this site.

With free text in a CN field like a 1990s SSL certificate (or, sadly, many certificates well into the 2010s because it was difficult to get issuers to comply properly with the rules and stop spewing nonsense into CN) it's entirely possible to see a certificate for " 10.200.300.400" which well, what's that for? Is that leading space significant? Is that an IP address? But those numbers don't even fit in one byte each I hope our parser copes!
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-05-23 12:10:28+00:00
That's pretty much why it failed: https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/

> This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path.
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-23 12:10:29+00:00
... Unless they do bring more convenience. A popular example are smartwatches. People have a perfectly good clock, stopwatch, sleep surveillance device on their phone, and still pay 300-900 dollars for an AppleWatch.

Why? Because looking at your wrist is much more efficient and fast than getting your phone out of the pocket.

A phone-connected 'AI necklace' to act as a trigger and communication device to an AI interface ( maybe even a small camera ) might be more convenient than fishing your phone out of your pocket as well.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-05-23 12:11:48+00:00
Side note but I wanted to build a cli program on flatpak and I kind of couldn't.

I have unfortunately not read the whole thing but I just want these two things:

better cli support

better permission support as I have had some issues with permissions. Currently using nix-shell as a sort of substitute against flatpak because I just want to use ephemeral environments without any permission issue or smth. Like I do nix-shell -p obs-studio and run obs and then close the shell and be peaceful as I rarely use obs for example and dependency hell. I may have wrote the exact same comment in the past but I want to use archlinux so much but nix-shell is way more comfortable to use on nix(I know its available on arch as well) and nix has the same name but arch might have different name so IDK.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 12:12:03+00:00
>> the Data Security Program establishes what are effectively export controls that prevent foreign adversaries, and those subject to their control, jurisdiction, ownership, and direction, from accessing U.S. government-related data and bulk genomic, geolocation, biometric, health, financial, and other sensitive personal data

> How do you think this could be related?

I didn't quote that when I said it may be related. I have some ideas of my own, but I just want to be clear so that I'm not being held to account for things I never said. How do you think it may be related?

People in other threads on this post were saying that Glitch was being used by bad actors, and if Glitch was aware of this or reasonably should be, then they would likely have issues with complying with audits for compliance with the new order, I would think.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-23 12:12:35+00:00
You're forgetting that a whole string of breakthroughs are all fairly recent (like in the last decade). Everyone, including the pro's, is treading new ground.

In that context anyone can make progress in the field, as long as they understand what they're dealing with.

Better regard mr. Carmack as an X factor. Maybe the experts will leave him in the dust. Or maybe he'll come up with something that none of the experts cared to look into.
by jfim | 2025-05-23 12:12:38+00:00
I'm pretty perplexed as well. They mention that they're not sharding PostgreSQL, without mentioning why in the article, but isn't that an obvious issue to many of their scaling problems?

I don't really see what it is that they're doing that requires a single master database, it seems that sharding on a per user basis would make things way easier for them.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-05-23 12:12:49+00:00
> the standard scientific protocol tells us to conclude that we have no “significant” evidence that the dice are biased. (Notice that this is subtly different from having evidence that the dice are not biased! Confusing these two statements is a common mistake, even for trained phd scientists, and especially for medical doctors.)

but shouldn't it be "no significant evidence that the dice aren't unbiased"? that's different from either
by arghwhat | 2025-05-23 12:12:54+00:00
> Edit: fundamentally, if hacker news has taught me anything, it's that "downvote = makes me feel bad and doesn't want to answer questions". The entire concept of democratic news aggregation was a lie.

Guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

That it feels bad to not win the popular vote does not make democracy a lie, and there's no surprise in not winning favor when blanket discarding the current topic and describing it as "hubris", while not adding any new or constructive information.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-23 12:13:28+00:00
Things change over time.

Part of not wanting to let go is the sunk cost fallacy. Part of it is being suspicious of being (more) dependent on someone else (than you are already dependent on a different someone else).

(As an aside, the n-gate guy who ranted against HTTPS in general and thought static content should just be HTTP also thought like that. Unfortunately, as I'm at a sketchy cafe using their wifi, his page currently says I should click here to enter my bank details, and I should download new cursors, and oddly doesn't include any of his own content at all. Bit weird, but of course I can trust he didn't modify his page, and it's just a silly unnecessary imposition on him that I would like him to use HTTPS)

Unfortunately for those rugged individuals, you're in a worldwide community of people who want themselves, and you, to be dependent on someone else. We're still going with "trust the CAs" as our security model. But with certificate transparency and mandatory stapling from multiple verifiers, we're going with "trust but verify the CAs".

Maximum acceptable durations for certificates are coming down, down, down. You have to get new ones sooner, sooner, sooner. This is to limit the harm a rogue CA or a naive mis-issuing CA can do, as CRLs just don't work.

The only way that can happen is with automation, and being required to prove you still own a domain and/or a web-server on that domain, to a CA, on a regular basis. No "deal with this once a year" anymore. That's gone and it's not coming back.

It's good to know the whole protocol, and yes certbot can be overbearing, but Debian's python3-certbot + python3-certbot-apache integrates perfectly with how Debian has set up apache2. It shouldn't be a hardship.

And if you don't like certbot, there are lots of other ACME clients.

And if you don't like Let's Encrypt, there are other entities offering certificates via the ACME protocol (YMMV, do you trust them enough to vouch for you?)
by pfdietz | 2025-05-23 12:14:29+00:00
According to the wikipedia page on ATP, the average ATP concentration in eukaryotic cells is 1 to 10 micromols per gram.

According to https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?s=n&v=2&id... a single mammalian cell has a mass of 3 to 4 nanograms.

Google AI tells me the average rate of ATP formation in a mammalian cell is around 10 million molecules per second.

The ratio here ranges from 3 to 40 minutes.

I imagine it varies greatly depending on cell type.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-23 12:14:30+00:00
Imagine public schools in San Francisco were to offer parents a deal: we'll increase the median student's rate of academic progress by 30%, but we'll also cut school hours by 30%.

Do you think people would vote overwhelmingly for that deal?

My suspicion is that they would not. For politicians, 'providing childcare' and 'providing employment for unionized government employees' are both more important than student learning.
by dagw | 2025-05-23 12:14:35+00:00
Would you rather hire an English major who graduated from one of these two colleges, or a high school graduate with a good SAT score?

Depends on what my incentives are on the hiring end. Many jobs default to requiring a college degree, and hiring someone without one would require a lot of extra work on my end. Also hiring a high school grad over a college grad would involve me putting my reputation on the line by implicitly vouching for them. If the high school kid can't do the job I will get blamed for the bad hire since I broke the procedures put in place to prevent such a thing from happening. I the college graduate sucks at the job, well these things happen, you did what you could.
by diggan | 2025-05-23 12:14:55+00:00
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.

The older posts on the same website provided a bit more context for me to understand today's post better:

- "Why I still have an old-school cert on my https site" - January 3, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/

- "Another look at the steps for issuing a cert" - January 4, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/04/cert/
by gosub100 | 2025-05-23 12:15:48+00:00
> attempt to cut off democracy

You must have misspelled government waste. All of this was exposed by doge and trump and the first thing you did was start minimizing the damage, saying we waste way more in other places, and telling me that the world will end if these lazy wasteful socialist institutions get their fat lips yanked off the teat. I didn't believe your lies then and no matter how much you squeal I don't believe them now. Your whole party has perfected it's use of language control, redefining words, and catastrophizing everything. These aren't MSM viewers in here, you're not fooling anyone. Fix your party by delivering social improvements not just fantasizing and warning about the "end of democracy", and minimizing waste. Fear mongering is not helping your situation if you have any hope of your candidates ever winning again.
by curt15 | 2025-05-23 12:15:51+00:00
> distros should package for themselves. You just distribute your sources.

Is Devault basically saying that the application developer should just throw their source code over the wall and hope that other parties notice and figure out how to build it correctly? I would find that model of software distribution unsatisfying as a developer because merely distributing a source tarball and leaving the rest to middlemen makes it difficult for me to predict how my users will experience the final product. Even if my product is fully open source and free to fork, it's my reputation on the line when things don't work as intended. I would prefer to establish a more direct relationship with my users; to personally build and test my software in all environments that I support; and to hear directly from users whenever they experience problems.
by maest | 2025-05-23 12:16:07+00:00
"Harvard's not a real school, therefore these actions are justified"

Even if you were right about Harvard not being a real school (which is a strange thing to claim), your conclusion still doesn't follow.

Separately, is there a name for this debating technique? I would like to call it "baiting the assertion".

You claim A => B where, in fact, A does not imply B. To distract attention from the faulty logic, however, you pick a highly divisive assertion A. That makes people argue about whether A is correct, instead on focusing on the faulty implication.

Here's an example: "Ukraine provoked Russia therefore we should send 0 aid to Ukraine"

(I have seen this argument both in the US and non-US discourses.)

When this argument is presented, people feel compelled to argue whether Ukraine did or did not provoke Russia. However, this hides the fact that _even if Ukraine did provoke Russia_, if might still make sense to provide aid: - due to humanitarian concerns - because you think the Russian response (even if provoked) is not commensurate - because you think the EU should present a united front - etc

However, saying things like "even if you are right <rest of argument>" is a difficult thing to do when A is a very divisive (or glaringly incorrect) statement, which is why this is a common troll argument.