MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dave_Rosenthal | 2025-05-08 00:32:36+00:00
FoundationDB's original promise was to combine a distributed storage engine with stateless layers on top to expose a variety of useful data structures (including SQL). The company was acquired before it could release the layers part of that equation. Apple open-sourced the core storage engine a few years later so FDB has kind of had a second life since then.

In that second life, the vast majority of the powerful databases around the industry built on FoundationDB have been built by companies making their own custom layers that are not public. This release is cool because it's a rare case that a company that has built a non-trivial layer on top of FDB is letting that source code be seen.

The group to which the FoundationDB storage engine itself appeals is fairly narrow--you have to want to go deep enough to build your own database/datastore, but not so deep to want to start from scratch. But, for this group, there is still nothing like FoundationDB in the industry--a distributed ACID KV store of extreme performance and robustness. So, yes, it's still the hotness in that sense. (As others have mentioned, see e.g. Deepseek's recent reveal of their 3FS distributed filesystem which relies on FDB.)
by cgriswald | 2025-05-08 00:33:33+00:00
> since switching won't get them any better service

It will, but as you note it will cost more.

As someone who has extensive experience with many vets due to rescuing and fostering with multiple orgs and having animals of my own, I'll take the local firms any day of the week. Although there are some bad ones, and although it can be hard to get your foot in the door, local vets as a whole offer better availability, a more timely experience, a lack of upselling, someone at the front desk, and generally more competent vets.

Experiences I've had with the other places make it very clear they're paying their vets bottom dollar, want to extract every one of my dollars possible, don't care how much of my time they waste doing it. Strangely, although they always want me to review my experiences, they never seem to take the criticism to heart.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-08 00:33:56+00:00
From section 1 of the GPLv3:

"The 'Corresponding Source' for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work."

The LGPL refers to the GPL by reference. I don't think the intent is to recursively require the source code of the entire universe. But the definition of "System Libraries" is somewhat vague, and the undefined term "general-purpose tools" is even vaguer. Would, say, MSVC be a "general-purpose tool", even though it arguably isn't a "generally-available free program"? (And which "free" are they using here?) I can see why many legal teams would be wary, at least.
by jjk166 | 2025-05-08 00:34:05+00:00
It would likely be better to describe that as an observation than a communication.

Even if someone were deliberately trying to convey they were bored via finger drumming, that communication only works in a social framework where we've mutually established a meaning to that behavior. If an alien were finger drumming on a table that would not necessarily indicate they were bored nonetheless that they wanted to convey that they were bored.
by anarazel | 2025-05-08 00:34:13+00:00
It turns out to be the other way round, curiously. The bigger the reads (i.e. how much to read in one syscall) and the bigger the target area of the reads (how long before a target memory location is reused), the bigger the overhead of SMAP gets.

If interesting I can dig up the reproducer I had at some point.
by globalnode | 2025-05-08 00:34:50+00:00
How can a glorified NLP app be equated with being the backbone of economic development and a path to AGI ? So many people have been fooled by marketing.

Honestly though, we have a much bigger issue with climate change in the medium to long run and it doesn't really matter what our governments and companies do with stats and spyware. If anyone thinks we can stop and deal with the climate when it becomes a bigger problem, just take a look at our track record so far.

(only mentioning climate change to offer perspective)
by wolrah | 2025-05-08 00:34:51+00:00
> it's most commonly activated by moving a sort of "stick" situated between the driver and passenger seat

It's not even specific to the ones with the stick. I happen to enjoy and prefer vehicles with three pedals, but I can say from personal experience that a Ford AODE, 4R70W, or 4R100 will hit hard enough to scare passengers when you drop a gear at highway speed.

A Chrysler 45RFE on the other hand will make a lot more noise but basically no braking effort when you downshift.
by EnPissant | 2025-05-08 00:37:31+00:00
Samsung acquired Harman Audio some years ago. Harman owns several well-known brands like JBL, Infinity, and Revel. They've invested billions in audio R&D, and Samsung has clearly benefited from that. Their soundbars now exceed the sound quality of Sonos systems that cost twice as much (or three times as much during sales).

Denon and Marantz are arguably the best AVR manufacturers. It’ll be interesting to see what Samsung does with them. The home theater market is pretty outdated compared to other areas of audio. Car audio, soundbars, and professional systems mostly use active speakers and tightly integrated setups. Meanwhile, home theater is still stuck with passive speakers and a component-based approach.

While some might see this as a monopoly concern, there's a chance Samsung could use its combined brands to modernize home audio. Imagine a fully wireless, all-in-one home theater system with active speakers and centralized room correction. That could be a real step forward.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-08 00:38:08+00:00
If you're deferring to the favors of a figurehead rather than the law, you would be much better off in Dubai. Everyone knows the game there, it is pure dictatorship, but the taxes are extraordinarily low, banking and KYC/AML is laissez faire, and if you're going to depend on personal connections to a leader rather than immigration law then you may as well go all in and get the better end of the deal.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-08 00:38:15+00:00
SEAD followed its Mississippi tests [on authenticity of 'Gulf caught'] with similar ones across the Southeast, including in Galveston and Kemah, Texas (59 percent fraud rate, according to a company release), Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Fla. (96 percent), and Savannah, Ga. (77 percent).

Article links to press releases for each area but the PR doesn't seem to add anything meaningful to the article - like which restaurants were/were not defrauding the public
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-05-08 00:38:34+00:00
The AIs have a perfect win rate against me when I cheat and compose my answers with ai- I think the app is broken, I’d guess some sort of accidental data leak. we’ve seen this kind of whoopsie on hacker news before: famously, an ai that was supposed to read your mind by predicting your next rock paper scissors move was cheating by training on a set including the move you just submitted, then “predicting” that move
by thwarted | 2025-05-08 00:39:52+00:00
> if someone is a PostHog customer they probably won't be using Ahref web analytics

It's (un)surprisingly common to end up with multiple website analytics products on the same site; marketing wants these two, another department wants another. When I had ghostery show the list of things it was blocking I often saw multiple, overlapping-feature-set analytics integrations being blocked on the same site.
by vkou | 2025-05-08 00:40:29+00:00
That theory is correct for people whom you get the choice to interact with once or twice with in your life, like realtors and funeral home directors or picking your thesis advisor, but really falls apart for anyone who has a regular customer base of people who come back for repeat service.

If my dentist starts charging me double and starts treating me like shit, I really couldn't care less about the practice's ownership structure, or how clean and well-structured, and unit-tested the code that runs on his computer is, If I have a choice, I'll look somewhere else. If I don't have a choice, I'll bitch, but keep going to him.

At no point will I care whether or not the office is PE-owned. It's utterly irrelevant to me.
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-08 00:41:01+00:00
this is "Kool-aid" from the supply side of LLMs for coding IMO. Plenty of people are plenty upset about the capture of code at Github corral, fed into BigCorp$ training systems.

parent statement reminds me of smug French in a castle north of London circa 1200, with furious locals standing outside the gates, dressed in rags with farm tools as weapons. One well-equipped tower guard says to another "no one is seriously disputing the administration of these lands"
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-08 00:41:50+00:00
CFAA is criminal law with specific parameters. the accused must have attempted or conspired to attempt to bypass a restricted system. Demonstrating how to steal money from a bank vault for example is not a crime, neither is teaching others how to do so for a fee or providing them with tools that can aid them in that endeavor. Especially when the other party is a government, it is reasonable to assume they will operate within the bounds of their own law. Red teamers, pentesters, security researchers, security training providers couldn't exist if the CFAA prohibited this. It isn't like their customers come to them and ask "hey, we're gonna spy on a journalist, can we buy pegasus". At the very least, it needs to be established that it is reasonable to presume pegasus will be used to break a law, it could be used for lawful reasons (which exist) and I'm sure they'll make their clients sign waivers to protect themselves fro such presumption.

Anonymity isn't a crime (at least not yet), and it alone cannot be used to presume criminal intent. It isn't a crime to offer services anonymously. Perhaps not paying your taxes (if income could be proven) is something they can go after (and fail).

The civil system can be used, if it is the government that is the plaintiff. Random companies suing is not enforcement since companies act in their interest, not in the interest of public policy and regulation. Waiting for events that align with corporate interests is not regulation, it is coincidence.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-08 00:43:50+00:00
100%.

"Smaht"[1] people learn to game the system and scam others for momentary benefit.

The worse side that is that we're all guilty of that system, to some degree, even if only by enabling it.

I'm also 100% sure that this is what drives civilizations to the ground.

1. Smaht is a term I use to describe people who think they're smart but they're actually extremely stupid. A lot of smaht people have degrees and diplomas which further fuels their delusion of intelligence.
by cma | 2025-05-08 00:44:12+00:00
With open router, no matter what happens you won't spend more than you deposited or owe more. It's much safer.

> This is about scalability and performance. Billing for as many requests per second as a cloud provider gets can't be done live, without significant performance and reliability degradation.

I don't buy this, for LLMs specifically. For lots of things a cloud provider gives, things might be aggregated and batched before showing up, but there is no reason your LLM spend should take nearly as long as bank system clearing to show. Especially an estimate, which it already gets disclaimed as.

There are companies that will monitor your cloud spend much faster pretty cheaply, and they are essentially having to reimplement the whole thing from the outside and keep up with Google's pricing changes through a shadow recreation of the billing system.

And open router is able to reflect your spend to you immediately, or couldn't implement their cap. If they can do it why can't Google, at least for the broad number of customers without custom price agreements.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-08 00:44:16+00:00
I have been developing a Linux desktop using "off the shelf" (Kubuntu) for "enterprise" use, for some years now.

By the word enterprise I actually mean "I've called your bluff"!

In the "enterprise" world you need to do Secure Boot, AV, and encrypted at rest. Debian and Ubuntu int al can do SB. The tricky one for Linux is AV. I deploy ESET, which only supports Debian/Mint/Ubuntu.

AD (LDAP n Kerberos) for auth via Winbind or SSSD etc is an easy given but the equivalent of drive mapping is a bit harder. Especially when VPNs are in use. Windows will keep on trying but the Unix/Linux mounting thing isn't quite so ... forgiving. Neither are perfect but I have no idea on how to even start on a discussion about something that might be called ephemeral mounts.
by const_cast | 2025-05-08 00:44:17+00:00
Because as I’ve stated, it only hurts the worker. You’re not materially improving their lives, you’re literally doing the opposite.

Maybe the hope is that if you kick people already down they’ll “learn a lesson” and then change their behavior? Which, I don’t know, maybe. But it seems to me it’s more likely they just continue doing what they’re doing but now worse.

And, by the way, I’m using objectively correctly.

If you don’t tip them, the worker makes less money on that order. Is less money for workers a better or worse outcome? It’s an incredibly simply line of logic. And, for the record, you haven’t even attempted to refute it. You haven’t said why not tipping is good. So… I’m inclined to believe I’m right and you know it. Maybe there’s some cognitive dissonance there where you want to simultaneously be pro-labor and pay labor less.

Tipping isn’t a culture. Well, it is, but because we allow it to be via legislation. Of course companies enforce and employ tipping - it’s a win for them. You can’t dismantle the culture without addressing the root cause. It’s like proclaiming you’re gonna solve a poverty culture by driving around in a Range Rover. Yeah… that doesn’t fix anything.

You want to believe you’re doing your part by doing nothing at all. It’s a nice thought and I’m sure comforting, but it’s not real. If you want tips to stop, then force employers to pay living wages and prevent them from gathering tips. There, problem solved.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-05-08 00:46:09+00:00
I tested positive for Lyme once because it was one of those "first line" inaccurate tests that can get thrown off by the presence of unrelated inflammation. I knew it was a false positive because I'd never stepped foot in territory with Lyme-carrying ticks, but a doctor insisted on testing me anyway, and then the false positive sent me to an infectious disease specialist who did a more reliable test and concluded that the first one was wrong.

Had I been less skeptical, it would've been very easy to conclude that I had "chronic Lyme". Thankfully I knew better than to take the first test at face value and kept pushing for answers to find out what was behind the results-warping inflammation. But there have to be too many people out there with very real symptoms and problems who are misled into clinging to bullshit answers.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-05-08 00:46:10+00:00
Glad to see folks studying this. I had a friend who loved to gloat and since he always won, it became tiresome. I certainly have my own issues to work out. Yet there is something about bragging and celebrating a win that can feel like salt in the wound.

Once games moved online behaviors like tea-bagging and racist rants really ruined it for me. With cheating and grieving I've just given up on all PvP games, unless I know the other players.
by p_ing | 2025-05-08 00:49:02+00:00
Yes, every security mechanism should be reviewed to validate it is applicable, i.e. I had a vulnerable version of node running but I wasn't using the particular aspect of node so it was a non-issue (and amazingly, IT sec agreed!).

But in the case of io_uring, it was outright bypassing other security layers. And while we all like to think we're running trusted services/code, we have to think about supply-chain attacks that may surprise us, or zero days, etc.
by charles_irl | 2025-05-08 00:49:11+00:00
Hmm, hard to say!

In the few months since I originally wrote this, I've come to an even greater appreciation of just how hard it is to maximize utilization of the Tensor Cores. It's a lot more than just kernel parameter tuning and using a few parallel programming tricks (parallel reduce, unrolling). It really borks your CUDA code -- you need warp specialization, you need to break warp uniformity, you need to work with explicit asynchrony. Hoping to write about this for the Modal blog/GPU Glossary soon!

I also spent a bit of time working with ncu/"NSight Compute". I'd probably include a bit about it in the section on how to improve your MFU if I rewrote the article today. But tl;dr use the profiling tool, Luke! And a good way to learn is to watch NVIDIA's GTC talks.

That said, I've also noticed even more cases where GPU kernel utilization is well below target. I think (and Horace He has argued) that that comes in part from optimized GEMMs running so fast on Tensor Cores that host overhead becomes the bottleneck (classic Amdahl). This unfortunately means more host logic needs to be compiled -- either graph-compiled as in torch.compile or moved into a compiled language.
by simonw | 2025-05-08 00:49:14+00:00
From poking around in the source code I found this 282M SQLite database:

wget https://services.arcgis.com/xOi1kZaI0eWDREZv/arcgis/rest/services/NTAD_North_American_Roads/FeatureServer/replicafilescache/NTAD_North_American_Roads_3862439624850511818.geodatabase

I can't figure out how to read it though. I get this error:

Connection to NTAD_North_American_Roads_3862439624850511818.geodatabase failed check: no such module: VSRS

As far as I can tell VSRS is a proprietary Esri thing.
Ask HN: Where could I pilot test my mascot personalization AI?
by ucbear | 2025-05-08 00:49:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a student at UCB working on an AI tool that personalizes mascots (like sports team characters) into custom versions for individual users.

Unlike general-purpose AI, my system preserves consistency and strictly follows the original character’s design guidelines! though.. each character takes about 4 hours to set up.

I’d love to get your thoughts: - What kinds of use cases or industries might benefit from this tech? - Any suggestions on how to find good pilot test partners?

Thanks in advance for any advice!
by triceratops | 2025-05-08 00:50:17+00:00
If obesity is 100% self inflicted, the fast food, snack food, and ancillary advertising industries should pack up and go home. They obviously do nothing.

Instead we have a system where these companies are allowed, even encouraged to make food that's terrible for you taste amazing, and market the shit out of it to increase shareholder value. But when they succeed at their jobs it's because you, the individual, fucked up. Well which one is it? Both can't be true.
by soared | 2025-05-08 00:50:51+00:00
IMO that analysis is shortsighted when looking at other technologies. Peru’s government would grind to a halt with say, windows/osx, excel, chrome, email etc. They are all tools that enable work. I don’t see AI being categorically different.

In this hypothetical world where AI runs the treasury, is the US now in a massively better position to make treasury related decisions? Maybe? Does the US gov have a remote chance of abiding by these decisions? Etc.

I can see Peru being disadvantaged if they don’t use AI, but if they contract out and set up their own stuff that they didn’t actually build - how’s that really worse? I feel like they let the US spend hundreds of billions in development costs and can now reap the rewards.
by ivanbelenky | 2025-05-08 00:51:43+00:00
"This NTAD dataset is a work of the United States government as defined in 17 U.S.C. § 101 and as such are not protected by any U.S. copyrights. This work is available for unrestricted public use."

I based my work on this, maybe the link is out, thx for testing. The dataset has already been consumed and collapsed into a smaller graph representation.
by DangitBobby | 2025-05-08 00:52:04+00:00
I wish I could remember where I heard this, it's from some NPR podcast like Freakonimics or This American Life. Dentists would normally sell their private practice to an up-and-coming dentist that they know, but recent graduates are so mired in debt that they can't really afford the loan to buy a practice, so PE firms end up buying instead.

Edit:

> DUBNER: We did a series on private-equity consolidation in the pet-care industry, and we found a lot of problems there for employees and consumers. But we also learned something that seems to apply to a lot of the human healthcare industry. If you look at nursing homes, doctor’s offices, dentists offices, what we heard is that the founders of these offices and companies, when it’s time to retire, they might prefer to sell to one of their junior partners. That’s what often happened before private equity was around. But now those junior partners have so much debt from medical school or veterinary school or whatever that they can’t afford to buy the practice. So the only likely buyer is an outside investor like a private-equity firm. The P.E. firm is satisfying a real need there, but the resulting roll-ups or consolidations are often worse for existing employees and worse for consumers. Do you have any thoughts for how that might work differently?

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-biden-policy-that-trump...
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-05-08 00:53:53+00:00
See, you just don’t get it, we will only be free when we get rid of politicians and have referendums on all legislation.

But you can sell options on your family’s votes.

Once someone sells a vote, they are in vote debt, and can default by voting a different person than they agreed.

So now you have to have a credit rating, but for voters. Then you need to have Voter Default swaps, which can be Bundled into Voter Default Obligations, Of VDO’s. And then you can have Synthetic Voter Default Swaps and ahead of a major election you can do a Big Short.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-08 00:54:23+00:00
> It was killed by a shortage of pitches, kit and coaching, and by the rise of baseball, the great American pastime.

There is no need for a pitch or kit. Cricket is played in the richest of grounds and poorest of places all over India. Manytimes the bat, the ball and wickets are ‘created’ out of scrap! All you need is a passion and desire to play the sport.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-08 00:55:14+00:00
I failed a few FAANG interviews.

E5s at Facebook make around 200k a year in pure stock. Assuming it grows in value, do that for a decade and your at 2.5 million or so.

Even after the taxes, that's enough to retire overseas.

Now I'm old. It didn't happen so I'm content to write code for a middle class wage
by sien | 2025-05-08 00:57:14+00:00
As you say 'Uni' student are you in the UK or Australia ?

Also, do you do math courses ?

Are the math courses still based on 60% plus performance in exams ?

Are they far less impacted than other courses ?

It seems like one answer to the LLM thing is that all Uni grades become mostly dependent on exams written in person and that all essays and assignments are given a considerably lower weight.