MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eduard | 2025-06-19 15:48:40+00:00
I'm currently signed up to ten or so different source code web services hosting FLOSS (e.g. KDE, FreeDesktop, Debian each have their own instances).

Attrition has held me back to participate in discussions or reporting issues. For that you need an account, and some source code web services make 2FA mandatory, and often I need to reauthenticate and go through that flow. If I'm exhausted, my brain makes the decision that it's not worth the effort.

A couple of other other reasons come to mind as well: setting up your account properly (adding SSH public key), setting up yet another entry in one's own password manager, acknowledging that their will be additional mails going to my mailbox (transactional e-mails, maybe important informational e-mails such as data leaks, TOS changes, etc.).
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-06-19 15:48:56+00:00
Your last example would be IMHO the most egregious example of current over-valuation.

This madman's extraterrestrial dream™[0] will do more harm than not.

[0] Nightmare - ¡yay let's destroy Earth to build a dependant-upon-Earth colony! /s

Also: if you want to drive a vehicle that actually saves the planet, buy a hybrid (plug-in, or not).
by jmward01 | 2025-06-19 15:49:31+00:00
The highs and lows of SpaceX have been interesting to watch. I have to wonder though if, at least partially, some of their recent troubles are partially because people are loosing passion for their mission. You can definitely see it in the reporting, and some of the comments here, that there is less willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt and while that is far from a technical measure, passion is a big part of what makes a team get through things and continue to make progress. I know for my own part there was a time where I was looking for positions at SpaceX purely because I wanted to be apart of what was going on but now you couldn't pay be enough to join them. If your key people start thinking of things as just a job instead of a world changing opportunity then your rapid iteration cycle can go from 'this is brilliant and gets things done fast so I better try harder' to 'this is stupid and I am putting in my minimum hours to get paid'.
by hiddencost | 2025-06-19 15:50:11+00:00
They're behind Anthropic and were behind openai being a nonprofit. They're behind the friendly AI movement and effective altruism.

They're responsible for funneling huge amounts of funding away from domain experts (effective altruism in practice means "Oxford math PhD writes a book report about a social sciences problem they've only read about and then defunds all the NGOs").

They're responsible for moving all the AI safety funding away from disparate impact measures to "save us from skynet" fantasies.
Ask HN: What do you think about a Slack alternative
by alexpham14 | 2025-06-19 15:50:19+00:00
I am getting ready to launch a product that lets people chat in groups and focuses on work and workspace collaboration.Like Slack and Discord, the pre-preview version will not have all the features they do. For now, it will only have text chat. The difference is that it costs less and makes the most of AI's presence and support in the workflow. I’m a fan of Slack, but honestly, its pricing is a barrier for me, and I believe it’s the same for any team.

I know it’s not something new, but is this a good idea, and does the community also care about it and want to see it? I would appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-19 15:50:19+00:00
Linux distros could work to create an API for anticheat to use that could verify their program's integrity, then work to have various anticheat to integrate it. This would avoid the issue of Linux not having a stable ABI for kernel drivers. For example Vanguard anticheat doesn't need to be a kernel driver since macos has good enough protection. If Linux could become competitive on security they wouldn't need kernel mode anticheat either.

I'm not holding my breath for this to happen though.
by jonfw | 2025-06-19 15:50:52+00:00
Two negatives that are actively made worse by the the fact that there are a variety of distros-

1. Nothing is googleable. People have to google how to do things like adjust the layout of external monitors, and it's significantly harder to do that on linux.

2. There are a lot of different ways to install applications, and different options are available depending on which distro or application you're targeting
by iNic | 2025-06-19 15:51:00+00:00
Every community has a long list of etiquettes, rules and shared knowledge that is assumed and generally not spelled out explicitly. One of the core assumptions of the rationalist community is that every statement has uncertainty unless you explicitly spell out that you are certain! This came about as a matter of practicality, as it would be inconvenient to preempt every other sentence with "I'm uncertain about this". Many discussions you will see have the flavor of "strong opinions, lightly held" for this reason.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-19 15:51:44+00:00
> I definitely want my production HA databases to fsync every write.

I didn't! Our business DR plan only called for us to restore to an older version with short downtime, so fsync on every write on every node was a reduction in performance for no actual business purpose or benefit. IIRC we modified our database to run off ramdisk and snapshot every few minutes which ran way better and had no impact on our production recovery strategy.

> if somebody sets up a Kubernetes cluster, they can and should afford enterprise SSDs where fsync of small data is fast and reliable

At the time one of the problems I ran into was that public cloud regions in southeast asia had significantly worse SSDs that couldn't keep up. This was on one of the big three cloud providers.

1000 fsyncs/second is a tiny fraction of the real world production load we required. An API that only accepts 1000 writes a second is very slow!

Also, plenty of people run k8s clusters on commodity hardware. I ran one on an old gaming PC with a budget SSD for a while in my basement. Great use case for k3s.
by plain | 2025-06-19 15:51:59+00:00
Correct:

> The official Zen browser repo got flagged by GitHub, in turn its currently unavailable for you.

> There is no code loss, We just waiting on a review by GitHub.

> Also affected is Mods download, Binaries download, Docs website and Update-Server.

This is concerning because it suggests they somehow violated the terms of service. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a ploy by the project author to forcefully close all the opened issues again.

I'm assuming the project is burdened with technical debt yet again, since most of the bug "fixes" are just monkey-patches. They're mostly superficial, where the root cause is usually never addressed, which creates more issues when new features are implemented, this additionally causes many regressions, with previously fixed issues resurfacing.
by gametorch | 2025-06-19 15:53:01+00:00
If this is true, when do you think humans first arrived in North America?

From my reading of the article, the dating of these footprints (~20k years ago) precludes the idea that humans arrived at that time. They must have arrived much earlier, because the northern part of the content was impassable due to glaciers.

...Unless they travelled down the Pacific coast of North America and then moved east.
by m4rtink | 2025-06-19 15:53:08+00:00
I agree, but still - what could they have used that was not "build your own engine" ? They seemed to have preferred (or maybe were forced to ?) use off the shelf hardware, even if sub-optimal.

The only engines that were not hypergolic & used kerolox were those used on the Atlas rockets or on the Deltas. Not sure if they had the necessary throttling range and other characteristics. I guess now I need to find some sort of a biography from someone working on the DC-X project. :D

As for Armadillo Aerospace - their efforts were admirably and I really enjoyed watching their progress. And they did manage to get a working engine. :)
by treebeard901 | 2025-06-19 15:53:30+00:00
Human thought, biases, and behaviors can all be described as various chemical reactions in the brain. Cortisol, the fight or flight response, adrenaline, dopamine and so on. Simulating these chemical reactions in a neural net might get closer to real human patterns of biases like cognitive dissonance. Even seeing an LLM of anything more than a statistical prediction machine is another human bias at work that we also use with animals... Anthropomorphism.
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 15:53:40+00:00
>I'm not claiming interrupts don't exist

I thought you were confused because you said "hardware interrupts (whatever that means)", and put it in scare quotes?

>so locked down that all phones of the same model/OS version are going to have the same behavior.

That's not how hardware interrupts work, though. The behavior is 100% user dependent. Me and you type at different speeds, times, etc. The hardware interrupts that result from me and you typing are, therefor, going to be completely distinct. The interrupt itself will be the same, but the timing of those interrupts is unique.

Whether or not /proc/interrupts remains globally readable is something I'm not confident on, but at the time of the paper (which was after sandboxing was first implemented in Android), it was globally readable and a valid side-channel for information leakage including as fingerprinting vector.

Hopefully that clears up what a hardware interrupt means, and why they are (or, at least used to be), a valid fingerprinting technique.
by bxparks | 2025-06-19 15:53:44+00:00
It's great in theory.

In practice, it may not work properly even on their "supported" models. For example, sound does not work on my Dell E7270. Secondly, you must be willing use the Chrome browser. I will not because Chrome no longer has the option to always show the scrollbars. I am convinced that modern UX/UI designers hate their users.
by octaane | 2025-06-19 15:53:55+00:00
I'm glad this has finally been put to rest. Per the Ars article: "...that makes for a grand total of 55 radiocarbon results in support of the earlier dates across the three studies."

The evidence of much earlier human habitation in the Americas has been around for decades, yet has always been shoved aside in favor of a hypothesis with all ends tidied up and bound with a neat bow. Humans traveling over ice sheets from eurasia to the americas never made a huge amount of sense when they could skirt it's resource-rich edges - and traveling by water is much faster, and much less calorically intensive than traveling by land. You also have your food readily available.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-19 15:54:01+00:00
>You're still falling into the historicist trap of thinking that a societies future development can be inferred from it's history (which is simply untrue because the future of knowledge is fundamentally unpredictable, how would we know what we will know in the future without knowing it).

Not only can future development be inferred, you can see the pattern in history. The consequences of weak men.

Reconstruction -> third great awakening -> world war 1 -> roaring 20s -> world war 2 -> golden age of capitalism -> 4th great awakening -> culture wars, 9/11, tech bubbles -> great recession, covid, etc

Or to look at what we're in right now.

Glorious revolution 1701 + 75 years = age of revolution 1776 + 84 years = civil war 1860 + 79 years = world war 2 1939 + 80 years = 2019

The cycle is 4 movements in 80 years adjusting every 20 years. Hence the 4 parts of strong men create good times.

>Also historically, difficult times don't breed resilient people, the dark age was a millennium long.

This is where you're confused. This isn't a situation where the USA is doing great and 100% of people are strong, then create a generation of 100% weak people.

During the civil war, there was weak and strong people. then during reconstruction there was weak and strong people.
by npalli | 2025-06-19 15:54:36+00:00
Performance drop of 2x for memory safety critical sections vs Rust rewrite taking years/decades, not even a contest. Now, if that drop was 10x maybe, but at 2x it is no brainer to continue with C++. I'm not certain Fil-C totally works in all cases, but it is an example of how the ecosystem will evolve to solve this issue and not migrate to Rust.
by apples_oranges | 2025-06-19 15:54:42+00:00
There are still people who have basic professionalism and desire to improve their skills, regardless of the vision they buy into or don't buy into. Motivation only goes so far, and in my humble opinion, unless Space X hiring was special in some way, the people who build space rockets are not the kind of people who underperform because they no longer buy the story. They just quit and excel elsewhere.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-19 15:54:43+00:00
> Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes

I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period.

My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.
by krapp | 2025-06-19 15:55:12+00:00
Democracy does "work" in the sense that there is some causal, albeit not direct, relationship between votes cast and representatives elected, vis-a-vis voting for said representatives. Trump supporters voted for him, and his agenda, and are getting what they voted for. And under the American electoral system neither majority support per capita nor even a popular vote beyond a margin of error are required for success, because states and state electoral votes (which are biased to favor rural, conservative politics) determine the outcome.

The problem here is not democracy per se so much as the inherent biases in the American system which allow a minority of voters to hijack the process so long as they live in the correct states, and American culture in which the apathy and disgust towards government and politicians is so toxic that people literally cannot see a difference between any one politician and any other.

As for who to vote for, I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Kamala Harris or the Democrats but I don't think she would be doing half of the heinous shit that Trump currently is, so I would posit the apparently controversial thesis that y'all should have not fucking voted for Donald Trump. This was one of the rare elections in which there was a right choice and a wrong choice. Or, if you can't accept that, a greater evil and lesser evil.

But Americans chose the greater evil. Barring some revelation of electoral fraud, Trump was America's choice, fairly and legitimately elected within the rules of the system. Democracy worked as intended. This is the government Americans wanted. Now Americans just have to deal with it.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-19 15:55:21+00:00
We did accidentally torch the Apollo 1 crew in their capsule.

My fav Apollo-era fuckup is when they tested the launch abort system. The test went bad, but was 100% successful in demonstrating it worked. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY

Getting to Apollo involved a lot of big booms, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
by mdaniel | 2025-06-19 15:55:56+00:00
I think OP's point was: but how much of that production grade woe is the fault of Kubernetes versus, sure, turns out booting up an PaaS from scratch is hard as nails. I think that k8s pluggable design also blurs that boundary in most people's heads. I can't think of the last time the control plane shit itself, versus everyone and their cousin has a CLBO story for the component controllers installed on top of k8s
by genewitch | 2025-06-19 15:56:49+00:00
not what i am speaking to. I don't know the number, and neither do you. you'd have to call those 5000 CPS caseworkers and ask them what their caseload is (it's 69 per caseworker on average across the US. that's a third of a million cases, in aggregate across all caseworkers)

my wife's caseload (adults) "floats around fifty."
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-19 15:58:05+00:00
You're underestimating how much the reputation of and trust in the US has fallen in Europe. Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.

It will take many good administrations to get that trust back. Especially the tariff attacks on US allies basically told us anyone can be elected at any time and throw a wrench in global trade. The amount of decoupling that's started here is huge.

These things take time to materialise so it's not obvious yet. But once the EU has alternatives for things it needs the US for (eg big cloud) why ever switch back?

Also the "buy European" movement sprung up out of nowhere and grew massively.

Trump will hopefully be a blip but the waves will be felt for years to come.
by tudorizer | 2025-06-19 15:58:09+00:00
I watched the entire talk, quite carefully. He explicitly states how excited he was about his tweet mentioning English.

The disclaimer you mention was indeed mentioned, although it's "in one ear, out the other" with most of his audience.

If I give you a glazed donut with a brief asterisk about how sugar can cause diabetes will it stop you from eating the donut?

You also expect deterministic outcomes when making analogies with power plants and fabs.
Ask HN: Is cloud infra making us forget the local file system and memory?
by hliyan | 2025-06-19 15:58:14+00:00
I started programming in the 90's and continue to do so to this day (though in a limited capacity since I'm managing teams). I frequently see things that would have had very simple/dumb solutions 20 years ago[1], which now seem to require complicated tools, libraries or services.

Two examples:

I recently saw an engineer provision an S3 bucket to store a temporary file that is only needed for the current session, and only accessible to the application that created it. For me, this is what the local file system is for.

I saw another engineer provision an in-memory key-value store to store some infrequently changing reference data that can be easily loaded at startup, in an application runtime where memory persists between requests. For me, this is what local heap memory is for. I would simply load the data into a singleton map.

Both of these services have legitimate use cases, but I can't help but wonder whether they (and other tools and services I won't go into here) are beginning to make programmers forget that our applications run on machines with a standard set of resources (CPU, memory, disk, network interface) made available through an operating system, and further abstracted by the API provided by the development platform.

Has anyone else experienced this?

[1] The systems I worked on were non-trivial and mission critical: capital market trading systems. So it's not a case of those "dumb" solutions being either non-resilient, non-performant or unmaintainable.
by neuronic | 2025-06-19 15:58:46+00:00
It's called gatekeeping and the gatekeepers will be the ones left in the dust. This has been proven time and time again. Better learn to go with the flow - judging LLMs on linear improvements or even worse on today's performance is a fool's errand.

Even if improvements level off and start plateauing, things will still get better and for careful guided, educated use LLMs have already become a great accelerator in many ways. StackOverflow is basically dead now which in itself is a fundamental shift from just 3-4 years ago.
Show HN: Siapy-lib – A Python library for spectral image analysis
by janezla | 2025-06-19 15:58:49+00:00
I've been working on siapy-lib, a Python library for processing and analyzing hyperspectral and multispectral images. It’s aimed at researchers, engineers, and developers who want to work with spectral image data without the overhead of large GUI-based tools like ENVI or SNAP.

The library focuses on flexibility and modularity, using a plugin-based architecture to make it easy to extend and integrate into your own pipelines.

Key features: • Spectral Image Handling: Read and visualize ENVI, GeoTIFF, and raw image cubes with ease. • Spectral Analysis: Extract and analyze spectral signatures • Machine Learning Integration: Label image regions, train models, and segment images • Camera Co-registration: Align data from multiple sensors and compute transformations between camera spaces. • Radiometric Conversion: Convert radiance to reflectance using reference panels. • CLI Tool (Experimental): Basic command-line access via siapy-cli for quick prototyping.

The library is still evolving, and I’d love feedback from people working in remote sensing, Earth observation, or spectral imaging—whether academic or applied. Suggestions, bug reports, or contributions are all welcome!

GitHub: https://github.com/siapy/siapy-lib CLI (optional): https://github.com/siapy/siapy-cli
by itishappy | 2025-06-19 15:59:13+00:00
He used a commercial rideshare program.

> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.

https://space.crunchlabs.com/
by pphysch | 2025-06-19 15:59:22+00:00
> These people have been sitting on the sidelines because the barrier to entry was so high.

This comment is wildly out of touch. The SMB owner can now generate some Python code. Great. Where do they deploy it? How do they deploy it? How do they update it? How do they handle disaster recovery? And so on and so forth.

LLMs accelerate only the easiest part of software engineering, writing greenfield code. The remaining 80% is left as an exercise to the reader.
by ivape | 2025-06-19 16:00:16+00:00
Better to think of it as a world driven by the strengths and weaknesses of people. Is the world better if more people can express themselves via software? Yes.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t think the universe provided AI by accident. I believe it showed up just at the moment where the universe wants to make it clear - your little society of work and status and money can go straight to living hell. And that’s where it’s going, the developer was never supposed to be a rockstar, they were always meant to be creatives who do it because they like it. Fuck this job bullshit, those days are over. You will program the same way you play video games, it’s never to be work again (it’s simply too creative).

Will the universe make it so a bunch of 12 year olds dictate software in natural language in a Roblox like environment that rivals the horeshit society sold for billions just a decade ago? Yes, and thank god. It’s been a wild ride, thank you god for ending it (like he did with nuclear bombs after ww2, our little universe of war shrunk due to that).

Anyways, always pay attention to the little details, it’s never a coincidence. The universe doesn’t just sit there and watch our fiasco believe it or not, it gets involved.
by gruez | 2025-06-19 16:00:21+00:00
> In 294 experiments on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we observed 116 unique fingerprint values, for a sample entropy of 5.73 bits

The claim being disputed was "canvas jitter for each iPhone 15 Pro will be different", not the broader claim of whether canvas fingerprinting exists at all. 116 unique fingerprints out of 294 doesn't really prove the former is true, especially when you consider that people on Mechanical Turk are probably all on laptops/desktops, which have more hardware diversity compared to smartphones. Moreover if the claim is that every (?) iPhone of the same model has different canvas outputs because of "canvas jitter", wouldn't we expect far more unique fingerprints?