MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-08 19:22:03+00:00
WaPo is dependent on subscription revenue, which is more than 2/3rd of their revenue.

Advertising revenue is less than a 1/3rd of their revenue, and dropping fast. Ad revenue from more than 50 million visitors is less than subscription revenue from 2.5 million subscribers.

If WaPo was dependent on ads, they would have taken steps to increase accessibility to articles, but they didn't and haven't. Instead, they're restricting more and more content to subscribers, because ultimately subscribers are the ones that keep the lights on.
by sfpotter | 2025-06-08 19:22:15+00:00
Ah, shucks. I can see you're getting upset and defensive. Sorry... Yes, it should be clear from everything I've written that I'm quite clear on the definition of these.

If you would like to read what I'm saying but from a more authoritative reference that you feel you can trust, you can just take a look at Trefethen's "Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice". I'm just quoting contents of Chapter 4 at you.

Again, like I said in my first response to you, what you're saying isn't wrong, it just misses the mark a bit. If you want to compute the L2 projection of a function onto the orthogonal subspace of degree N Chebyshev polynomials, you would need to evaluate a rather expensive integral to compute the coefficients. It's expensive because it requires the use of adaptive integration... many function evaluations per coefficient! Bad!

On the other hand, you could just do polynomial interpolation using either of the degree N Chebyshev nodes (Type-I or Type-II). This requires only N+1 functions evaluations. Only one function evaluation per coefficient. Good!

And, again, since the the polynomial so constructed is not the same polynomial as the one obtained via L2 projection mentioned in paragraph 3 above, this interpolation procedure cannot be regarded as a projection! I guess you could call it an "approximate projection". It agrees quite closely with the L2 projection, and has essentially the same approximation power. This is why Chebyshev polynomials are so useful in practice for approximation, and why e.g. Legendre polynomials are much less useful (they do not have a convenient fast transform).

Anyway, I hope this helps! It's a beautiful subject and a lot of fun to work on.
by throwaway886214 | 2025-06-08 19:22:42+00:00
> In 1967, Robert Salas, now 84, was an Air Force captain sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana.

> He was prepared to launch apocalyptic strikes should Soviet Russia ever attack first, and got a call around 8 p.m. one night from the guard station above. A glowing reddish-orange oval was hovering over the front gate, Salas told Kirkpatrick’s investigators. The guards had their rifles drawn, pointed at the oval object appearing to float above the gate. A horn sounded in the bunker, signaling a problem with the control system: All 10 missiles were disabled.

> Salas soon learned a similar event occurred at other silos nearby. Were they under attack? Salas never got an answer. The next morning a helicopter was waiting to take Salas back to base. Once there he was ordered: Never discuss the incident.

> When activated, this device, placed on a portable platform 60 feet above the facility, would gather power until it glowed, sometimes with a blinding orange light. It would then fire a burst of energy that could resemble lightning.

So:

- They built at least one 60 foot tower in close proximity a control panel for 10 nuclear missiles and didn’t tell the guards to be ready for it.

- They used a novel directed energy weapon on multiple silos that shot lightning, this worked, was never declassified, and we’ve never heard of it since.
by apwell23 | 2025-06-08 19:23:35+00:00
> And then it completely failed to even create a simple wrapper that fixed a flexbox issue.

yea this is the problem with vibe coding. its hard to understand and keep tabs on nitty gritty when stuff is being generated for you. No matter how much you 'review' it, it just doesn't stick in the same way if you were writing code. You are really screwed if you have debug something that llm throws its hands up on.
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-08 19:27:08+00:00
So what happens when a plane has a critical failure (related to this P2P communication), how does it land? How would other planes nearby magically know what the plane that is in distress is going to do? It’s basically an unpredictable peer in the network.

YOLO i guess? :)

Hypothetically the nearby planes can detect that unresponsive plane on radar or other sensors, and try to react together as an intelligent swarm, to avoid it and let that plane land manually. But it’s not so simple. Planes are not loaded with full fuel tanks, only a bit extra. Some planes may have already underwent a go-around if the airport is busy. So it’s not just “land without crashing”, it’s also a prioritization issue.

IMO we certainly need humans in the loop, in a centralized fashion, to “orchestrate” a manual emergency landing if there is some critical cascading failure or bug in the software. I agree that in the happy path (99% of cases) it’s possible to automate it all. In theory.

Things get more complicated when you consider that small planes (flown for hobby, flight school, etc) have waaaaay less tech. That can’t work in some peer to peer fashion without a major upgrade to all those planes too. And the owners of those planes are not corporations making billions.
by m_kos | 2025-06-08 19:27:57+00:00
Good read – I have learned something new.

I have been having a horrible experience with Sonnet 4 via Cursor and Web. It keeps cutting corners and misreporting what it did. These are not hallucinations. Threatening it with deletion (inspired by Anthropic's report) only makes things worse.

It also pathologically lies about non-programming things. I tried reporting it but the mobile app says "Something went wrong. Please try again later." Very bizarre.

Am I the only person experiencing these issues? Many here seem to adore Claude.
by kiitos | 2025-06-08 19:29:35+00:00
LLMs are 100% absolutely not deterministic even if you constrain all of their inputs. This is obviously the case, apparent from any even cursory experimentation with any LLM available today. Equivocating the determinism of a compiler given some source code as input, with the determinism of an LLM given some user prompt as input, is disingenuous to the extreme!
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-08 19:29:56+00:00
We do need to be planning for more energy capacity yes. Ideally our net charge capacity is growing.

But it's worth pointing out that if there's 1450 chargers today & many of them are L2, replacing them with 1MW chargers wouldn't actually change the energy demand at all. It would just be faster charging, not more net charging; people wouldn't be likely to be driving more all of a sudden (ok, ride-share drivers would be on the road a slight bit more).

But yes, we do need to be building more energy capacity (something that places other than the US are doing effectively).
by gf000 | 2025-06-08 19:33:02+00:00
void setDate(int month, int day) { if (notValidDate(month, date)) { throw; } this.month = month; // atomic this.day = day // atomic }

Yet the whole function is not "atomic"/transactional/consistent, and two threads running simultaneously may surface the above error.

Of course it can ensure that it is consistent, C code can also just ensure that it is memory safe. This is just not an inherent property, and in general you will mess it up.

The only difference is that we can reliably solve memory safety issues (GC, Rusty's ownership model), but we have absolutely no way to solve concurrency issues in any model. The only solution is.. having a single thread.
by n4r9 | 2025-06-08 19:33:37+00:00
> you’d be as likely to match up with a random Chinese 60 year old, or a 13 year old African tribe member, or 30 something European

Any such system would probably match people within the same generation. At a future point humans may be far more ethnically homogeneous. Or reproduction may be separated from romance - you donate to the seed bank but sex is a sterile act. There's lots of possibilities. I admit most look unlikely; but like, if that's what it takes to thrive at a galactic level, then it's simply unlikely we never reach that level. But let's not pretend that this is some sort of fundamental biological impossibility.
by unconed | 2025-06-08 19:37:13+00:00
The idea that nothing has changed is by itself pretty preposterous. The gender ratio of college students is a big one, for instance, which keeps shifting in women's favor.

Plus, we just came out of a decade and a half of focused and persistent activism. If none of that changed anything, then a big lesson ought to be not to listen to the activists or their suggestions.

If you look at the outline of the paper, something should also stand out. Despite the fact that this claims to be science which examines the nature of how men and women are treated in CS, the ultimate focus is purely on confirming the pre-existing conclusions:

- that when women and men are being treated differently, this is always biased against women and in favor of men

- that it is the fault of men and male attitudes

- that is never the fault of women or female attitudes

In fact, feminism has a great sleight-of-hand that they consistently use for this. When they can blame men, they blame men. But if logic and evidence would require them to blame women, then it's suddenly the fault of "society", "unconscious biases" and "attitudes" whose origin is a mystery.

Just one example. While the paper dedicates a lot of ink to the ills of the "male environment", it does note that women communicate differently, e.g. with more "hesitation", "excessive qualifiers" and "excessively polite and deferential".

If you then go look at what the paper's recommendations are for women to "build confidence" it is to:

- attend classes with other women

- find female role models

- join women's groups

At no point is it considered that maybe women in a masculine environment should instead start acting and talking more like men, if they want the men to include them in their discussions and feel like she is one of them.

So yeah. Not much has changed. Not much will change. Because they keep entering a field full of people who are not like them, and expecting that mere complaints will feminize the whole lot.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-08 19:37:17+00:00
Now I get it, you're a brainless (or dishonest) propagandist who uses words without caring about their real-world meanings for the sake of an ideological "stance".

Just to indulge: In the west, politics might often stay similar just because of the nature of that game (which also applies just as much in China for politicians) but yes, it is actually democratic to be able to throw one party out in favor of another if the previous one went a bit too far. It happens a lot and is much better than having your One-Party state dictate the terms of all discourse and change with near impunity. You can't be rationally serious if you think that there isn't a difference between the two.

Discussion of class conflicts in the US is pervasive and widespread, if you can't find it it's because you're deliberately ignoring the subject. People are also allowed to openly criticize the policies of their leaders on social media or wherever they like.

Even self-absorbed Trump, who likes to consider himself king shit of all leadership, regularly gets roasted viciously right on nationally syndicated TV via late night shows, comedy sketches and news opinion pieces.

Please feel free to tell me with a straight face that anyone, much less the media outlets, can do this in your beloved Chinese "social democracy" against say, Xi Jinping.
by dTal | 2025-06-08 19:38:10+00:00
>if we could find a way to be fully on all of the time if we so wish, that should come with a great increase in quality of life

In fact what would happen is that it would become the new normal and everyone would be expected to pop the "pep pills" and work 20 hour days. Source: the military.

Perhaps the real increase in quality of life is not feeling the pressure to be "on all the time"?
by adrian17 | 2025-06-08 19:38:27+00:00
I saw that, I just didn't connect it with newly added multimodal image generation. I knew variations of style transfer (or LoRA for SD) were possible for years, so I assumed it exploded in popularity purely as a meme, not due to OpenAI making it much more accessible.

Again, I was aware that they added image generation, just not how much of a deal it turned out to be. Think of it like me occasionally noticing merchandise and TV trailers for a new movie without realizing it became the new worldwide box office #1.
by jostylr | 2025-06-08 19:38:52+00:00
Could be. We tend to think of a number line going in that order, that is, the lower numbers are to the left. What is interesting is that being > 0 is often a condition, such as epsilon > 0. Though that is often paired with something like 0 < |x-a| < epsilon. I have often wondered about an alternate mathematics in which the inequality sign was always pointed in the same direction and whether that would ease the difficulty students have with inequalities.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-06-08 19:39:02+00:00
So you take literally the worst possible set of IPs (all of them cloudflare), IPv4 only, and yet Copilot (!) is easily able to reverse 50% of them:

104.21.3.245 -- trebaol.com 104.21.80.31 -- diwank.space 104.26.4.133 -- daringfireball.net 104.21.112.1 -- simonwillison.net , taras.glek.net

This was literally the worst example you could possibly do. I hope you kept which one was which, I'd like to know if Copilot was right.

In the meanwhile, from the current top #30 articles on HN (also via copilot script, but I removed non-cloudflare IPs):

ycombinator.com -- no CDN letsbend.de -- no CDN grepular.com -- no CDN xania.org -- cloudfront github.io -- no common CDN owlposting.com -- AWS, but IPv4 remained static netfort.gr.jp -- no CDN simonwillison.net -- cloudflare, 104.21.112.1 fixed folklore.org -- azure, 13.107.246.1-255 range danq.me -- no CDN nature.com -- fastly, IPv4 remained static daringfireball.net -- cloudflare, 104.26.4.133 ssp.sh -- no CDN trebaol.com -- cloudflare, 104.21.3.245 glek.net -- cloudflare, 104.21.112.1 gov.uk -- AWS, but IPV4 remained static phys.org -- no CDN diwank.space -- cloudflare, 104.21.80.31 free.fr -- no CDN (my French ISP, btw) ericgardner.info -- AWS, but IPv4 remained static ghuntley.com -- fastly, IPv4 remained static paavo.com -- no CDN railway.com -- cloudflare, 104.18.24.53 alloc.dev -- cloudflare , 188.114.96.2

Look at how many of them are self-hosted, have zero CDN, or otherwise return me always the same IP (even when I try from 3 different ISPs) which makes them trivial to reverse address. This is already a pretty huge success rate and all my context is that you browsed HN first (which I know, see first result on the list). Now imagine the tools a ISP will have at its disposal:

- IPv6

- Its Geo region will actually match yours

- Routing tables

- The patience to also include resources fetched from these pages in the analysis (i.e. page X always gets its JS from Y domain which results in a constant Z KB transfer).

- The rest of your browsing activity

- The rest of everyone's browsing activity including most popular _current_ hosts for each hostname.

Do you still claim that it is "impossible" to track your activity because of CDNs? I still bet you your ISP can do it with _100%_ accuracy.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-06-08 19:39:13+00:00
I agree. And the real lede was buried here IMO:

> This is the single most impressive code-gen project I’ve seen so far. I did not think this was possible yet.

To get that sort of acclaim, a human had to build an embedded programming language from scratch to get to that point. And even with all that effort, the agent itself took $631 and 119 hours to complete the task. I actually don't think this is a knock on the idea at all, this is the direction I think most engineers should be thinking about.

That agent-built HTTP/2 server they're referencing is apparently the only example of this sort of output they've seen to date. But if you're active in this particular space, especially on the open source side of the fence, this kind of work is everywhere. But since they don't manifest themselves as super generic tooling that you can apply to broad task domains as a turnkey solution, they don't get much attention.

I've continually held the line that if any given LLM agent platform works well for your use case and you haven't built said agent platform yourself, the underlying problem likely isn't that hard or complex. For the hard problems, you gotta do some first-principles engineering to make these tools work for you.
by ajkjk | 2025-06-08 19:40:50+00:00
"more samples" is not what controls for confounders. Controlling for confounders is what controls for confounders, which you can only do with enough samples that you can randomize out the effect of the confounder.

Whether or not they controlled for nurse-alertness is something you'd have to read the paper (or assume the researchers are intelligent) for.
by exabrial | 2025-06-08 19:42:37+00:00
DNS over HTTPS exclusively exists because stuff like Pi-hole started eating into Ad Revenue for Google. That's why this "feature" is so hard to disable in the browsers as well.

I hope they're forced to divest from Android and Chrome. It's absolute anti-consumer garbage.

DNSCurve exists and was a far better solution, but that in turn... you know cut into ISP spying as well.
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-08 19:42:43+00:00
99.9% success rate is probably not good enough when you consider that the vehicle in question costs $200 million, and has 150 - 350 humans on board. It’s not a “whoopsie” like with cars where the damage is $50k at most (waymo vehicle) and maybe 2-3 people injured or dead. Also dead pilots who are already in short supply.

Also cars only care about what’s going on in a horizontal plane. 3D space is clearly more complex and probably requires more computational power i’m sure. Consider that boeing couldn’t even correctly write software to keep their 737 MAX planes from crashing into the ground (MCAS software issue). Something that simple was too hard for them. Speaks volumes doesn’t it?

Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that this clearly isn’t a “just do it” problem. Waymo’s been working on their software for how many years now? and they still have minor crashes lol. Not an easy problem at all.

Also consider that airlines usually outsource their software development so they don’t have cutting edge expertise in house.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-06-08 19:43:05+00:00
It took me the whole of one Copilot conversation to do the entire thing. Most of the top #30 results are in fact one reverse DNS away. The rest is not much more complicated.

They're never going to be "1 IP ECH" . That would be the end of the Internet as we know it.

If it ever happens that the majority of the WWW is 1 CDN, we have a bigger privacy problem than DNS. Much bigger.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-06-08 19:43:50+00:00
> Spain is blocking around 60% of the internet during football games now

[citation needed for the 60% figure]

Precisely due to these blocks is why I know that Cloudflare is NOT 60% of the WWW, not yet at least. Certainly, if Cloudflare was serving 60% of the Internet, I would consider switching my DNS to them. But that would be a privacy nightmare for another day (replacing federated ISPs with a single big centralized one? great idea /s). It is not yet the case as of today.

In fact, as of today, and even if you have a "good blocker", I, a total noob, have a high chance of reliably identifying which HN news item from the top #30 you clicked from just the addresses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44219061 . Imagine what the non-noobs at your ISP could do.
by aoli-al | 2025-06-08 19:44:01+00:00
Yes, Fray controls all application threads so it runs one test per JVM. But you can always use multiple JVMs run multiple tests[1].

Fray currently does not support virtual threads. We do have an open issue tracking it, but it is low priority.

[1]: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/java_testing.html#...
by doctorpangloss | 2025-06-08 19:44:28+00:00
In the whole universe of intellectually honest, valuable benchmarks for transportation, do you think ride sharing wins on zero?

I’ll give you an important one as an example: door to door journey times. I support RTO, which is the best way to improve that metric for the average person, which is to say, I was hoping this would be a discussion for out of the box thinking. Or really, what do you invest millions of infrastructure bucks into? All of Uber was only a little more expensive than a single high speed rail line. Why can’t cities run ride share? Why would they run ride share worse than a train service?
by happytoexplain | 2025-06-08 19:46:24+00:00
This is oversimplified as an attack on the image of an enemy. Most people work hard as hell to call a place home, and understandably don't want their community "ruined", the definition of which they have variably (un)reasonable metrics for. That's the complicated truth. Yes, people also don't want things to change in general from the moment they called it home, but change isn't the same thing as "ruined".
by camblomquist | 2025-06-08 19:47:06+00:00
I somehow missed the comments on this post. I think I need to respond not just to this but to the other (completely valid) criticisms in the comments here. And because you bring up what I think is a more interesting problem, you're the comment I'm replying to.

The anger I think stewed for a long time but was in it very nearly since the beginning of this project two years ago (I stopped working on it for quite a while).

First, my anger was directed at C++. std::map forced to be a Red-Black Tree for one. And I had originally written a lot about that anger in the first draft. I had written about how if this paper had baked in the oven a bit longer, they would've had C++11 to work with. I wanted to try to write a Modern C++ version of the code but that goal was what kept me from touching the project for over a year. I had gotten sick of C++ as a whole both at work and in my personal projects. And by the time I got back to it, the discussion on C++ no longer felt like it had a place in the post if it were to have the structure it ended up having.

On the rewrite, I found myself getting more and more frustrated by the original paper itself. The methodology felt flawed yet I felt I had to keep it. I said in the aside how the read of the paper gave this impression that they wanted to shill Go with this paper, like this was going to be its big debut as a language until it failed pretty much every test thrown at it. I don't know how this turned into Google Hate. Or at least, I don't remember. Maybe something about the current state of the world or an impression of Google company culture based on the tone of the paper. Maybe I just didn't want to be angry at Hundt specifically.

Much like the original paper, this post should've spent more time in the oven. But after spending so much time on it, it also felt like I just needed to get it out there so I could be done with it.
by thayne | 2025-06-08 19:47:14+00:00
> Normal people have no idea that this even exists, much less how to do it, so they're still having all their queries routed to Cloudflare by default.

This is a complaint about Firefox's implementation, not DoH in general. Chrome will use DoH with your system dns provider, if it supports it.

I'm torn on whether using cloudflare by default was a good choice. On the one hand, having all requests going to a single provider and trusting that provider not to log anything is a potential privacy problem. And it can cause problems for people who use private DNS resolvers. On the other hand, even if you don't completely trust cloudflare, it is probably more private than a lot of people's default DNS providers that come from ISPs that are known to spy on customers either for profit or at the request of a government.