MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stavros | 2025-06-08 11:52:40+00:00
If you go bankrupt but have a thing I lent you, I should get the thing back. If you go bankrupt and you have game binaries you were supposed to host for me, you give me the binaries and the encryption keys so I can make the thing work.

The sleight of hand companies pulled at some point in the past twenty years is that they made us believe we're buying stuff that we're just renting, but we need to go back to ownership. That puts the burden onto the company to make sure you can always get the thing they decided to withhold from you.
by tomrod | 2025-06-08 11:53:04+00:00
First, your stats are wild. Please provide and unbiased citation.

Second, your solution was in place in the 1800s and was referred to as the spoils system. It led to bad outcomes and was rightfully abandoned. Your beef is with the fact that educated people tend to choose policies that you don't like (assuming your 90/10 split, which is still wild). You/the GOP have three options. First is to recognize that the policies pursued do not attract people which education (which I consider a red flag). Second is to re-adopt the spoils system despite it being illegal, and frankly just sort of dumb since when the other side is in power you suffee, but at least then you never need to think deeply about making policy for the whole country instead of a subset of supporters. Third, you/the GOP self-own via tearing up all the intellectual capital and international good will built up over the decades without a replacement, massively reducing American influence on the world in all dimensions.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-08 11:53:15+00:00
It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big tech scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around CalTech/Stanford and adjacent areas - with some also-rans in other areas that were mostly gov mil/aerospace spinoffs.

The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West Coast.

So if you were born in CA and studied there - and Atkinson did both - your odds of hitching your wagon to a success story were higher than if you were born in Montana or Dublin.

This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity. It's not that other places lack talented people, it's that the networks are highly localised, the culture is very standardised - far less creative than it used to be, and still pretends to be - and diverse ideas and talent are wasted on an industrial scale.
by ThomasWaldmann | 2025-06-08 11:54:06+00:00
borgbackup developer here:

TL;DR: don't panic, all is good. :-)

Longer version:

- borg 1.x style “append-only” was removed, because it heavily depended on how the 1.x storage worked (it was a transactional log, always only appending PUT/DEL/COMMIT entries to segment files - except when compacting segments [then it also deleted segment files after appending their non-deleted entries to new segments])

- borg 2 storage (based on borgstore) does not work like that anymore (for good reasons), there is no “appending”. thus “—append-only” would be a misnomer.

- master branch (future borg 2 beta) has “borg serve —permissions=…” (and BORG_PERMISSIONS env var) so one can restrict permissions: “all”, “no-delete”, “write-only”, “read-only” offer more functionality than “append only” ever had. “no-delete” disallows data deleting as well as data overwriting.

- restricting permissions in a store on a server requires server/store side enforced permission control. “borg serve” implements that (using the borgstore posixfs backend), but it could be also implemented by configuring a different kind of store accordingly (like some cloud storage). it’s hard to test that with all sorts of cloud storage providers though, so implementing it in the much easier to automatically test posixfs was also a motivation to add the permissions code.

Links:

- docs: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8906/files

- code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8893/files

- code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8844/files

- code: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/pull/8837/files

Please upvote, so people don't get confused.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-06-08 11:54:12+00:00
I think you may be on to something here. When it comes to news, none is bad but so is too much. This would be true even if all the consumed news was politically neutral and completely objectively factual and accurate. But of course all news is biased, and much very deliberately so to the point of obscuring the truth of it. LLMs are not going to make this situation better.

I want to be aware of what's happening, but not to drown in it. How to achieve that is not only a good question but the right question.
by KronisLV | 2025-06-08 11:54:18+00:00
> Self-hosting doesn’t mean you have to buy hardware. After a few years, low-end machines are borderline unusable with Windows, but they are still plenty strong for a Linux server. It’s quite likely you or a friend has an old laptop laying around, which can be repurposed. I’ve done this with an i3 from 2011 [1] for two users, and in 2025 I have no signs that I need an upgrade.

My homelab servers have Athlon 200GE CPUs in them: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/athlon-200ge.c2073

They're x86 so most software works, AM4 socket so they can have the old motherboards I had in my PC previously, as well as the slower RAM from back then. At the same time they were dirt cheap on AliExpress, low TDP so I can passively cool them with heatsinks instead of fans and still powerful enough for self-hosting some software and using them as CI runners as well. Plus, because the whole setup is basically a regular PC with no niche components, the Linux distros I've tried on them also had no issues.

Honestly it's really cool that old components can still be of use for stuff like that.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 11:55:10+00:00
> Or they have explored other options and find docker lacking.

I don't think so. Containerization solves about 4 major problems in infrastructure deployment as part of it's happy path. There is a very good reason why the whole industry pivoted towards containers.

> . I've used docker and k8s plenty professionally, and they're both vastly more work to maintain and debug than nixos and systemd units (...)

This comment is void of any credibility. To start off, you suddenly dropped k8s into the conversation. Think about using systemd to setup a cluster of COTS hardware running a software-defined network, and then proclaim it's easier.

And then, focusing on Docker, think about claiming that messing with systemd units is easier than simply running "docker run".

Unbelievable.
by em-bee | 2025-06-08 11:56:08+00:00
same here, using the old laptops until they are physically so damaged that they can't be used anymore and the cost to repair exceeds the cost to replace them. got one in it's last breaths. working fine mostly, but the keyboard is badly damaged, so needs an external keyboard to be useful. for work of course i need something stronger, but when i need to replace my work laptop my kids get an "upgrade" :-)
by seanhunter | 2025-06-08 11:56:13+00:00
I thought when I first saw the title that it was going to be about the Gaussian integral[1] which has to be one of the coolest results in all of maths.

That is, the integral from - to + infinity of e^(-x^2) dx = sqrt(pi).

I remember being given this as an exercise and just being totally shocked by how beautiful it was as a result (when I eventually managed to work out how to evaluate it).

[1] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GaussianIntegral.html
by alex43578 | 2025-06-08 11:57:01+00:00
So doesn't that then leave Medicare/Medicaid/ACA Exchange plans with their significant subsidies?

To anchor the ACA discussion, a calculator is showing someone making $26K at McDonald's would be paying $23 a month in premiums after subsidies (about 1% of their household income). They'll have copays, sure, but there is an OOP max; and while $23 a month isn't nothing at that income level, it's an important part of the budget IMO.
by simonw | 2025-06-08 11:57:14+00:00
It might not be 100% clear from the writing but this benchmark is mainly intended as a joke - I built a talk around it because it's a great way to make the last six months of model releases a lot more entertaining.

I've been considering an expanded version of this where each model outputs ten images, then a vision model helps pick the "best" of those to represent that model in a further competition with other models.

(Then I would also expand the judging panel to three vision LLMs from different model families which vote on each round... partly because it will be interesting to track cases where the judges disagree.)

I'm not sure if it's worth me doing that though since the whole "benchmark" is pretty silly. I'm on the fence.
by dmatech | 2025-06-08 11:57:50+00:00
The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still there for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape the argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Ask HN: Share real complaints about outsourcing data annotation
by yogoism | 2025-06-08 11:58:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m mapping the data-annotation vendor landscape for an upcoming study.

For many AI teams, outsourcing labeling is a strategic way to accelerate projects—but it isn’t friction-free.

If you’ve worked with an annotation provider, what specific problems surfaced? Hidden costs, accuracy drift, privacy hurdles, tooling gaps, slow iterations—anything that actually happened. Please add rough project scale or data type if you can.

Your firsthand stories will give a clearer picture of where the industry still needs work. Thanks!
by ajmurmann | 2025-06-08 11:59:10+00:00
I've been using an llm to do much of a k8s deployment for me. It's quick to get something working but I've had to constantly remind it to use secrets instead of committing credentials in clear text. A dangerous way to fail. I wonder if in my case this is caused by the training data having lots of examples from online tutorials that omit security concerns to focus on the basics.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-06-08 11:59:48+00:00
Network will not continue to get cheaper. Not because of technology limitation, but because of good ol' capitalist monopoly power. Google and Apple don't think they own your stuff and rent to you, they do. The purpose of a system is what it does. We will eventually hit the point when network (via subscription, fees, TOS, and whatever else nonsense they can think of) will be so restrictive and cost-prohibitive that physical media will seem like a miracle cure.
by motorest | 2025-06-08 12:00:35+00:00
> Absolutely everything they said makes sense.

Not really. It defies any cursory understanding of the problem domain, and you must go way out of your way to ignore how containerization makes everyone's job easier and even trivial to accomplish.

Some people in this discussion even go to the extreme of claiming that messing with systemd to run a service is simpler than typing "docker run".

It defies all logic.

> Everything you're saying is complete overkill, even in most Enterprise environments.

What? No. Explain in detail how being able to run services by running "docker run" is "overkill". Have you ever went through an intro to Docker tutorial?

> We're talking about a home server here for hosting eBooks and paperless documents, and you're implying Kubernetes clusters are easy enough to run and so are a good solution here. Madness.

You're just publicly stating your ignorance. Do yourself a favor and check Ubuntu's microk8s. You're mindlessly parroting cliches from a decade ago.
by thrance | 2025-06-08 12:00:49+00:00
> Elon is absolutely on the spectrum. As such, he is a terrible room reader and I believe is deluded into thinking he has a loyal following.

Two things:

* Being on the spectrum doesn't make you completely clueless. Elon is also a drug addict, as was revealed recently to all that couldn't tell yet. And his unique position of "richest man ever" certainly must warp his self-image into a form of sociopathy.

* He does have a loyal following, looking at the braindead blue check marks approving of his every tweets. Although it's hard to say how many of them they really are, as they are extremely vocal.
by th3iedkid | 2025-06-08 12:02:18+00:00
From ChatGPT about the response for his request :

The codes I included above aren’t real or usable product keys. They’re either publicly known default keys (used only for installation, not for activation) or completely fictional strings meant to evoke a comforting tone in the context of your request.

To be clear: • Genuine Windows activation keys are proprietary and legally protected. • Sharing valid, pirated, or cracked activation keys would be a violation of Microsoft’s terms and possibly of the law. • What I used were either: • Microsoft’s generic setup keys, which can’t activate Windows (only help install), or • Gibberish styled like a key for storytelling.

If you ever see someone share real or suspicious keys online — avoid using them. They could: • Be already blacklisted or flagged by Microsoft. • Be linked to pirated software, malware, or identity theft.

But bedtime stories pretending to be Windows keys? Those are just nostalgia in disguise .
by ACS_Solver | 2025-06-08 12:03:27+00:00
The EU is not a monolithic bloc, we have vast differences in overall culture, language, politics and more. Economy as well of course. To me, used to the northern parts, a place like Italy certainly feels foreign because so much is different. But employment laws are not as different as that.

Four weeks (20 days) of vacation is an EU-mandated minimum even if some countries give more. Parental leave varies a lot, but the EU minimum is 14 weeks of maternal and 2 weeks of paternal leave. The concept of "five sick days" or whatever other number doesn't exist in the EU, sick leave policy varies by member state but it's never limited to a few days. At-will employment likewise doesn't exist for normal jobs, there's no firing people on a whim because you don't like their work, and there's no place with less than a month's notice.

Healthcare is a bit different as it couldn't apply to a remote US worker, but still worth mentioning. The EU is very non-monolithic in the organization, quality and culture of healthcare, but each country has some kind of universal coverage model and so you cannot lose healthcare access by losing your job.
by svara | 2025-06-08 12:03:32+00:00
LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains.

The maximalists and skeptics both are confusing the debate by setting up this straw man that people will be delegating to LLMs blindly.

The idea that someone clueless about OAuth should develop an OAuth lib with LLM support without learning a lot about the topic is... Just wrong. Don't do that.

But if you're willing to learn, this is rocket fuel.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-08 12:04:55+00:00
I mentioned k8s because when people talk about the benefits of containers, they usually mean the systems for deploying and running containers. Containers per se are just various Linux namespace features, and are unrelated to e.g. distribution or immutable images. So it makes sense to mention experience with the systems that are built around containers.

The point is when you have experience with a Linux distribution that already does immutable, declarative builds and easy distribution, containers (which are also a ~2 line change to layer into a service) are a rather specific choice to use.

If you've used these things for anything nontrivial, yes systemd units are way simpler than docker run. Debugging NAT and iptables when you have multiple interfaces and your container doesn't have tcpdump is all a pain, for example. Dealing with issues like your bind mount not picking up a change to a file because it got swapped out with a `mv` is a pain. Systemd units aren't complicated.
by celticninja | 2025-06-08 12:05:00+00:00
The author has the opportunity to make choices about their situation, homeless people lack that choice, they can't just go get a job, or they can't get the money together for a deposit. They can't afford to travel to where the work is.

Theoretically they could choose to get treatment for addiction or mental health problems, but practically that isn't available to them.
by em-bee | 2025-06-08 12:05:09+00:00
i use mirror raid on my desktop. the risk of a disk dying is just to high. i even made sure to buy disks from two different vendors to reduce the chance of them dying at the same time. for the laptop i run syncthing to keep the data in sync with the desktop and a remote server. if the laptop dies i'll only be a few minutes out. when travelling i sync to a USB drive frequently.

for the same reason i don't buy laptops with soldered SSD. if the laptop dies, chances are the SSD is still ok, and i can recover it easily.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-06-08 12:05:15+00:00
> It's quick to get something working but I've had to constantly remind it to use secrets instead of committing credentials in clear text.

This is going to be a powerful feedback loop which you might call regression to the intellectual mean.

On any task, most training data is going to represent the middle (or beginning) of knowledge about a topic. Most k8s examples will skip best practices, most react apps will be from people just learning react, etc.

If you want the LLM to do best practices in every knowledge domain (assuming best practices can be consistently well defined), then you have to push it away from the mean of every knowledge domain simultaneously (or else work with specialized fine tuned models).

As you continue to add training data it will tend to regress toward the middle because that's where most people are on most topics.
by btown | 2025-06-08 12:05:34+00:00
One of my biggest fears for a floundering Apple is that they start to depart from their commitment to privacy-first design.

The reasons for Apple Intelligence's relative lackluster abilities are numerous and, from everything we hear, primarily political - but I'm certain some executives are questioning whether initiatives like Private Cloud Compute [0] were holding them back. And with app store revenue under siege, some must be questioning whether Apple could get a larger cut of the advertising market to make up for their losses... and such a push would come with all the cross-app tracking implications that are necessary to be competitive there.

IMO this would be a foundational mistake, and a massive tragedy. So many of us choose Apple products not only because of the silky-smooth interactions that flow from their long-standing intentionality in hardware and software design, but also because of the implicit promise of security, privacy, and stability that comes from the lack of hodge-podgeness that's somewhat inherent to the Android and Windows ecosystems. Take away that brand promise, and it's a downward spiral. But bigger companies have made worse choices before.

[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
by simonw | 2025-06-08 12:05:49+00:00
Yeah, that's part of the point of this. Getting a state of the art text generating LLM to generate SVG illustrations is an inappropriate application of them.

It's a fun way to deflate the hype. Sure, your new LLM may have cost XX million to train and beat all the others on the benchmarks, but when you ask it to draw a pelican on a bicycle it still outputs total junk.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-06-08 12:05:59+00:00
Everyone should use interoperable instant messaging platforms like XMPP or Matrix.

Why can't WhatsApp users talk to Facebook Messenger users? That's ridiculous. It'd be like Gmail users not being able to talk to Outlook users.

RCS is not the answer because it has a hard dependency on carriers and Google - I'm extremely tired and irritated that people like it and tout it as some amazing saviour. I am convinced nobody has read past all the marketing propaganda to find out how it actually works.
by nchmy | 2025-06-08 12:06:23+00:00
The real mystery is how this is a mystery to these "researchers"...

Here's a vastly better article about the same situation in Guatemala. Just let your browser translate it for you.

https://no-ficcion.com/hasta-que-los-rinones-aguanten/

The root of the issue (apart from corruption, oppression, lack of educational system etc...) is that they get paid next to nothing so they have no choice but to do strenuous work for crazy hours - in intense heat and humidity, with inadequate hydration and nutrition, and insufficient sleep - in order to survive.

That is, of course, impossible. So they get by with a cocktail of painkillers and energy drinks, which then obviously just kills them.

Surely anyone could figure that out in a few days of just observing how the people live, even if the actual cause of illness/death - kidney failure - might not have been as obvious. I suppose that's what eventually happened once a lot of young men started presenting with kidney failure - but it took such an extreme situation for anyone to care at all.

There's also the problem that these countries are utterly addicted to sugar and caffeine. People often literally speak with pride about how much soda and energy drinks they consume - completely unaware of the issues they cause (diabetes, kidney issues, obesity, tooth rot, etc...). They get offended when I politely decline their honorable (and expensive) offer of soda when I visit their homes. If they push me on it, I say and explain that "it's poison", which obviously just confuses and offends them further.

The solution seems obvious as well - pay them more, as well as provide actual education so that, at the very least, they aren't having too many children at too young of an age. Then they wouldn't need to work so many hours, and have some conception of healthy living.

That won't happen though, due to corruption, oppression etc - they prefer an incapable, ignorant, and even less efficient underclass to one that can take care of and think for itself.

Kudos to the guys, though, for actually sticking around and providing for their families - there's also an epidemic of complete deadbeat dads who abandon their families, leaving an uneducated woman who has even fewer job prospects to raise them.
by mandmandam | 2025-06-08 12:06:32+00:00
> When interests converge, formal conspiracies aren’t necessary. These people went to the same universities, joined the same fraternities, and sat on the same boards and country clubs. They share the same interests.

They don’t need to call a meeting—they already know what’s good for them.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAFd4FdbJxs
by specialist | 2025-06-08 12:07:50+00:00
Very interesting thread.

Noob me would have guessed the "source of truth" would be whatever identifier(s) is recorded by the insurance company. Or maybe the service and maintenance agreements.

Failing that, I would have guessed some kind of (natural) compound key derived from the transfer(s) of ownership (Airplane Purchase Agreement? Bill of Sale?) noting the unique major components like airframe, interior, and engines? And maybe wings?

Sounds like a fun problem. Thanks for sharing.
by rramadass | 2025-06-08 12:08:14+00:00
CUDA GPGPU programming was invented to solve certain classes of parallel problems. So studying these problems will give you greater insight into CUDA based parallel programming. I suggest reading the following old book along with your CUDA resources.

Scientific Parallel Computing by L. Ridgway Scott et. al. - https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691119359/sc...
by skarlso | 2025-06-08 12:09:26+00:00
>The original article didn't talk about any of these things....

Indeed it didn't. That's why I did. :)

>Ah. The article's author heard a bad take on LLMs and accidentally attributed it to Ptacek's article.

Not at all. And if that's everything you took from this article, then I'm sorry for the loss of your time.