MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-06-08 15:47:02+00:00
Important background: Building the same tram in Britain costs at least 2X more than in France, often 3x more.

UK tram track construction typically involves deeper track beds compared to France/EU, using concrete slabs of 500-1000mm deep, is intended to protect utilities. In contrast, many European projects utilize shallower trackbeds, even with grassed areas, which are 300-400mm deep
by bornfreddy | 2025-06-08 15:47:37+00:00
Not just that. ISP knows the IP addresses anyway, so they can make an educated guess which domain you are accessing (or use SNI). So why would I want to leak this data to another entity?

Of course, Cloudflare (if page uses them) and Google (if you are not blocking their remote fonts & js) also already have this information, so there's that.
by diwank | 2025-06-08 15:47:53+00:00
no, just used chatgpt to bootstrap the research :)

here's the original chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/6844eaae-07d0-8001-a7f7-e532d63bf8...

I also used bits from claude research but apparently if you use claude research, they don't let you create a share link -_-
by simonw | 2025-06-08 15:48:44+00:00
Anecdotally, I've had several conversations with people way outside the hyper-online demographic who have been really enjoying the new ChatGPT image generation - using it for cartoon photos of their kids, to create custom birthday cards etc.

I think it's broken out into mainstream adoption and is going to stay there.

It reminds me a little of Napster. The Napster UI was terrible, but it let people do something they had never been able to do before: listen to any piece of music ever released, on-demand. As a result people with almost no interest in technology at all were learning how to use it.

Most people have never had the ability to turn a photo of their kids into a cute cartoon before, and it turns out that's something they really want to be able to do.
by gkbrk | 2025-06-08 15:48:48+00:00
The author used to run a public Arch mirror under mirror.ext4.xyz, so it's not exactly an unknown domain.

Combined with the fact that a lot of their self-hosted stuff, including the Reddit front-ends, are in the Certificate Transparency logs [1], it's not hugely surprising that web crawlers would run into them.

[1]: https://crt.sh/?q=ext4.xyz
by kloop | 2025-06-08 15:48:53+00:00
My team uses it for geospatial data. We rasterize slippy map tiles and then do a raster summary on the gpu.

It's a weird case, but the pixels can be processed independently for most of it, so it works pretty well. Then the rows can be summarized in parallel and rolled up at the end. The copy onto the gpu is our current bottleneck however.
by ibaikov | 2025-06-08 15:49:24+00:00
Russian here. I can't show -any- cool tech made here or an optimization that we do that western countries don't because people would say I praise Russia no matter how much more often and harsher I criticize. They don't even know what I think about the country, I just can't speak about it.

I appreciate people who are saving flagged comments because what made HN great 10-15 years ago was that I often changed my views because people would articulate why they are right and they sometimes indeed were.
by Mister_Snuggles | 2025-06-08 15:51:13+00:00
To play devil's advocate, shoving everything into HTTP/HTTPS also allowed a ton of innovation.

Would video streaming sites (Youtube, Vimeo, etc) ever have gotten off the ground if they had to go to IANA to get a port number assigned, then wait for browsers to support the new protocol that runs over the new port, etc? Probably not to be honest. Or maybe browsers would just let JavaScript connect to any port, which would be terrifying from a security standpoint.

I'm firmly convinced that shoving everything into HTTP/HTTPS was a mistake. But I'm also willing to acknowledge that it's probably the least-worst solution to a bunch of problems.
by tpm | 2025-06-08 15:52:04+00:00
The fall didn't begin with Gorbachev, it began with the communist party being clueless at adapting to new situations, essentially what China managed to do after Mao, the Soviets didn't after Stalin and the rest. The regime ossified and fell apart, at first slowly and then rapidly. Gorbachev just refused to spill even more blood.
by malteeez | 2025-06-08 15:52:33+00:00
Some european countries are in the process of switching over to iCAS made by indra. A press release for that included a picture https://www.dfs.de/homepage/de/medien/presse/2023/30-03-2023...

There is also some work by the germans on moving the TID part to a web-based approach.
by throwawaybob420 | 2025-06-08 15:52:57+00:00
I’ve never seen such “walking off the cliff” behavior than from people who whole heartedly champion LLMs and the like.

Leaning on and heavily relying on a black box that hallucinates gibberish to “learn”, perform your work, and review your work.

All the while it literally consumes ungodly amounts of energy and is used as pretext to get rid of people.

Really cool stuff! I’m sure it’s 10x’ing your life!
by zer00eyz | 2025-06-08 15:53:13+00:00
> M910 with an i5

These are great and the M920q is also nice.

At 100 to 160 used these are a steal, just test the disks before you commit to long term projects with them (some have a fair bit of wear). Its newer cousins quickly climb in price to the $300+ range (still refurb/used)

The bleeding edge of this form factor is the Minisforum MS-01. At almost 500 bucks for the no ram/storage part it's a big performance jump for a large price jump. This isnt a terrible deal if you need dual SFP+ ports (and you might) and a free PCIE slot but it is a large price jump.
by marcusb | 2025-06-08 15:53:21+00:00
> why would it be different with LLMs?

Because LLMs are not competent professionals to whom you might outsource tasks in your life. LLMs are statistical engines that make up answers all the time, even when the LLM “knows” the correct answer (i.e., has the correct answer hidden away in its weights.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m able to validate something is true much more quickly and efficiently if it is a subject I know well.
by bobbiechen | 2025-06-08 15:53:27+00:00
The Fifth Solvay Conference

From back row to front, reading left to right: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Léon Brillouin, Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Willans Richardson.

https://mymodernmet.com/the-solvay-conference-photo/
by herval | 2025-06-08 15:53:35+00:00
Definitely. It’s not just online either - half the billboards I see now are AI. The posters at school. The “we’re hiring!” ad at the local McDonalds. It’s 100x cheaper and faster than any alternative (stock images, hiring an editor or illustrator, etc), and most non technical people can get exactly what they want in a single shot, these days.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 15:54:07+00:00
> Not just that. ISP knows the IP addresses anyway, so they can make an educated guess which domain you are accessing (or use SNI). So why would I want to leak this data to another entity?

Because a lot of sites are behind a CDN that makes such guessing infeasible, and can use ECH to block the SNI leak. And since your ISP knows your real identity and other personal info like physical address, it's better privacy-wise for them not to be the ones who know exactly which sites your IP is visiting.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 15:54:58+00:00
> Also shoving every protocol under the sun into HTTPS just feels wrong. I get why it's happening (too many middleware boxes and ISPs think internet == web). But shouldn't we fix the ISPs and middleware instead of endlessly working around it?

It'd be great for the horrible ISPs and middleboxes to change, but that's not realistic, and working around it by wrapping everything in HTTPS is realistic.
by Retric | 2025-06-08 15:56:36+00:00
It’s not that humans have perfect drawing skills, it’s that humans can judge their performance and get better over time.

Ask 100 random people to draw a bike and in 10 minutes and they’ll on average suck while still beating the LLM’s here. Give em an incentive and 10 months and the average person is going to be able to make at least one quite decent drawing of a bike.

The cost and speed advantage of LLM’s is real as long as you’re fine with extremely low quality. Ask a model for 10,000 drawings so you can pick the best and you get a marginal improvements based on random chance at a steep price.
by lutoma | 2025-06-08 15:56:40+00:00
Borg is a fork of Attic, not restic. Restic is also written in Go while Attic/Borg is in Python.

For me the reason to use Borg over Restic has always been that it was _much_ faster due to using a server-side daemon that could filter/compress things. The downside being you can’t use something like S3 as storage (but services like Borgbase or Hetzner Storage Boxes support Borg).

That’s probably changed with the server backend, but with the same downside.
by Yenrabbit | 2025-06-08 15:56:56+00:00
A few observations: 1) the performance vs complexity curve looks very similar to that for most humans (having seen groups attempt Towers of Hanoi with 5 car tires) haha 2) models can trivially solve some of these tasks when given tools 3) this is an internship paper with some quirks that many mostly dismissed, but is being quoted everywhere as "Apple proves LLMs can't ever reason"

Anyway, fun experiment to test your understanding of these things but don't take any conclusions as gospel :)
by diwank | 2025-06-08 15:57:08+00:00
we tried a few different variations but tbh had universally bad results. for example, we use `ward` test runner in our python codebase, and claude sonnet (both 3.7 and 4) keep trying to force-switch it to pytest lol. every. single. time.

maybe we could either try this with opus 4 and hope that cheaper models catch up, or just drink the kool-aid and switch to pytest...
by croes | 2025-06-08 15:57:45+00:00
Our brain power is declining because we spent less on children’s education in favor of tax cuts for big companies and billionaires.

And now we rather spend money on AI than teachers.

That makes it worse and isn’t a cover but shift of priorities for the worst.

> Let AI be your personal assistant, your coach, your therapist, your nutritionist, your workout buddy, travel planner, your everything.

That’s a naive take on AI, in the end it’s companies and about profit and you don’t want those companies to be your personal assistant, your coach, your therapist, your nutritionist, your workout buddy, travel planner, your everything.

Because it’s not yours but theirs
Show HN: Let’s Bend – Open-Source Harmonica Bending Trainer
by egdels | 2025-06-08 16:00:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a simple harmonica practice app that shows real-time pitch and bending targets for each hole. It helps blues harp players visualize their technique and improve intonation.

No tracking, no ads, open source (MIT).

The app is available on F-Droid and GitHub. You can find more details here: https://letsbend.de

Feedback welcome!
by eckelhesten | 2025-06-08 16:00:34+00:00
That’s incorrect. I use DNSecure (iOS app) to relay all DNS traffic on my iPhone to my DNScrypt-proxy server which I host on the internet (make sure you know what you do before exposing DNS servers on the internet).

It’s awesome because I have system wide tracker/adblocking which works whether or not I’m on my LAN and even with Apple Private Relay on.
by diwank | 2025-06-08 16:00:52+00:00
yeah, the max subscription comes in two tiers, $100 gets you 5x the tokens than pro (which only has sonent) and the $200 gets you 20x. doing the math for tokens is kinda annoying and not straightforward atm. they also have a "hybrid" mode which uses opus until ~20% tokens for opus left then switches to sonnet
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 16:01:03+00:00
This article is totally wrong. I'm not sure how it got so much traction. Details:

> But slowly people started to realize what the collaboration between Mozilla and Cloudflare really means: Cloudflare gets all your DNS queries.

There are a lot of DoH providers other than Cloudflare. https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS lists several. If you don't want Cloudflare seeing your DNS requests, then use one of them instead. (And even for users who do just stick with the default, I think it's better privacy-wise for Cloudflare to see that data than for the average American ISP to.)

> Yes, there is. It is called DNS over TLS and is specified as a proposed standard in RFC 7858. This provides transport encryption to DNS without abusing HTTP as transport protocol.

The only difference between DoT and DoH is that DoT is easier to block and force fallback to totally insecure DNS. There's no reason to ever use DoT if you can use DoH. (And I don't get why the author likes it better: whoever runs the DoT server gets the exact same data that they'd get with a DoH server instead.)

> No, it is not. Abusing HTTP as a transport protocol for DNS data adds a unneeded complexity to the protocol. You must add a HTTP module to all DNS servers or interact with a separated HTTP server on the same system in order to support DoH. That is a lot of code which can contain a lot of bugs and security flaws. Complexity is the enemy of security.

The extra complexity of HTTP is massively outweighed by the significant reduction in fallbacks to insecure DNS.
by mindslight | 2025-06-08 16:03:28+00:00
No, it doesn't. You're assuming that markets have a computational efficiency and smoothness that simply isn't there. P != NP.

Markets are a heuristic based around mediating between the interests of different parties precisely because the overall problem is computationally hard. If markets achieved the kind of optimality you're thinking, then top-down central planning would also be workable.
by baq | 2025-06-08 16:03:42+00:00
It’s hard to think of a worse analogy TBH. My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit. It is a fad, but it’s also a very useful tool.

Ape NFTs are… ape NFTs. Useless. Pointless. Negative value for most people.
by raintrees | 2025-06-08 16:03:48+00:00
I think that just shows our different perceptions - I, too, see many HN posts as very left. Frequently seen in assumptions about values/ethics/morals...

Update: On further reflection, it is not HN that I am describing. It is the content of the posts that seem to lean that way...

I am outside both of the US parties, I think it is like being sober at a party of those partaking in alcohol. Different perception of the same situation.
by exiguus | 2025-06-08 16:07:02+00:00
dnsdist support QPS limits [1] and eBPF filtering [2]. And you can use dynamic Rules to drop traffic and there are several rules to set UDP and TCP limits.

A in production config looks like: https://github.com/freifunkMUC/ffmuc-salt-public/blob/main/d...

[1] https://www.dnsdist.org/advanced/qpslimits.html

[2] https://www.dnsdist.org/advanced/ebpf.html
by flanked-evergl | 2025-06-08 16:07:12+00:00
They make something people want. Most people I know thah use it, including me, just don't really see that big a downside to using it.

I'm not even slightly considering removing any Meta app, and let's face it, Firefox is over as a project because their priorities are all out of wack.

So Chrome and meta apps all the way for me, but I'm sure to listen to the Amazon Washington Post as to how I should treat Amazon competitors in the future.
by znpy | 2025-06-08 16:07:21+00:00
> Selfhosting is a pain in the ass

I use rhel/rocky Linux exactly because of this. I don’t need the latest software on my home server, and i am reasonably sure i can run yum update without messing up my system.

Most of the time people complain about system administration when self-hosting it’s because they’re using some kind of meme-distro that inevitably breaks (which is something you don’t want on a server, irrespective if it’s at work or at home).

Bonus point: i can run rootless containers with podman (orchestrated via docker-compose).

And i get professionally curated software (security patches backported, selinux policies, high-quality management and troubleshooting tooling).
by sremani | 2025-06-08 16:07:51+00:00
The book - PMPP - Programming Massively Parallel Processors

The YouTube Channel - CUDA_MODE - it is based on PMPP I could not find the channel, but here is the playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuhJEEJQgUM&list=PLVEjdmwEDk...

Once done, you would be on solid foundation.
by ModernMech | 2025-06-08 16:08:13+00:00
You're conflating education work with productive work. School is about learning, for one's personal fulfilment. You're supposed to do that mostly on your own time. School is just a way to keep you motivated to learn a particular thing, and the notion of homework is necessary to reinforce that learning happens on your own and in a classroom.

But actually mostly on your own. 45 minutes twice a week in a classroom is just not enough time to learn anything of substance and depth. The Thursday-to-Tuesday memory loss is especially profound; Tuesday class is mostly spent reminding everyone who didn't do their homework what we had talked about last Thursday.
by Irongirl1 | 2025-06-08 16:08:34+00:00
Censorship.

All kinds including tech. People not wanting to allow someone to read a book because the person is "in trouble with the law." What does their breaking the law have to do with their explanations of how a technology works? Nothing...and the removal of a book says more about the vendors than it does about the supposed criminal. Generally censorship as practiced in this country is more about politics (ie: someone not liking someone else) than it is about accuracy.
by creata | 2025-06-08 16:08:40+00:00
True, and there are plenty of other reasons Chebyshev polynomials are convenient, too.

But I guess what I was asking was: is there some kind of abstract argument why the semicircle distribution would be appropriate in this context?

For example, you have abstract arguments like the central limit theorem that explain (in some loose sense) why the normal distribution is everywhere.

I guess the semicircle might more-or-less be the only way to get something where interpolation uses the DFT (by projecting points evenly spaced on the complex unit circle onto [-1, 1]), but I dunno, that motivation feels too many steps removed.
by Mister_Snuggles | 2025-06-08 16:11:04+00:00
How does this prevent a random application from making an HTTPS request to a random hard-coded IP address? Similarly, how does this prevent an application from making an HTTPS request to a generic host (e.g., api.example.com)?

This is what DoH looks like from outside the application. You can't really tell that it's DoH since it's just an HTTPS connection, which is kind of the whole point of it.
by ajmurmann | 2025-06-08 16:12:00+00:00
> Adjust that medium household income statistics for purchasing power in usa across last 40 yrs, you’ll realise wages are same or have declined in real value term’s when the total wealth in country has skyrocketed.

That's why I said "real median household income". Real income in economics means PPP corrected and is up a lot. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I wholeheartedly agree on the housing issue though. The cause there isn't with top politicians or some evil cabal limiting housing but it's a local problem caused by elections of NIMBY candidates and local community having too much input on permitting while only a small group of mostly of older and wealthier NIMBYs show up to those meetings.
by dataflow | 2025-06-08 16:12:00+00:00
Are you sure this is exactly what it means? You're basically saying that if I start hacking on a driver that consumes such an API tonight, I must release it as GPL somewhere publicly the moment I start consuming the API? I can't even work on it for a bit privately?

I'm surprised if so, because usually these sorts of licenses only apply if you're redistributing the code, not if you're just using it privately.
by diggan | 2025-06-08 16:12:54+00:00
The models that are being put under the "Pelican" testing don't use a GUI to create SVGs (either via "tools" or anything else), they're all Text Generation models so they exclusively use text for creating the graphics.

There are 31 posts listed under "pelican-riding-a-bicycle" in case you wanna inspect the methodology even closer: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-06-08 16:13:06+00:00
> If you want to build a train the best way to save money is to build exactly the same as everyone else does: standard off the shelf trains, running on standard off the shelf rails, and standard off the shelf overhead rail.

You are speaking like a naive person that thinks that most the challenge is the physical world

But in UK most of the challenge is archaic and idiosyncratic laws, disproportionately powerful NIMBY’s and the treasury brain.

The treasury brain will approve a project with 1X capex and 10x opex instead of one that has 2X capex and 1X opex

The NYMBY is wild and unpredictable, they just killed project for a data centre placed on top of a literal dump because it would ruin the view of that dump from a motorway (nobody lives there)

A project to re-open 3 miles of railway that already exists took 5 years to approve and 80,000 pages of environmental accessment

But if it’s innovate and designed in UK it might just slip through
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 16:13:08+00:00
> Unless there's a hard counter to the hard counter?

Two opposing Iron Beam lasers pointed at the allied one?

But also, low-flying drones using ground cover to get close, and in the final approach attack from multiple angles at the same time so it physically cannot rotate fast enough to reach all targets before impact — if it has a maximum 180° rotation time of 0.2 seconds, and the attacking drone has a terminal speed of 100m/s (~224 mph), the last 20 meters has to be clear of all cover, including the soldiers who are operating the Iron Beam and might find their bodies being kept between the drones and the laser itself until the last moment.
by znpy | 2025-06-08 16:13:44+00:00
> The landlord is merciless if you miss a payment, you are out.

That’s a skill issue though.

I have a domain that i used to pre-pay for years in advance.

For my current main domain i had prepaid nine years in advance and it was paid up to 2028. A couple of years ago i topped it up and now it’s prepaid up to 2032.

It’s not much money (when I prepaid for 9 years i spent like 60€ or so) and you’re usually saving because you’re fixing the price so skipping price hikes, inflation etc.
by gxd | 2025-06-08 16:14:37+00:00
I've been using this for a few years. I have a legal copy of Win98 with several games from my physical collection fully set-up. Getting to the desktop is just one click away on Win11. Also, my setup is fully portable and can run on any PC from a USB stick. Dosbox-X and Dosbox-staging is what powers my retro PC game collection!
by kuschku | 2025-06-08 16:15:04+00:00
That's already been the case for years, and is why DoH was invented in the first place.

Chromecasts hardcode DNS to 8.8.8.8, so people would redirect that traffic to their PiHole for adblocking.

To "fix" that, Google introduced DoH, which is why adblocking on chromecasts is significantly harder nowadays.
by simonw | 2025-06-08 16:15:20+00:00
The way I run the pelican on a bicycle benchmark is to use this exact prompt:

Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

And execute it via the model's API with all default settings, not via their user-facing interface.

Currently none of the model APIs enable tools unless you ask them to, so this method excludes the use of additional tools.