MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 7bit | 2025-06-01 08:35:29+00:00
I dtarted my Linux journey 3 weeks ago with Arch and Ansible to create a declarative system. The installing-part however was tricky, because I have a second disk with Windows and I want to use secure boot. And if I wanted to use Ansible, I would have to create a specific ISO. And then I would have to manually define the disk I want to use or run into the risk of formatting the wrong one and lose a lot of data.

Then I found NixOS, which is like Ansible, but better, because Ansible only adds information to a system, but NixOS also ensures that anything that is not declared is removed as well.

After three weeks, I realized that the effort to declaratively (or automate an imperstively) install the OS is such a lot of work that does not pay off if you're not going to install multiple systems each week or month.

How many commands does it take to actually install NixOS? You partition the disk which take 3 commands. Then you format it, which takes 3 commands. Then you mount the disks, which takes 3 commands. Then you install it, download your configuration and apply it, which is another 2-3 commands.

It takes 5 minutes vs whatever effort you put into creating a declarative installer and keeping that up to date. I also had to think of the time it would cost me to actually figure out HOW a declarative installation would work and the tools I would require. I reckon that the first 24 system would essentially be free (opposed to the 2 hours or so it would cost me to figure out declarative OS installations).

I decided that for me, it is not worth it, although I am the type of personality that just hates not automating things.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-01 08:35:49+00:00
Speaking as someone who has made up myriad "screen names" and email addresses and forum usernames, and someone who has struggled with the validity of his own given name, I considered why it is called a "given name" and how arrogant it may be to unilaterally make one up instead. These are commonly known as "assumed names" or "aliases".

I decided that not only was it futile, after a lifetime of going by one name, to convince people to call me something else, or know me by another name, but it is also arrogant to try and manipulate those names which have been given to me by people who love me. And furthermore, how insulting and appalling it was, for me to say that I didn't like the name I was given, in fact being baptized with that name, would be a repudiation of not only my parents, but my mother church and her authority to accept the name which my parents proposed at that time.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-06-01 08:35:56+00:00
I don’t think the authors are being wilfully deceptive in any way, but Blender Cycles on a gpu of that quality could absolutely render every scene in this paper in less than 4s per frame. There are very modest tech demo scenes with low complexity, and they’ve set blender to cycle through 4k iterations per pixel - which seems non-sensible as Blender would hit something close to its output after a couple of hundred cycles, and then burn gpu cycles for the next 3800 cycles making no improvements.

I think they’ve inadvertently included Blender’s instantiation phase in the overall rendering time, while not including the transformer instantiation.

I’d be interested to see the time to render the second frame for each system. My hunch is that Blender would be a lot more performant.

I do think the papers results are fascinating in general, but there’s some nuance in the way they’ve configured and timed Blender.
by nextn | 2025-06-01 08:36:47+00:00
> That assumes the vendor runs a buy-back scheme. That would cost

What would it cost? The vendor runs software that sells tickets. The same software can buy tickets back, invalidate the ticket IDs, and issue new tickets with new IDs. This feature can be part of the software at no additional cost.

Not running a buy-back scheme possible costs more to customers because of today's scalpers.

> How do you distinguish between someone buying tickets as a gift and someone who sold them on in a manner you did not detect?

As the venue/band, you don't need to. Sell to anyone.

As the customer, when you're buying from a scalper you know you're buying at a higher price than the advertised price.

> what if the group of friends changes - who pays the admin fees?

I don't see what admin fees must exist for this. Software manages anything. Printing a new ticket is cheap.

> Many scalpers are rather experienced and organised.

So is law enforcement. Scalpers can't hide the fact that they're selling.
by bjackman | 2025-06-01 08:36:55+00:00
I'm not able to install anything like this in my current home but if you live somewhere reasonably warm (so it's not super unpleasant to get a wet bum) I can hugely recommend something like this. (I want everyone to get one since I can't).

Living in Asia where the "bumgun" (bidet on a hose) is popular made me realise how barbaric toilet paper is. It's really quite disgusting and also very uncomfortable!

In India it's relatively common to see these retrofitted bidets that fit under the seat. Personally I think they're inferior to the hose but that's a personal preference, these things still work great, and they are less intrusive and probably easier to install. One of my Indian colleagues has one at his home in Europe too.
Show HN: Pokémon Blue remade in React (playable in browser)
by chase-manning | 2025-06-01 08:37:35+00:00
I rebuilt Pokémon Red/Blue from scratch in React and TypeScript as a side-project.

It works natively in browser, and even has a fun gameboy view on mobile. It's 100% a recreation, in that it doesn't use any of the original game code, other than the image assets and sounds. You can move around with the arrow keys, Spacebar is Start, and Enter is A.

It's MIT licensed, so feel free to fork it and do whatever you like

Contributions are very welcome, there's still lots of work to go until it's a full recreation of the game, so if anyone wants to help add content please feel free! Currently it supports up to Mt Moon.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-06-01 08:38:07+00:00
Not sure about the current state of affairs. But I think for example MySQL had json columns way earlier than mariadb, and to me they appear to have a nicer design/accompanying functions to work with them.

Also, I've run into a deadlock issue a while ago with mariadb. Skimmed their bug tracker and there are a couple similar reports, some remaining open, other getting fixes like "well I changed stuff around and I think it might solve the issue". An emerging pattern was that they think there might be a locking issue, but they're not sure, and any deadlock they can reproduce under rr (or whatever that recording debugger is called) is, according to them an issue with rr itself and a false positive. It gave me serious "we're just yoloing it" vibes. I understand it's not a trivial code base and they're probably understaffed, and I still prefer it over MySQL merely because of who owns that project but still, it left a weird impression.
by hgl | 2025-06-01 08:39:13+00:00
Not to criticize the article, which is very well written, just some extra info:

It seems for the author, the custom installer is mainly used for accepting user SSH public key, terminfo, and maybe also locale.

Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh. Since NixOS is installed via nixos-anywhere, it runs a bash script to do everything, and all the script's dependencies will be pulled by nix.

For people who don't want to build a custom installer, or their cloud environment doesn't allow one, you can simply host a script somewhere and download and run it on the remote machine to add your SSH public key and other customizations, including partitioning the disk.

Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko runs in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.

I wrote a nix configuration library[1] that also does NixOS installation (uses nixes-anywhere under the hood), where you can choose between using disko, a default script[2] that handles 90% of the use cases (using only the default tools available on a vanilla NixOS installer, so nothing gets installed to the ram), or your own script.

[1] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse

[2] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse/blob/main/load/partitionScri...
by zinekeller | 2025-06-01 08:39:54+00:00
Apparently Chrome does not support secp521r1 EC/DH key exchange. secp521r1... should probably be avoided unless you're targeting FIPS standards (too much security, also designed by NSA) but "higher bits" apparently are sexier than having a more rigorous algorithm than x25519.

... or probably this is very intentional move to block Chrome?
by mattlondon | 2025-06-01 08:41:08+00:00
I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it" when faced with a difficult/big decision.

I am not sure how much I believe that or how true it is, but I have found that many times I have come up with a better solution to a problem after going for a run or having a shower. So there might be some truth in it.

But yeah it is hard to know when you are in too deep sometimes. I find that imposter syndrome usually kicks in with thoughts of "why am I finding this so complex or hard? I bet colleague would have solved this with a simple fix or a concise one-liner! There must be a better way?". TBH this is where I find LLMs most useful right now, to think about different approaches or point-out all the places where code will need to change if I make a change and if there is a less-destructive/more-concise way of doing things that I hadn't thought of.
by hoseyor | 2025-06-01 08:42:18+00:00
Not only that, he even explicitly states that he has a mostly online perspective.

It’s a curious phenomenon that I don’t think is nearly appreciated enough that this technocratic, hubristic mindset that is prevalent among people in tech, riding high on some sense of power and high income, is causing major social issues akin to various other aristocratic type mindsets of the past; the figurative princes riding around their hereditary lands with upturned noses at the peasants they abuse that are both the source and base of their en-titled lives.

Then you add on top of that the insult of immigrants trying to lecture indigenous people they are freeloaders on about how they know better who and what they are, and you have a mixture that seems like it could easily end up boiling over for understandable reasons one day, when the resentment is explosively released because containment by the authoritarian ruling class invariably slips.
by Y_Y | 2025-06-01 08:42:20+00:00
> I don’t know who todsacerdoti is, but looking at their submission history, it looks like this account automatically cross-posts from other sites (maybe lobsters?)

That's a pretty serious allegation to make without evidence.

Luckily I have some evidence right here:

~ $ python3 repost3.py todsacerdoti 78.0 seconds earlier - michael.stapelberg.ch - I like to install NixOS (declaratively) 92.0 seconds earlier - southcla.ws - Structured Errors in Go 149.0 seconds earlier - home.expurple.me - Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications? 101.0 seconds earlier - www.sitongpeng.com - WebSockets guarantee order – so why are my messages scram... 142.0 seconds earlier - volution.ro - PunchCard Key Backup 74.0 seconds earlier - www.youtube.com - Configure Your Git [video] 79.0 seconds earlier - download.vusec.net - Half Spectre, Full Exploit: Hardening Rowhammer Attacks w... 53567.0 seconds earlier - standardcompletions.org - Standard Completions 67.0 seconds earlier - bitfehler.srht.site - FOSS Tools for Infrastructure Testing 97.0 seconds earlier - ratfactor.com - Implementing a Forth ...

I checked afterwards, most of those articles have different authors on Lobsters, so it doesn't seem to be one person just funding cool stuff and submitting to both.

edit: some stats -

1 posts where HN is earlier within ten minutes 135 posts where HN is after within ten minutes Earliest instance within ten minutes: 2025-05-10T16:00:53Z Average time to repost: 140 seconds

@dang - I know the anti-spam countermeasures are secret, and that there may be good reasons for cross-posting, but perhaps this might be a good thing to check for abuse of (even as a cronjob).
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 08:42:47+00:00
Tbh, I've completely abandoned the concept of a systems programming language because the primary benefit of the concept seems to be to argue over it. There's practicality (eg can i link this into the kernel?) and then there's hand-waving about how it feels to a developer, and the conversation seems almost entirely subsumed by the latter.

See also: "is C a high-level or low-level language?" Just shoot me instead, please.
by muragekibicho | 2025-06-01 08:43:05+00:00
Interesting fact The authors of this 1975 paper wrote it with the intention of designing cryptographic ciphers. Here's the interesting thing : the paper's main theorem is foundational for modern Catalytic computers. To quote the inventors of catalytic computers "Coppersmith and Grossman [CG75] have shown that the class TP(Z 2 , 2 O(n) , O(1)) contains all boolean functions"
by MrJohz | 2025-06-01 08:43:32+00:00
> sending an empty skeleton that then gets hydrated with user data over APIs is fastest for a user's perception of loading speed

This is often repeated, but my own experience is the opposite: when I see a bunch of skeleton loaders on a page, I generally expect to be in for a bad experience, because the site is probably going to be slow and janky and cause problems. And the more the of the site is being skeleton-loaded, the more my spirits worsen.

My guess is that FCP has become the victim of Goodhart's Law — more sites are trying to optimise FCP (which means that _something_ needs to be on the screens ASAP, even if it's useless) without optimising for the UX experience. Which means delaying rendering more and adding more round-trips so that content can be loaded later on rather than up-front. That produces sites that have worse experiences (more loading, more complexity), even though the metric says the experience should be improving.
by proc0 | 2025-06-01 08:44:05+00:00
I assume it's reproduceable. He's using a philosophical argument called the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. So it's not just a random conversation, and Alex is a philosophy guy so he knows how to lead the AI into that conclusion.

He explains at the end that the ad was definitely scripted but not the rest of the conversation, since the point of the channel is to explore philosophy. He recently has been posting these AI conversations and they are super interesting to me.

As far as context, I think ChatGPT (it's probably o3 I would guess) has a huge context window that can include large documents or codebases. Most top models have a huge window now, and while it's probably more expensive to use all those tokens I'm sure it's more of an investment for youtube channels.
by asimpletune | 2025-06-01 08:44:45+00:00
Honestly one of the biggest and most important differences is cars, city planning, and how they effect one’s community. I saw the other day a show hn for making friends and thought that so much of that need comes from not being surrounded by people in cities designed for people.

I’ll use a metaphor that I think is funny. If life were an office, it is better from a community standpoint to start your life in an open office, and then eventually decide as you get more senior if you want to work from home completely, hybrid, or stay in the open floor plan. The opposite is a disaster, when life begins as a work from home office, from a community perspective, because you don’t have a good bridge to prior generations and other branches of the human genealogy tree.

I’ll end by saying that I love the USA and it has a lot of great attributes as a nation. I honestly wouldn’t have enough time in this comment to go over how many things are done well there. Anyways, I’m just a little worried about the compounding effects from being without community, due to cities designed for cars. Situations like that can be unpredictable and dangerous, with unsavory alternatives suddenly seeming attractive.

Roommates, romantic partners, workmates, and college buds are the saving grace in all this.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 08:46:05+00:00
That attitude as described feels like chucking a large portion of the benefit you get from leaving C out the window.

But...

> But at that point, why does it need to be part of the language? Would not a standard library module suffice?

This indicates zig is desired to ship with unicode support—just not part of the core language runtime. Now this I can support—unicode doesn't require core runtime support. Most programs don't have a need for unicode text normalization, for instance, so why would you need this without linking in a standard library? But the idea of not shipping unicode in your standard library rightfully died decades ago.

Notably, this doesn't imply:

* source code being ascii

* string literals being ascii

* unicode string processing not being immediately available in the standard environment

So I'm not sure which behavior is being described here, but I certainly consider utf8 support to be table-stakes for language design in 2025. Without this a language is a toy. I'm not going back to using ICU and will fight anyone who encourages me to.
by schobi | 2025-06-01 08:46:23+00:00
What a beautiful execution. He seems to have included all requests and written about every detail.

Going to this kind of resolution, the only practical use case is with cameras. You record some frames and later want to check the exact timestamp. This is even useful for a single image, not just high speed cameras.

But taking images is not just a single point in time. There is an exposure time and it is hard to measure absolute timings on start and end of exposure. With a segment clock display, the numbers will blur. For this a row of LEDs is fine - just light up one at a time. In the image you will see multiple leds on at once, giving you verification of start and stop.

But again, I needed just one clock and built it already.
by noisy_boy | 2025-06-01 08:46:42+00:00
I mean that's such a text heavy area anyway. I am not an expert in filing S1 but won't a lot of it be more or less boilerplate + customisations specific to the offering? Any reasonably advanced model should be able to take you a good chunk of the way. Then iterate with a verifier type model + a few people to review; even with iterations that should definitely shorten the overall time. It seems like such a perfect use case for an LLM - what am I missing that is hidden in the scepticism of the sibling comments?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-01 08:47:00+00:00
I'd be interested to know how you traced this. I dove into the rabbit hole, and used ssllabs.com for a client browser check. I compared the client with the server to note that the server, very strict in its protocols, accepts only TLS v1.3 (check) and only a single CHACHA cipher (check) so I could not see why they were not connecting. Now I do see that Chrome only does ecdh secp384r1 or 256, but that was fine print, and I did not understand its importance.

An attempt to fetch the blog URL with http: also failed with a 404.

Anyway, I did find the blog article, dated May 2022, on the Wayback Machine, in two old snapshots, and attempting to take a snapshot today failed. The W3C Validator was able to fetch and parse anyway.

There was no particular indication of browser compatibility in the blog post. But a very opinionated piece on DNSSEC indeed.
by bluenose69 | 2025-06-01 08:47:36+00:00
I think written examinations are the only solution, and "distance" is the right word.

Also, oral examinations are costly to administer. This work needs to be done with a panel, to avoid complaints. And the panel members cannot include TAs, who are after all just students themselves. A 10-minute examination can have start-up problems, and doesn't allow for in-depth followup questions.

With a panel of say 3 professors replacing 1 professor, and interviews of say 1 hour replacing what might be 20 minutes of grading, we are talking about quite a lot of increased workload.
by Phreaker00 | 2025-06-01 08:48:31+00:00
> I read somewhere that the subconscious brain continues "working on problems" even when you are not actively working on it consciously. Hence the expression to "sleep on it".

It's something I've actively used for almost two decades now when dealing with challenges i'm stuck on. I remember one of my professors explaining it as having a 'prepared mind'.

What I do is, before I go to bed, try to summarize the problem to myself as concise as possible (like rubber ducking) and then go to sleep. Very often the next morning I wake up with a new insight or new approach that solves the problem in 10 minutes that took me hours the day before.
by dagw | 2025-06-01 08:49:31+00:00
So someone on the edge of poverty, balancing two or three minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet, should be considered part of the same class as the CEO of Microsoft or Google? Hell most people on the Forbes list 'work' in at least some meaning of the word, even if many of them effectively work for themselves.

What about the trust fund kid working part time at an art gallery just because they like the scene and hanging out with artists? Same class?

And on the flip side, are pensioners, the unemployed, and people on permanent disability part of the same class as the dilettante children of billionaires?
by BlueTemplar | 2025-06-01 08:50:12+00:00
Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.

And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-06-01 08:50:14+00:00
Yes and no, locally it would work because that's what you grew up with, but traveling, and especially communicating would be equally confusing. Currently we have that problem on globe-spanning video calls where "let's schedule another meeting tomorrow" could mean very different things. In the global utc scenario, tomorrow would still mean different things to someone growing up with "midnight" during the day vs. When you're asleep.
by lauritz | 2025-06-01 08:50:33+00:00
I think there is opportunity for a more design-oriented tool in this space. I tried pitch.com a while back and was a heavy Google Slides user for a while, but, like the author, I keep coming back to Keynote.

What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.