MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wtallis | 2025-07-27 07:33:53+00:00
Your last sentence does not follow from the preceding one. Hybrid drives were doomed by having truly tiny caches, making them not particularly fast (you need a lot of flash chips in parallel to get high throughput), prone to cache thrashing, and easy to wear out the NAND flash. These days, even if you try, it's hard to build a caching system that bad. There just aren't SSDs small and slow enough to have such a crippling effect. Even using a single consumer SSD as a cache for a full shelf of hard drives wouldn't be as woefully unbalanced as the SSHDs that tried to get by with only 8GB of NAND.
by teo_zero | 2025-07-27 07:33:56+00:00
I agree, but the current specification is complex too: two identical "tagged" structs are compatible, two identical "untagged" structs are not. And before C23 it was even worse, depending on whether the two structs were defined in the same file or not.

We're applying a patch over a patch over a patch... no surprise the end result looks like a patchwork!
by debian3 | 2025-07-27 07:35:38+00:00
There is tons of cheaper alternatives now. Some chinese brand. The implementation is particularly hard to get right (how to avoid object that enters the radar field of view like passing next to a fence among other tricky scenario like a car that follow at the same speed as you but suddenly accelerate to pass you, etc). A lot of competiting radars will have false positives or negatives. That’s why Garmin is still the favorite product on the market. Wahoo just released one as well, and the reviews are quite positive so far. Bryton makes one, Magene, Giant, Trek, igpsport, etc.
by tgv | 2025-07-27 07:36:12+00:00
What do you expect to run on them then? I run 3 user facing services plus their test environments plus the database on the same 8GB server, and half of the memory is free. The database takes about 10GB (growing slowly). There's also a 10GB media directory that grows slowly. Most of it is images, I think, and videos are short. But it'll be quite a while before reaching 1TB.
by ycombiredd | 2025-07-27 07:36:53+00:00
I subjected some of my own writing to an "AI-detector" and was surprised to find what a high percentage of AI I must have in my DNA.

Joking aside, I have found myself recently using phrases and styles of turning a phrase and stopped myself asking, "since when do you say that?"

Since I've spent countless hours talking to LLMs, that's when. I even had a multi-hour conversation with ChatGPT about my idea for "perfectly flawed" lab-grown diamonds, several months ago and was excited to finally find a place to talk about what I learned, hence the comment you attribute to being from an LLM.

I'm probably not an LLM, nor did I generate a response for this thread using an LLM, but you've just made me really self-conscious about how now humans, or at least myself, have to be wary that we don't start talking like the LLMs that are supposed to be talking like us.
by crinkly | 2025-07-27 07:37:05+00:00
I disagree with this.

The ideological approaches to these problems always seem to result in adding more technology to the problem, which introduces more attack vectors, more control points and more complexity, all of which are difficult to understand and manage. The real problem is you should not need to identify yourself all the time. And the best way to do that, contrary to the SaaS culture on here, is not to hand over your stuff to someone else where you need to identify yourself to get it back or even involve yourself in "services culture".

So over the last 2 years I unpicked all my dependencies and moved to a reductionist and disposable model. The "minimum happy subset" is pretty much a domain with an IMAP box still, as it was 20 years ago. The IMAP box is dumb enough to be moved around. And your stuff should be in simple files, with well-documented formats, on the computer that you own and control. An average user can self-manage this with minimal effort. Everything else I have found to be 100% disposable.

This incidentally lines up 1:1 with the non-technical friends I have who just don't care and do it that way anyway. Perhaps we care too much.

Also can we just get some plain old HTML presented like a 50 year old book next time.
by differentmod | 2025-07-27 07:38:59+00:00
> I would take the FP zealots more seriously if they stopped asserting that FP makes things more correct.

Depends on the correctness requirements in question. But overall you are 100% correct about this.

FP, among other aspects, enables and promotes some ways of reasoning, for instance when mutation is avoided, that can be relatively easy to use to verify correctness of certain types of properties. For instance, induction proofs and some other kinds of mathematical proofs. However, for some other types of correctness properties, imperative programming can be easier to reason about than FP. One possible example is in regards to implementation of algorithms, where for instance an implementation of quicksort in C is likely to be more concise and clearer than a "true" quicksort implementation in Haskell. Another possible example is (if one assumes that FP requires garbage collection) that of hard real-time systems, for instance some types of medical devices, where even though some types of garbage collection may be viable, approaches like forgoing dynamic memory allocation (no malloc, no reference counting, no types of garbage collection, etc.) may be easier to reason about regarding achieving the correctness requirement of hard real-time.

Overall, I definitely agree that ML and FP are not the best for achieving correctness in all cases.

I personally like to pick and choose between FP and other approaches, and mix them in different ways dependent on the project or task at hand. Like, a purely functional interface with internal mutation in the implementation for optimization. Or, some mutable API that uses FP for some aspects of the implementation where FP is easier to reason about.

> I can tell you that debugging a compiler written in ML is a dumpster fire compared to debugging a compiler written in C++. If take C++ over any FP language for compilers any day of the week.

For larger compilers for some requirements, I could for some projects imagine that this is true. But, for smaller compilers with relatively few requirements, the pattern matching and tagged union features of modern ML languages are very popular, and I like having access to those features when writing smaller compilers. If you do not mind spending the time to expound on this topic, I would very much like to know more. Or, maybe some links, like blog posts, that discuss this topic. I am genuinely curious. A blog post could also be shared elsewhere, instead of just lost in some Hacker News discussion. (Maybe I should start blogging myself).

Also, Hacker News/Ycombinator is censorship-infested.
by uecker | 2025-07-27 07:39:30+00:00
Sure, but _Record would add even more complexity. The tag rules I had changed in C23 were a step to remove complexity, so a step towards cleaning it up. I wasn't able to fix the untagged case, because WG14 had concerns, but I think these can be addressed, making another step. It is always much harder to undo complexity than to add it.
by timr | 2025-07-27 07:39:33+00:00
Those laws sound similarly onerous -- though not identical -- to what we have in many US states. A depth of 300mm is...well, let's just say that's aggressive (11")...but we also have strict rules about the fencing that goes well beyond what would qualify as a normal fence [1]. And yes, there are penalties if you knowingly circumvent the rules and someone dies (though I don't know if these are criminal. There's probably always a way for a grandstanding prosecutor to make it stick.)

> Turns out that drowning deaths in pools for kids under 4 have decreased 5% per year for the last 20 years [0]. That's about 500 kids lives saved in twenty years at the expense of every pool in the country being fenced - about 1.6 million pools.

OK, well...it's a (big) assumption that the laws are the reason for the decline, and moreover, that every part of every rule you described is necessary for the declines.

That's the fundamental problem with these kinds of things -- the "if it saves even N>1 lives!" crowd appears, ignores causation, and ratchets up the strictness of rules -- never the other way around. So you end up with fencing rules around 11" inch-deep puddles of water, and full-employment programs for lifeguards, when maybe one or the other would have been sufficient. Or something else. And maybe next time, they will want to fence the fountain at the local park.

Beyond that, I don't like to engage in "value of a life" debates, because there's no upper bound on emotion. But I should say that your numbers left out the cost of the lifeguards.

[1] Because heaven forbid that a motivated child climbs said fence. If your fence is insufficiently slippery, you will be liable! I'm not joking.
by joules77 | 2025-07-27 07:40:37+00:00
Its not really restrained. You just have to be clever with the prompts.

If it was there would be a theory (of restraint) telling us precisely how many safety mechanisms (alignment/filters/policies/safety layers bla bla) are required the more unpredictable or large a model gets.

There is no such theory in sight, so we may have 500 safety mechs in place today and discover tomorrow we really needed 6 million.

We already see people breaking the models all the time.

If people with 3 inch brains can do it, what do you think a system with compute capacity the size of city can do?

End of the day we are building systems we don’t fully understand, restraining them with tools we don’t know are sufficient, and racing ahead faster than we can verify their safety.

Basic Jurassic Park plot unfolding.
by gf000 | 2025-07-27 07:40:55+00:00
This is one particular aspect of security.

If the hardware is not done properly, then the whole thing is broken. E.g. you are useless with your encryption keys if your modem sucks and leaks data, or if the CPU can trivially be made to run custom code (and you just entered your encryption key into a software that just looks like the prompt you were looking for)
by 01100011 | 2025-07-27 07:44:37+00:00
Yeah. Dr. Ford Brewer(https://www.youtube.com/@PrevMedHealth) talks a lot about this. I find him to be pretty current and he translates things into an easily understood format.

Basically the calcium stabilizes the plaque. Unstabilized plaque is what can rupture, squirting out from the artery wall into the blood and forming a clot. High cholesterol can cause deposits in the artery wall simply due to chemical diffusion. Inflammation, often caused by metabolic syndrome/diabetes expands the plaques. Idk, I probably got that wrong, but anyway calcium scores aren't well correlated with risk.
by TheCowboy | 2025-07-27 07:45:51+00:00
I don't think it necessarily leads to a of mastery of data structures and algorithms in the context of leetcode/modern coding interviews. One can do a lot of coding, and even be paid for it, for years and just not even encounter a lot of this material. Though one will have developed much of the same intuition that you typically acquire in a data structures class, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prepared to code mergesort on a whiteboard.
Show HN: ExtractQ cuts auto-insurance claim time 75% with zero-training AI
by berwinsingh | 2025-07-27 07:46:26+00:00
Hi HN—Berwin here.

We built ExtractQ after watching friends in insurance re-type PDFs all day. The service uses a vision-plus-LLM pipeline (AWS Bedrock + LangChain + CrewAI) to map any incoming doc to JSON without per-form training. We then validate via third-party APIs (DMV, VIN) before ingesting into the core claims app.

In production at a mid-size insurer we cut average claim prep time from 45min to 19min and reduced downstream data-entry errors by 85%.

I’d love feedback on scaling doc-heavy AI workflows—especially around validation and audit trails.
by procaryote | 2025-07-27 07:49:31+00:00
Pretty fun!

Pi's are powerable from the header pins, so you could save the usb adapters and route power directly from the relays to the power pins.

I'd also be tempted to add a way to access the serial consoles and the power button-equivalent pins of the pis for a lom-equivalent. It might be doable with a pico or two.

Nowadays with pi5s you could also of course hook a m2 board up to the pci lane and skip the m2 enclosures.

I'd personally prefer a recessed push-button power switch too; the switch you use would make me nervous something would drop on it and turn the system off
by jorams | 2025-07-27 07:49:46+00:00
For what it's worth I checked for The Netherlands, and the data can be correct if they always round down.

In 2021 The Netherlands had ~17.5 million inhabitants[1]. 99 people drowned[2], of which 19 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.56 or 0.45.

In 2020 The Netherlands had ~17.4 million inhabitants[1]. 138 people drowned[2], of which 31 were from different countries. Per 100 000 that's either 0.79 or 0.61.

This is of course dependent on the per 100 000 being inhabitants. If it includes tourists the rates go way down, because millions of people visit. For 2020 and 2021 it adds 7.2 and 6.2 million people respectively, for non-pandemic years closer to 20 million[3].

[1]: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/dashboard-bevolking/b...

[2]: https://www.cbs.nl/item?sc_itemid=7491f794-6e63-4556-bdcc-d9...

[3]: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/82059NED/table?dl=C...
by kragen | 2025-07-27 07:51:04+00:00
Usenet was a decentralized forum where anybody could participate and nobody could be banned. Despite this, the quality of discussion was usually very high. The user interfaces supported rather comprehensive threading and filtering capabilities, so you could block the people you wished you could ban. It was sort of destroyed by spam (since spammers couldn't be banned) but doesn't have much spam anymore because it's too obscure for spammers to bother with.

There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.

But Usenet still exists.
by kacesensitive | 2025-07-27 07:52:54+00:00
I know a few of these people. The two I've spoken with since their resignation basically said, "we're definitely getting laid off unless something insane changes with the funding cuts so at least this way we get a severance."

It's really sad how our NASA funding is the lowest it's been since 1961.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal...

I'm so sick of the not only incompetent leadership in the U.S., but the literal anti-science stance our government has taken. We're 6 months into this nightmare, I really can't see how it can get worse.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-27 07:53:11+00:00
> You have no idea what else he is or isn't up in arms about.

I actually looked back through 6 months worth of their comments. This is the angriest they've been here.

> Given that the concern is users of this app /making stuff up/, this line is a touch ironic.

I don't know why you would believe that I claimed to know what they're like in their personal life. It seems pretty obvious to me that I'd be referring to their comments here, but consider that point clarified now.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-27 07:55:05+00:00
LLMs have, for me at least, mostly replaced search. Because one of the most common things I search for is stuff like 'what is the function in [x] that does [y] in [z]'. Search for that on Google (or any other search engine) and your results will be complete trash. Search for it on an LLM and it's one of the few things they're nearly perfect at.

Search engines, especially with the resources of Google, could have developed at least basically functional natural language search decades ago. Instead they chose to rest on their laurels (pagerank even still plays a significant role!), and secure market control by anti-competitive behavior.

Google is certainly well on their way to becoming another Yahoo, but there's no extrinsic reason for it in the same way there was no reason for Yahoo to become what it became. In 100 years people will be searching the corpus of human writings (or whatever medium is dominant then) for information that's relevant to them. So there's in intrinsic reason for any search related company to just naturally die. It simply needs to keep innovating, or at least evolutionarily improving.
by olalonde | 2025-07-27 07:56:13+00:00
> I think that is a clue to the absence of a fair market dynamic.

Also probably due in part to what's been called the best advertising slogan of the 20th century: "A Diamond is Forever" [0]. The implication being that you're not supposed to sell (or buy) a used diamond.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Marketing
by Thorrez | 2025-07-27 07:56:22+00:00
Does the kidney meet the scientific definition of an organism?

If we were to survey those biologists, what would they say? Same regarding an infertile person, and cancer. I think scientists have already resolved the questions you're posing.

BTW, I don't think the nervous system argument is very common. Pro life people won't use it, because it means early abortions would be ok. Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted. The nervous system starts to form at 3 weeks of fetal age (5 weeks gestational age). Most people are in a tail-wagging-the-dog situation where their beliefs about personhood are derived from their belief about whether abortion should be legal or not, instead of the other way around. I see you haven't fallen into that trap. It does seem possible I have fallen into the trap. However, I do think science is on my side.
by vaylian | 2025-07-27 07:57:04+00:00
The article argues for interoperability through standardized protocols. Freedom is achieved through the possibility to move one's own data to a different host when the current host becomes problematic. Either host can be a commercial service, a friend's computer or your own server. Self-hosting is only one option among several in this model.

If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.
by isoprophlex | 2025-07-27 07:57:05+00:00
The relentless disintermediation of, well, everything in society is powered by big tech. No middle class can exist anymore in the neoliberal turbocapitalist system that's trying to grow into place everywhere; there is just the little human puttering about, and a bunch of extremely rich oligarchs and tech bros taking their money.

Technology made all of this possible. From amazon (destruction of local shops) to uber (not saying the old system was good, but who needs transit concentrated into the hands of a few) to google (monopolizing and stifling search and adtech). And who knows what role large scale manipulation by stochastic propaganda parrots will play.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-27 07:57:16+00:00
When all is said and done, the heart of your anger is that women might be "secretly publicizing" (your exact words, lol) things about men - sometimes about "their looks", and sometimes about the threat of assault and rape.

That's more than silly. It's dangerous for our sisters and mothers, and an attack on free speech.

I sincerely hope you can recognize that the threat of rape and assault rather outweighs the threat of people saying mean and untrue things about you behind our back. If not, well, then you might be the type of person that forum was made to talk about.
by neya | 2025-07-27 07:57:36+00:00
Whenever Yahoo! comes into discussion, no one talks about the other side of Marissa Mayer, the former CEO who fucked up Yahoo so bad. I had a friend back then who used to tell me how toxic the work culture had become in there. She apparently openly hated men and discriminated against them in the name of empowerment (and subsequently lawsuits were even filed). She was a glorified senior manager from Google basically who had no idea how to run a company. The Tumblr acquisition was proof. Most of the employees had lost faith in her after that acquistion basically. She, on the other hand, took away millions home while everyone who had invested their sweat equity and trusted her even one bit got screwed royally.
by pferde | 2025-07-27 07:58:07+00:00
The good news is that every self-hoster will be more than happy to start using this hypothetical self-sovereign solution with their data, if and when it becomes available.

I know I would. I'm just not smart enough, nor have the correct kind of experience to start designing, building or evangelizing such solution, so I am stuck waiting for someone else.

A good example is ForgeFed, which I can't wait to mature enough to be usable.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-27 08:01:10+00:00
I am not a writer and the blog posts I have built are really long and I am pretty sure that noone except myself have read them, but I really feel as if I use AI quite a lot to code some one off projects and nowadays a general overreliance on them too.

I am pretty sure that sure, it might be more tedious to actually manage your thoughts into more structured format to present to a larger audience and you might think that AI is meant for such tasks but I personally feel as if there is something about using AI in writing that feels sloppy most of the times.

Write bad but original. Maybe it won't get to the top of the HN, but you get the widest amount of freedom if you are really passionate about writing.

(I am thinking of stopping to use AI / using AI to just teach me things if I find a need to create a project that I am genuinely curious to build myself)
by Thorrez | 2025-07-27 08:01:36+00:00
I'm not saying capitalism is perfect. All I'm saying is that it's better than communism. This was the comment I was replying to:

>In political-left world, everybody has health care, access to housing and a liveable salary. In a political-right world, people are deported and killed, and the unlucky ones (i.e. the poor) live on the streets and can't afford to visit a doctor.
by crinkly | 2025-07-27 08:01:41+00:00
I work for one of the largest financial companies. It's not us or the sector. There's a whole shadow sector behind the scenes doing this stuff run by billionaire funded think tanks who manipulated tech markets and leverage political and social manipulation through their connections. It's the world we live in but we didn't create it.

Shit education leads to pliable humans leads to social manipulation leads to desired outcomes from marketing efforts.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-27 08:03:38+00:00
I have created nanotimestamps which basically allow you to embed a lot of data into blockchain itself with basically 0 gas fees.

I don't really like crypto that much from a currency perspective given its history with scam but I like the technology just a little bit so I built it.

If someone is interested on someway to monetize or I don't know just talk about it, I am more than happy to.

Regarding zk human proves, there are some zkmail things that can allow you to prove an amazon transaction or tax reciept etc. which can prove human proof so yeah I think its possible.