MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gpm | 2025-07-19 21:38:40+00:00
My laptop definitely dies significantly faster when I'm making it work instead of just mindlessly scrolling on it... since the display is on in both cases I don't see what that could be but chip powre consumption making a singificant difference.

My phone dies much faster when I am using it, but admittedly screen usage means I can't prove that's chip power consumption.

VR headsets get noticeably hot in use, and I'm all but certain that that is largely chip power usage.

Macbook airs are the same speed as macbook pros until they thermally throttle, because the chips use too much power.

This claim just doesn't pass the smell test.
by usr1106 | 2025-07-19 21:38:54+00:00
1998 the game was already lost, although we could not imagine how evil Google would become and many others did not exist yet. Eternal September was 1993 after all https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September.

In 1989 when I started to use internet, someone being on the internet meant they could be trusted. Private internet did not exist, so all users were basically university employees. I visited people and invited people from other countries without knowing them. Sending a couple of emails, and everything was fine. I sent bills to a money collector overseas and the cheque was in the mail a couple of weeks later.
by jwr | 2025-07-19 21:39:47+00:00
I am amazed that hotels are still stuck in this old mindset of charging exorbitant amounts to some customers (unpleasant to customers) rather than providing a good service to all customers (good for customers).

If I knew that a hotel chain will have my room fridge stocked with beer at reasonable prices (small markup or even no markup, because this does not need to be a revenue stream!), I would pick that hotel every time. Just for the convenience, and the nice feeling of not walking a minefield.
by vineethy | 2025-07-19 21:40:05+00:00
The author's motivation for writing this is well-founded. However, the author doesn't take into account the full spirit of rust and the un-constructive conclusion doesn't really help anyone.

A huge part of the spirit of rust is fearless concurrency. The simple seeming false positive examples become non-trivial in concurrent code.

The author admits they don't write large concurrent - which clearly explains why they don't find much use in the borrow checker. So the problem isn't that the rust doesn't work for them - it's that a central language feature of rust hampers them instead of helping them.

The conclusion for this article should have been: if you're like me and don't write concurrent programs, enums and matches are great. The language would be work better for me if the arc/box syntax spam went away.

As a side note, if your code is a house of cards, it's probably because you prematurely optimized. A good way to get around this problem is to arc/box spam upfront with as little abstraction as possible, then profile, then optimize.
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-19 21:40:32+00:00
I has having lunch with some hardware designers from SGI and Sun, and the SGI people mentioned jokingly that the MIPS could be both big-endian and little-endian, which they called SPIM. Then they pointed out much to the embarrassment of the Sun people (including me at the time) that the little-endian version of the SPARC would be called CRAPS.
by chmod775 | 2025-07-19 21:41:05+00:00
Why not just make it not purchasable with that payment option/store credit?

In many countries Steam supports plenty of alternative payment options that do not use VISA or mastercard.

Thinking about it, if a platform as enormous as Steam just completely stopped accepting VISA and mastercard, they'd a) probably still be fine b) VISA and mastercard would probably cave - few companies will prioritize outworn politics over literally billions of revenue. In fact I'd expect these two to be the last to do that. Valve would be more the type to put principles first. Too bad they didn't this time.
by mavilia | 2025-07-19 21:41:33+00:00
This comment made me rethink what I have that is actually valuable data. My photos alone even if culled down to just my favorites would probably be at least a few gigs. Contacts from my phone would be small. Other than that I guess I wouldn't be devastated if I lost anything else. Probably should put my recovery keys somewhere safer but honestly the accounts most important to me don't have recovery keys.

Curious what you consider valuable data?

Edit: I should say for pictues I have around 2Tb right now (downside of being a hobby photographer)
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-19 21:42:07+00:00
I mean, it could be - the highly filtered water could be re-filtered.

But unless it's cheaper to do so, or they're required by law to do so, they're just going to pump cleaner starting water out of the drinking supply and use that.

And good luck finding a city or state government that's not so desperate for big industry and tech jobs to arrive that they will hold their feet to the fire and demand they cut water use.
by procaryote | 2025-07-19 21:42:11+00:00
I'm happy to complain about python but I got like a third into it and didn't find any actual wtfs.

Java as contrast has interning wtfs because == between java objects does essentioally what python's `is` does. Python actually made a good choice here and made == do what you'd expect.

Is anyone surprised by `(1 > 0) < 1`? There are languages where it will be rejected because of types, but what else would you expect it do than compare a boolean true to 1?

Is there anything of value later on?
by grimblee | 2025-07-19 21:42:19+00:00
Something all the paragons of the wealthy forget to say is that when these people evade taxes in a country, theh population is paying for it and no amount of spendings or investements would ever make up for the loss, otherwise they wouldn't stay. These people are leeches, if they don't want to pay taxes then they can't get rich on our backs, it's as simple as that. They want to go ? Good ridance !
by BoorishBears | 2025-07-19 21:42:27+00:00
No, and they're lying on the most important claim: that this is not a model specialized to IMO problems.

From the thread:

> just to be clear: the IMO gold LLM is an experimental research model.

The thread tried to muddy the narrative by saying the methodology can generalize, but no one is claiming the actual model is a generalized model.

There'd be a massively different conversation needed if a generalized model that could become the next iteration of ChatGPT had achieved this level of performance.
by skybrian | 2025-07-19 21:43:15+00:00
Chromatic button accordions have each octave in three rows of four instead of two rows of five and seven like a piano. It's very regular, but doesn't match up with major or minor scales or with sheet music. A major scale is a zig-zag.

I play both piano and button accordion and they're just different. Neither one has a compelling advantage.
by zahlman | 2025-07-19 21:43:25+00:00
> then you add more, each step seems like it's an improvement, and then one day you realise you're looking at unintelligible nonsense and you say "Oh no, what have we done?"

I've never found it difficult to keep them in check. I still can't fathom a use case for nesting f-strings within an f-string substitution, for example. And probably the only format specifier I commonly use is `:02x`.
by pyrale | 2025-07-19 21:43:38+00:00
> and yet it’s basically a hobby language.

The difference between academia languages such as ocaml or haskell and industry languages such as Java or C# is hundreds of millions of dollar in advertising. It's not limited to the academy: plenty of languages from other horizons failed, that weren't backed by companies with a vested interest in you using their language.

You should probably not infer too much from a language's success or failure.
Show HN: I built a simple study app and got 60 users so far:')
by iboshidev | 2025-07-19 21:44:53+00:00
built a simple study app that turns messy notes (images or text) into flashcards + quizzes using gpt-4o.

originally made it to help myself focus while studying. launched with a hard paywall to avoid ads or noise.

~60 users so far, mostly from tiktok. curious if this is useful beyond my own use case?
by callc | 2025-07-19 21:45:18+00:00
Even though I’ve never used python walrus, I’m a huge fan of the “X language feature can be used as an expression”

I feel the same way with rust control flow being used as an expression, and am disappointed when other languages don’t have it.

Even though one could argue it makes things more complicated, I feel more mental freedom and feel the language getting out of the way.
by dspillett | 2025-07-19 21:45:40+00:00
Standards like ISO27001 and such are deliberately not prescriptive in that way. You might argue that this makes them less useful, and I would agree…

The standard states that you should do something about X, and perhaps that your choice of how to do X should have property Y, but won't go into thither specifics. All the certificate you have, of you have one, really says is that you seem to have covered the relevant points in what you decided to do, and that you are actually implementing what you decided to do. This is one of the reasons why, despite companies having a pile of certificates like that, large prospective clients send a huge questionnaire to anyone wishing to tender for a job: the questionnaire on post fills in the gaps by requesting further detail on how you implemented the requirements of the standard (and in many cases makes it obvious that their are wrong answers that you could give).
by vincent-manis | 2025-07-19 21:45:56+00:00
I take neither side in a dependencies vs NIH war. I like using SQLite as a database, and I use Tk (of Tcl/Tk) as my user interface toolkit, for example. Neither of those is going anywhere, they are both maintained, and I build them myself.

I would argue that the right way to think about dependencies, as some have alluded to, is to do a risk/benefit analysis. On the benefit side, how much work would it take me to duplicate this component, how well will it suit my needs, and so on. On the risk side, everything from continued maintenance to security and licence issues (for both free/libre/open-source and proprietary components). Then risk/benefit asks for ways of ameliorating risk, such as by forking code, or paying for support.

The right way to think of adding a dependency is to ask and answer questions like this prior to adding it. This is not the way that JavaScript developers used left_pad, they just said “it's in npm, so it's good.”
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-19 21:46:50+00:00
The mapping from DNA to health outcome is unbelievably chaotic/high-cardinality, then mixed in with various environmental/social/cultural factors that don’t show up in DNA at all.

Drugs are in fact how we come to understand this chain of causality, piece by piece.

So yeah, what you describe is obviously the dream (hand waving through some ethical considerations) but we just don’t know anywhere close to enough about the biology.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-19 21:47:08+00:00
Actually, the citations above already warn 40% of users have neutral to negative side effects, and doesn't get into the consequences of allergic or nausea related symptoms (about 2 of the 5 papers seem of reasonable quality.)

So to be clear, cancer patients have a lot of other problems that likely would confound which reported symptoms are related to which medication.

Someone with access to the PsycINFO database login could clarify things for sure. If I recall it was a few cases of micro-dosing related organ failure cases that caught my attention. No idea which specific psilocybe mushroom was responsible.

The Natives also used Datura, but rolling in your own excrement naked for 2 weeks with severe hallucinations isn't a popular recreational experience for some reason. A few kids die every so often trying to prepare the plant.

Have a great day, and stay healthy =3

I must apologize for the low quality data here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221175391...
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-19 21:47:33+00:00
Fair enough, I was literally searching for the word.

I assumed the history of noise externalities from supersonic aircraft might merit a broader discussion of externalities.

It’s great that they are talking about air pollution, but I’d still argue that there are many other externalities to supersonic air travel, (and sub sonic air travel, and ground transport, etc)

I just think we’d get saner transport policy and better innovation if we talked about them, and how to balance the benefits for people inside the vehicle for the costs to those outside the vehicle.
by o11c | 2025-07-19 21:47:34+00:00
Other things that matter (some overlap):

* Is the file userland-compressed, filesystem-or-device-compressed, or uncompressed?

* What are you going to do about secret keys?

* Is the file immutable, replace-only (most files), append-only (not limited to logs; beware the need to defrag these), or fully mutable (rare - mostly databases or dangerous archive software)?

* Can you rely on page size for (some) chunking, or do you need to rely entirely on content-based chunking?

* How exactly are you going to garbage-collect the data from no-longer-active backups?

* Does your filesystem expose an accurate "this file changed" signal, or better an actual hash? Does it support chunk sharing? Do you know how those APIs work?

* Are you crossing a kernel version that is one-way incompatible?

* Do you have control of the raw filesystem at the other side? (e.g. the most efficient backup for btrfs is only possible with this)
The perfect cross platform framework
by miguellima | 2025-07-19 21:47:42+00:00
There's a lot content out there about the "perfect" cross platform framework and why you must use it.

But lets be honest almost everything is bullshit, just saying what you want to hear to keep you engaged.

What really matters is how it behaves in real world scenarios.

At the moment I'm looking at Tauri, React Expo and flutter.

My key points are: - maintainability; - consistency, not to look the exactly the same way, but to work the same way. - security, keep source code (not sure if exposing code is considered a security issue) and user data safe. - offline support, some shared code logic between back and front, eg. create invoice

Any real world and production experiences that can be shared?

note: my app is in the fintech space, the goal is to build an mvp and get the required certifications.

Thanks in advance!
by BoorishBears | 2025-07-19 21:48:54+00:00
Also from the thread:

> 8/N Btw, we are releasing GPT-5 soon, and we’re excited for you to try it. But just to be clear: the IMO gold LLM is an experimental research model.

And from Sam Altman:

> we are releasing GPT-5 soon but want to set accurate expectations: this is an experimental model that incorporates new research techniques we will use in future models.

The wording you quoted is very tricky: the method used to create the model is generalizable, but the model is not a general-use model.

If I have a post-training method that allows a model excel at a narrow task, it's still a generalizable method if there's a wide range of narrow tasks that it works on.
by thechao | 2025-07-19 21:49:03+00:00
This is effective feature size and has little to do with actual geometry. Transistor size has barely budged in the last 10–15 years. The limitation is electrical, and it's not clear where that limit is. The smallest gate was built with an AFM out ~7 atoms; that's about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than a transistor, rn, and upwards of 9 than a stdcell. There's a LOT of room; we just don't know a good path to get to there.
by progbits | 2025-07-19 21:49:04+00:00
> One way is to ensure that machines that must be backed up via "push" [..] can only access their own space. More importantly, the backup server, for security reasons, should maintain its own filesystem snapshots for a certain period. In this way, even in the worst-case scenario (workload compromised -> connection to backup server -> deletion of backups to demand a ransom), the backup server has its own snapshots

My preferred solution is to let client only write new backups, never delete. The deletion is handled separately (manually or cron on the target).

You can do this with rsync/ssh via the allowed command feature in .ssh/authorized_keys.
by iotku | 2025-07-19 21:49:17+00:00
I do love the joke, but it is worth remembering as well that all of those S were to a certain extent afterthoughts to fix otherwise insecure protocols.

Given how old FTP and HTTP are it's fairly understandable that they weren't initially designed with security in mind, but I think it's valid to question why we're still designing insecure systems in 2025.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-19 21:49:36+00:00
prefer bool() threw an exception on receiving a string, rather than act the way it does now.

That breaks the truthiness cornerstone of the language. You can write

a = 1 # or [], (), "yo", "false", 3.2, MyFooClass(), (1,), False if a: fire_ze_missles() else: declare_peace()

Upon encountering `a`, Python is evaluating bool(a). If that no longer works for strings, you now need a separate code path for determining a non-empty string.

It can short-circuit the brain upon reading a word that you know means false, but the Python rules are consistent. "Empty" is False, everything else is True.
by yayitswei | 2025-07-19 21:49:52+00:00
I'm picky about layouts - I type in Dvorak, learned Janko via Chromatone, currently playing harpejji.

Coming from a classical piano background, there was definitely a learning curve, but I feel like it was worth it. Every chord shape is identical across all keys (C major and D major would be played the same way), which makes it much easier to learn jazz voicings or modulate a song.

If anyone ever builds a quality grand piano with Janko layout, I'm buying! Hacks on hacks become unnecessary if you start with the right design.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-07-19 21:49:58+00:00
I understand the points about aesthetics but not law; the judge is there to interpret legal arguments and a lawyer who presents an argument with false premises, like a fabricated case, is being irresponsible. It is very similar with coding, except the judge is a PM.

It does not seem to matter where the code nor the legal argument came from. What matters is that they are coherent.
by torginus | 2025-07-19 21:51:09+00:00
From my vague rememberance of doing data science years ago, it's very hard not to leak the training set.

Basically how you do RL is that you make a set of training examples of input-output pairs, and set aside a smaller validation set, which you never train on, to check if your model's doing well.

What you do is you tweak the architecture and the training set until it does well on the validation set. By doing so, you inadvertedly leak info about the training set. Perhaps you choose an architecture which does well on the validation set. Perhaps you train more on examples more like ones being validated.

Even without the explicit intent to cheat, it's very hard to avoid this contamination, if you chose a different validation set, you'd end up with a different model.
by bitweis | 2025-07-19 21:51:17+00:00
100% - especially when Auth stands for just Authentication. Simple RBAC authorization also won't take us far. But Fine-grained Permissions(e.g. OPA, Cedar, OpenFGA, Permit.io) with ReBAC giving ai-agents Zero standing permissions, and only deriving on the fly the least privilege they need / got consent for, can dramatically reduce the problem
by cycomanic | 2025-07-19 21:51:51+00:00
Just the other day I needed to code some interlocked indices. It wasn't particularly hard but I didn't want to context switch and think so instead I asked gpt 4o. After a back and worth for 4 or 5 times, where it gave wrong answers I finally decided to just take a pen and paper and do it by hand. I have a hard time believing that these models are reasoning, because if they are they are very poor at it.
by Multicomp | 2025-07-19 21:53:27+00:00
/sarcasm/

Which is so much worse than the current paradigm where we have a client side SPA deciding to do all sorts of state syncing and react hooks and tracking pixels and auto pop ups all doing their own thing all over the place!

/end sarcasm/

I think for a side project, not immediately expecting your front end's first version to not horizontally scale to the moon is ok.
by spankibalt | 2025-07-19 21:53:48+00:00
> "I’m a massive Wikipedia fan, have a lot of it downloaded locally on my phone, binge read it before bed, etc."

Me too, albeit these days I'm more interested in its underrated capabilities to foster teaching of e-governance and democracy/participation.

> "What would you see in an article that motivates you to check out the meta layers?"

Generally: How the lemma came to be, how it developed, any contentious issues around it, and how it compares to tangential lemmata under the same topical umbrella, especially with regards to working groups/SIGs (e. g. philosophy, history), and their specific methods and methodologies, as well as relevant authors.

With regards to contentious issues, one obviously gets a look into what the hot-button issues of the day are, as well as (comparatives of) internal political issues in different wiki projects (incl. scandals, e. g. the right-wing/fascist infiltration and associated revisionism and negationism in the Croatian wiki [1]). Et cetera.

I always look at the talk pages. And since I mentioned it before: Albeit I have almost no use for LLMs in my private life, running a Wiki, or a set of articles within, through an LLM-ified text analysis engine sounds certainly interesting.

1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_genocide_of_Serb...]
by lil-lugger | 2025-07-19 21:54:09+00:00
That’s fine but you would have to find the commit message to understand the context, whereas this is closer to an extended git blame per line with more metadata because if you store the conversation history locally you can link that line to its conversation context and that lives with the code not with the git commit.

At the moment I use just extensive docs to track decisions and business logic but its static and is constantly going stale.
by dspillett | 2025-07-19 21:54:10+00:00
Log structured data and/or hash based ledgers are already sometimes used¹, both locally and in off-server & off-site backups, to prove that data and logs have not been tempered with. If they have then it is much harder (though far from impossible if the ledger is local-only) to hoover the fact. Of course the ledger doesn't say how the data/logs where populated nor what with, it just indicates if tampering definitely hasn't taken place (they can't say that deliberate tampering definitely has taken place, just that it might be likely, as corruption from other sources (hardware failure, etc) could also break the chain).

--------

[1] such schemes existed much prior to bitcoin & friends, though they were not used a lot back than.
by zahlman | 2025-07-19 21:55:18+00:00
> Pad left? That's a two-line method at most.

The functionality comes from the prior string.format method, which has been around since Python 2.6 (first released in 2008).

https://docs.python.org/2.6/library/string.html#formatspec

> It's faster to do it yourself ad-hoc.

I have found the syntax to be quite mentally "sticky".

> the implementation is right there (and easy to customize!) not buried in the docs and immutable.

There are hooks to customize it.
by piker | 2025-07-19 21:56:50+00:00
Nobody is proposing that people will be writing markdown by hand in text editors. Just that a lot of the complexity of rendering stuff on the screen precisely as it would be printed on, say, A4 paper can perhaps soon be left behind. People print a lot less these days, and thus WYSIWYG (in the original 70s, 80s and early 90s sense of the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG) may be less important.