MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-16 07:08:09+00:00
I live in an old watermill. We’ve had a “run for your life” flood. Fortunately, I was well aware of the risks when we moved here, and always keep an eye on the weather in winter.

We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.

Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.

The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.

We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.

Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.

We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.
by northlondoner | 2025-07-16 07:08:54+00:00
Happy to hear about this. Actually, budget should be increased not reduced. From purely ROI terms, NASA has a stellar return on investment. Immense contribution to human civilisation beyond US.

Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr...)
by whyowhy3484939 | 2025-07-16 07:09:45+00:00
That's assuming there is a substrate that can be disturbed. That's where the parent's analogy breaks down.

As an example of an alternative analogy: think of how many bombs need to explode in your dreams before the "substrate" is "rippled". How big do the bombs need to be? How fast does the "matter" have to "move"? I think "reality" is more along those lines. If there is a substrate - and that's a big if - IMO it's more likely to be something pliable like "consciousness". Not in the least "disturbed" by anything moving in it.
by naysunjr | 2025-07-16 07:11:37+00:00
You ever see that video of the flat Earther who disregarded what his own eyes saw for his memorized semantics?

Your ex workers goto work whistling Star Trek TNG theme song?

Come on… the shit people believe? Some people just “believe” to make money but so many many more believe in American civil religion, or whatever stream of consciousness they simmered in early on.

I’m not hating. I’m saying direct experience is truth not our visual syntax. Still waiting for my nuclear powered… everything. Where’s my mini commuter helo and …etc etc etc

It’s a government job with extra steps. No hate. Good grift if you can get it.
by gora_mohanty | 2025-07-16 07:13:20+00:00
After the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa, and the tsunami in 2004, the Indian government put together a comprehensive disaster management programme involving better weather satellites, forecasting, early warning systems, and disaster response plans including evacuation strategies with food and shelter for evacuees. The effort spans local, state, and central governments, as well as para-military forces that are deployed in an emergency. India also provides warnings to other nations, like Bangladesh, and the programme has been supported through major political changes.

The results are plain to see, and in my opinion at least, put much more expensive US responses to shame. So much for a democratic government being unable to plan.
by dvoros | 2025-07-16 07:13:26+00:00
Really-really nice article! I'm currently working on a single-process, in-memory, multiplayer game written in Golang. (: Happy and relieved to hear that it worked out for you and I might even borrow some ideas (e.g. I'm less worried about bandwidth, but Protobuf might still make sense). Thank you very much for sharing!
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-16 07:13:33+00:00
Something I haven't seen explored, but I think could perhaps help is to somehow introduce feedback regarding the generation into the context, based on things that are easily computed w/ other tools (like perplexity). In "thinking" models we see a lot of emerging behaviour like "perhaps I should, but wait, this seems wrong", etc. Perhaps adding some signals at regular? intervals could help in surfacing the correct patterns when they are needed.

There's a podcast I listened to ~1.5 years ago, where a team used GPT2, further trained on a bunch of related papers, and used snippets + perplexity to highlight potential errors. I remember them having some good accuracy when analysed by humans. Perhaps this could work at a larger scale? (a sort of "surprise" factor)
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-07-16 07:14:55+00:00
No, what I mean is the 2002 experience was awesome for us in our time, like the 2022 is for people of today. But both experiences still pale compared with a movie teather. It's like for us at the time the DVD was a 8, modern TV is maybe a 10, but movie rather in both cases was like a 10000. It was, and it is, in a complete another level.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-16 07:16:41+00:00
Very good! Looks good to me. One small callout:

mid = left + (right - left) // 2

This implementation detail is to my knowledge unnecessary in Python because Python's built-in int type has arbitrary-precision integers. It's intended to avoid buffer overflows in languages like C.

Imagine, say, that left is 1 and right is 2^63 - 1. In Python left + right will just give you 2^63, no big deal. In C, left + right will overflow and produce undefined behavior; in practice it usually gives you I think -2^63, which is obviously going to screw up the bsearch a bit. It isn't wrong, just slightly less idiomatic for the language.

Python's interpreter may or may not be able to recognize and refactor the slight inefficiency of the extra arithmetic operation out. I will only point out that most of the time when we write our own bsearch it's because we want to optimize something really fundamental to the codebase. Any time you have to whip up your own algorithm it's prima facie evidence that that part of the code might be good to profile.
by zamadatix | 2025-07-16 07:18:24+00:00
I'm sure SpaceX would be more than willing to sign a non-exclusive no-minimums fixed-price-per-launch (based on mass/orbit/etc) indefinite contract for any types of missions the SLS could hope to do. This type of contract isn't even new to NASA (or SpaceX), it's just the policy says "competition" like SLS has to exist and be funded too.

The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.
by srkdaniel | 2025-07-16 07:19:17+00:00
Project: I’ve been working on Brandiseer — an AI tool that creates a complete brand kit (logo, color palette, fonts, style-guide PDF, hero & social images, business card, icons) in about 10 minutes for a one-time $9.99.

Why? I kept seeing indie projects with great ideas but mismatched visuals, because real branding costs $1k+ and takes weeks. Brandiseer is my attempt to make pro-level, consistent branding fast and affordable for anyone.

Would love feedback or ideas for V2 (SVGs, Figma export, more style controls?). Open to questions, critiques, or feature requests!
by somat | 2025-07-16 07:19:18+00:00
I would guess not. indentation in python serves a very different purpose to the mandatory indentation as found in early cobol/fortran.

I am not really an expert but here is my best shot at explaining it based on a 5 minute web search.

Cobol/fortran were designed to run off punch cards, specific columns of the punch card were reserved to specific tasks, things like the sequence number, if the line is a comment, continuation lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Code_format

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~cs154/lectures/lecture024.htm

In python the indentation is a sort of enforced code style guide(sort of like go's refusal to let you load unused modules), by making the indentation you would do normally part of the block syntax, all python programs have to have high quality indentation. whether that author wants to or not.
by madaxe_again | 2025-07-16 07:19:47+00:00
It would have helped if the columns were correctly tied down - those rebar stumps tell a story, which is that they did the foundation pour, left stubs, and then poured columns atop them with a cold joint. Fine if you’re doing a carport in a desert. Criminally negligent in a river floodway.

For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.

I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.

Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.
by adornKey | 2025-07-16 07:20:16+00:00
That discussion on Stackexchange has something like 6 upvotes. And if you read it, the comments there are mostly ridiculous. The absorption is logarithmic beyond 8000 ppm, and someone there e.g. whines about that Wijngaarden doesn't explain the climate on Venus (> 90% CO2 atmosphere).

The thing about Venus is also something you'll find if you look for serious papers trying to criticise the paper. Nitpicking about the word logarithmic seems to be the only things that serious critics have found. The other main argument seems to be name calling and Cancel Culture... and that's all what critics so far have produced...

Claiming that things are unaccepted is also some kind of rumour. There are more papers, and if you read them you'll notice that they're of very high quality. Just compare the quality with that of papers of critics...

To me the most compelling argument for Wijngaarden is the incredible low quality of all the writings from people from climate-institutes that tried to find something against him. OMG...
by thomasrp | 2025-07-16 07:20:28+00:00
Hello! Curious to know more. I work at https://stream.estate which helps navigate Europe’s complex real estate market with ease.

Our API aggregates data from public records and proprietary datasets, delivering a comprehensive view of the market. Using machine learning, we analyze this data to uncover trends and patterns—like price fluctuations or demand shifts—so you can make smarter decisions.

Would that be something interesting for Icosic? Or are you not addressing the European market yet?
by pickledoyster | 2025-07-16 07:20:55+00:00
Indeed, as another comment linked to https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21819-impact-of-ongoing-war... it seems pretty clear that this is not the case:

> We've used our available connections to try to keep them safe. There's no way to get them out of the conscription. However, they're an incredibly talented security researcher and engineer and it would be extraordinarily misguided to send them to front line combat. This seems to be understood now.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-07-16 07:21:45+00:00
People debate whether the Human Brain Project was a failure, despite the fact that it generated a lot of new research.

In 2025 dollars, the cost for the Human Brain Project is just under $2 billion. In 2025 dollars, the Space Shuttle total cost is $311 billion. NASA spends about $3 billion every year on the ISS - more than the entire Human Brain Project.

The problem is that people are able to look at the Human Brain Project, and say that despite important research coming out of it, it might not have been a good idea (again, this gets debated). But people act as if some research coming out of NASA's endeavors entirely justifies them. When people refuse to look at things critically, resources almost invariably end up misallocated.
by i_niks_86 | 2025-07-16 07:23:13+00:00
Many commenters assume fallback behavior exists between DNS providers, but in practice, DNS clients - especially at the OS or router level -rarely implement robust failover for DoH. If you're using cloudflare-dns(.)com and it goes down, unless the stub resolver or router explicitly supports multi-provider failover (and uses a trust-on-first-use or pinned cert model), you’re stuck. The illusion of redundancy with DoH needs serious UX rethinking.
by rollcat | 2025-07-16 07:24:45+00:00
I do recognise and respect his past work. But he's come to a point where he'd rather hinder the progress of free software than help it. That's not extremist, that's short-sighted and spiteful.

That, and the uh, "it's not rape if..." comments. I wouldn't want anything to do with this guy following that, just no.
by w3news | 2025-07-16 07:26:02+00:00
To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your code. We call that tests and types, proof that it should do what you expect. Especially when writing tests first, then types, then the code. Start with a test per acceptance criteria, that well describes what it should do, and is clear what you send and receive. Also in an API you can describe the API in OpenAPI or GraphQL with all the properties and types, and you can validate on runtime the data on your specification, that specification is than also a proof that the application does what you described in your specification.

So OpenAPI/GraphQL, tests and types and proof that the system works like intended. Always start with that before writing code. The specification is a solid base that doesn't change a lot if you start with it. How the code works, you can refactor it, and proof with the specification if it sill does the same like before.

Code is less important than the specifications.
by beAbU | 2025-07-16 07:27:01+00:00
My mid 30s brother in law is obsessed with graphics and framerates in video games. He optimises his games and gaming hardware selections primarily based on graphics fidelity.

He used to get the latest version of the fifa game every year, because the "graphics were so much better in this one", he went into debt for an xbox series X because of the better graphics that it offered, now he's recently built a custom gaming PC, primarily because he could eke better (you guessed it) graphics out of the games he plays.

Every single time I would tell him IDGAF about graphics, and I'll probably keep my XSX until the proverbial wheels come off before I upgrade. For me all I need is acceptable smoothness, decent-ish performance, but most importantly an enjoyable gameplay experience and (primarily for me) a very strong narrative focus.

I stopped trying to dunk on his enthusiasm (I was like that when I was 15), and now I'm just happy he's happy. Although he probably won't be happy, because the next-gen gpus are already just over the horizon, and by the time he's built his next gaming PC the next-next-gen GPUs will be just over the horizon...

Maybe some people are like that with movies? Maybe they select based on flashiness and special effects, and when the effects are obviously visible then it's bad by default? Maybe comments like "wow, this movie is certainly visually striking" in a focus group is seen as a Good Thing which makes the producers optimise for that when they make movies?
by justanotherjoe | 2025-07-16 07:27:03+00:00
The use of color is atrocious in new movies. It's the era of high contrast and contrasting colors. They depend on it to make something look 'expensive' and 'premium' even though to me it looks really bad. And played out. Give me washed out greens like My Neighbor Totoro or yes, Jurassic Park, anyday.

It's a self-reinforcing thing. New movies want to look 'new', no matter if 'new' is bad.
by Leo-thorne | 2025-07-16 07:27:44+00:00
This is a pretty cool idea. Using passkeys to encrypt files means you don’t have to remember passwords but still keep things secure. What I really like is that each file gets its own key, so even if one gets exposed, the others stay safe. If this kind of setup gets integrated into tools we use every day, like photo apps or cloud storage, it could be really useful.
by bawolff | 2025-07-16 07:28:03+00:00
As far as i know, Russia mostly stopped using conscription for the ukraine war effort after popular discontent, and now mostly only uses conscripts internally, with most of the russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine being offered large sums of money to "volunteer".

I was initially assuming Israel was relying on reserves for the current war, which seems to be true, but it also sounds like being in the reserves is mandatory so i guess that is conscription with extra steps.

Anyways, i guess your broad point is right.
by bambax | 2025-07-16 07:29:04+00:00
> Which animal best represents your Firefox browsing style?

I'm not an infant so I don't need pretty pictures of animals to express myself. This is offensive and ridiculous. Please fuck off.

I use Firefox as a fucking browser, to, you know, browse the web. Open web pages. Read stuff. Avoid ads at all costs. And that's pretty much it.
by cryptonym | 2025-07-16 07:29:55+00:00
I have been online for 30y and can't remember being affected by downtime from my ISP DNS.

When DNS resolver is down, it affects everything, 100% uptime is a fair expectation, hence redundancy. Looks like both 1.0.0.1 and 1.1.1.1 were down for more than 1h, pretty bad TBH, especially when you advise global usage.

RCA is not detailed and feels like a marketing stunt we are now getting every other week.
by wiseowise | 2025-07-16 07:30:05+00:00
Source for what? That it’s a job? If tomorrow there’s a shortage of jet pilots in Ukraine and no volunteers - they’ll put conscripts to training there. Use your critical thinking.

> Correct, which is why I used critical thinking instead of jumping to conclusions.

There’s almost a million of active personnel in Ukrainian army at the moment, a million. That’s the population of Cologne or Amsterdam. Modern armies, like Ukrainian one, have dozens of branches, and meatgrinder is “only” one of them.

And I still don’t understand what’s your original point anyway?
by Zanfa | 2025-07-16 07:30:07+00:00
I’m sorry, but calling anything but above-replacement birth rates “slow-motion extinction” is ridiculous. This is the equivalent to expecting babies to be 15 meters tall by the time they’re adults from extrapolating their rate of growth in their infant years.

Below-replacement rate might be an economic issue around retirement, but as far as the human species goes, it’s a nothingburger at this scale. We’re not passenger pigeons.
by tankenmate | 2025-07-16 07:32:22+00:00
I use routedns[0] for this specific reason it handles almost all DNS protocols; UDP, TCP, DoT, DoH, DoQ (including 0-RTT). But more importantly is has a very configurable route steering even down to a record by record basis if you want to put up with all the configuration involved. It's very robust and is very handy, I use 1.1.1.1 on my desktops and servers and when the incident happened I didn't even notice as the failover "just worked". I had to actually go look at the logs because I didn't notice.

[0] https://github.com/folbricht/routedns
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-16 07:32:25+00:00
I agree with your points here, but I feel the need to address the final bit. This is not aimed personally at you, but at the pattern you described - specifically, at how it's all too often abused:

> Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!

Those are the easy cases, and correspondingly, you don't see much of those - or at least few are paying attention to companies talking like that. This is distinct from saying "X is going to directly benefit the society, and we're merely charging for it as fair compensation of our efforts, much like a baker charges you for the bread" or variants of it.

This is much closer to what most tech companies try to argue, and the distinction seems to escape a lot of otherwise seemingly sharp people. In threads like this, I surprisingly often end up defending tech companies against such strawmen - because come on, if we want positive change, then making up a simpler but baseless problem, calling it out, and declaring victory, isn't helping to improve anything (but it sure does drive engagement on-line, making advertisers happy; a big part of why press does this too on a routine basis).

And yes, this applies to this specific case of OpenAI as well. They're not claiming "LLMs are going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to get rich off them, and then use that money to fund lots of nice things". They're just saying, "here, look at ChatGPT, we believe you'll find it useful, and we want to keep doing R&D in this direction, because we think it'll directly benefit society". They may be wrong about it, or they may even knowingly lie about those benefits - but this is not trickle-down economics v2.0, SaaS edition.
by GWBullshit | 2025-07-16 07:33:31+00:00
Appreciate the reply and advice.

Having said that I've had this model for quite a while now and have been doing this since I can remember and never had this issue until the latest macOS update, which from what I've researched seems to be affecting loads of people with all sorts of newer, much fancier processors than what I have.

While I will definitely keep your advice in mind going forward, it seems that this issue sprung up only after this last update, which is strange because I remember reading something about "improved energy management" or some such.
by h4kunamata | 2025-07-16 07:33:35+00:00
The "system" hates what they cannot control. GrapheneOS, Proton, all are victim of such direct attack.

I checked the guy GOS mentioned: Robert Braxman. One single photo gives you all the vibes from the guy.

It is the same as "Stop Killing Games" movement with Pirate Software totally against it while spreading misinformation. Bad for him tho, the internet uncovered all the lies and bs, that guy's life is finished lmao

For GOS, they need some serious security analysts to review Robert's doing and exposed everything, just like "Stop Killing Games" heroes did.

Not that we don't trust GOS but the position they are in, make it easy to be judged as "bias" by the media, only them Robert and cia will stop this bs.