MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrScientist | 2025-07-23 15:53:18+00:00
Back to the parental comment - it's been decided there isn't really a good reason to have most guns and so they are strictly controlled - I mean what's the legit reason for having an assault rifle?

Now if the government thinks there isn't really a good reason to have a phone they can't hack ( because they are the good guys right.... and in theory need court orders etc - so there is legal oversight ) then they will see such phones in the same light and consider banning.

This is at the core of the argument - and why governments ask for a special backdoor - as they accept a generally secure phone ( to stop your neighbour snooping ) is a good thing, but they are used to being able to tap phones and open letters if a judge gives them permission.

Obviously the ironic thing is most phones probably already do have special backdoors - but only for the country where the makers reside - and that countries government doesn't want other governments to know or have acccess.

And in the case of fridges - there is no argument there that they aren't legit reasons to own.

In the case of knives - zombie knives don't really have legit use, whereas kitchen knives do.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-23 15:53:28+00:00
If you think the 6502 doesn't have enough registers and addressing modes... Try the PDP-8.

The PDP-11 on the other hand has a lot of registers and addressing modes. A kid with a TRS-80 in 1980 might have thought the "16-bit" PDP-11 looked like the future although it really was the past, as it dated from 1970. The greatest weakness of it was that the user had a 16-bit address space so a PDP-11 running RSTS/E gave everybody a BASIC experience a little bit better than an Apple ][ or alternately the ability to run applications similar to CP/M. The machine as a whole had more than 64k of RAM but as a user you got 64k of code and 64k of data -- so it was a little bit better than the 8-bitters of 1980 but not as good as the IBM PC for having a bigger "problem space" to work on bigger problems.

My high school got a VAX to replace our PDP-8 and the computer club got it. We had two video terminals and a printing terminal, originally the printing terminal was the main terminal that was used when the machine was brought up in single-user mode. I swapped in one of the video terminals in this role, powered it up, and had the VDT catch on fire -- so we cleaned up the other terminal before bringing the machine up with that.
by jacobwg | 2025-07-23 15:53:33+00:00
Since we launched this last year, GitHub released a v2 of their internal cache API [0], based on Twirp [1] of all things, so we adapted to that. Interestingly that Twirp service also receives Actions artifacts, though we have not intercepted those today given that you likely still want them to appear in the GitHub UI / be accessible from the GitHub API.

[0] https://github.com/actions/cache/discussions/1510

[1] https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-07-23 15:53:37+00:00
Fair warning: the Trixie update does not allow you to roll back. It is in theory possible but practically it not only fails every single time, but leaves the system in an inconsistent and broken state. (Code for 'soon to be unbootable').

What this means is when you find out stuff breaks, like drivers and application software, and decide the upgrade was a bad idea, you are fucked.

More notably, some of the upgrade is irreversible - like MySQL/MariaDB. The database binary format is upgraded during the upgrade. So if you discover something else broke, and you want to go back, it's going to take some work.

Ask me how I know.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-23 15:54:27+00:00
The article covers that.

> Space station crews launching on Russian Soyuz spacecraft have to make their way to the Central Asian spaceport of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. No matter what the mission, even astronauts have to go through customs, NASA officials said. As part of their routine airline flights to other countries and back, they of course encounter airport customs.

It's not to/from the ISS that's the issue there.

A US-only crew on a US-launched spacecraft that lands in US territory won't need to do it. (ISS may add a few complexities, but if you stay on, say, the Shuttle, you're not leaving US-controlled territory.)
by aurareturn | 2025-07-23 15:54:44+00:00
I know Groq chips load the entire model into SRAM. That's why it can be so fast.

So if Cerebras uses HBM to store the model but stream weights into SRAM, I really don't see the advantage long term over smaller chips like GB200 since both architectures use HBM.

The whole point of having a wafer chip is that you limit the need to reach out to external parts for memory since that's the slow part.
by apwell23 | 2025-07-23 15:54:56+00:00
> I truly know the API is going to do what it says or what I think it says without actually calling the API?

what if the API changes all of sudden in production? what about cases where api stays the same but content of response is all wrong? how do tests protect you from that?

edit: they are not hypothetical scenarios. wrong responses are way more common than schema breaking. tooling upsteam is often pretty good at catching schema breakages.

wrong responses often cause way more havoc than schema breakages because you get an alert for schema failures in app anyways.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-23 15:55:10+00:00
You mentioned an anonymous anecdote about a farmer in an unnamed country. That's not facts. The facts say that frequency and outlier events in rainfall haven't changed. I used the UK as an example because it has unusually long records on this topic. So, it's worth checking the Met Office's data on this to ground the discussion in something more concrete.

Look at the graphs in this report:

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/11/UK-Weather-2...

Pages 5 and 6 show annual rainfall. It increased a little around 1870, but today it's not much different to rainfall levels in the 1910s. Winter average is a little higher recently but only due to heavy rains in the winter of 2013, otherwise there'd be nothing to see. Rainfall in other seasons hasn't changed at all.

Page 7 shows just the most extreme years. "most of the ten wettest years occurred in the years up to and including 1960 (Figure 10a). The only two exceptions are 2000 and 2012. The situation regarding the ten driest years is even starker, with the most recent significant year being 1964 (Figure 10b)."

Nor are there more or stronger storms. Wind speeds have actually been falling over time (page 10). It's turning into a financial issue for wind farms. The British government itself says that, also for the whole North Atlantic:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/understanding-...

> The UK State of the Climate report states that there are no compelling trends in storminess when considering maximum gust speeds over the last four decades. More comprehensive studies across the North Atlantic region have reached similar conclusions.

You need to stop attacking people who are responding to your anecdotes with data. A lot of people believe untrue things about the weather because they struggle to separate predictions about the future vs statements about the present. It's certainly possible there are places where rainfall has become markedly more intense. But if so, it's not a global phenomenon.
by doublerabbit | 2025-07-23 15:55:16+00:00
For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the renderer.

Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.

If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.

I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight.

As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.
by 65 | 2025-07-23 15:55:35+00:00
Besides having to boot from an ISO and the arduous process of installing Linux in general compared to not having to do this with MacOS or Windows, hardware compatibility is by far the most annoying part of Linux desktop. Want to use a new laptop to run Linux? Well it probably will have a bunch of hardware issues you need to monkey patch.

It appears a site for software engineers can get lost in the sauce with the concept of something being "easy" - but Linux absolutely will never take off if it's a pain in the ass for the average computer user to install and use.
by ben_w | 2025-07-23 15:55:36+00:00
Rapid collapse is indeed unpredictable, and always bad; but the military is heavily dependent on the economy, so it starting huge probably won't make a huge difference.

Especially if the US happens to do the collapsing at around the same time the rest of the globe moves away from oil etc., given how dependent the existing military equipment stockpiles are on petrochemicals.
by duxup | 2025-07-23 15:55:54+00:00
I'm going to riff off this a little about hype and stories.

>Amusingly there’s also quite a few comments like “oops I deleted my whole file system, what do I do now?” or “I’m not a programmer and I got Copilot to build my product but now it’s broken and won’t change anything - I want my money back”.

I think one of the unfortunate situations with the sort of hyping everything up to 11 on the internet is that a lot of these stories aren't truly end times drama. Many of them are titled like that and present what seems like a potentially dramatic story, but they're really "Hey I saw this, those of you in the know might want to know this can happen."

The deleting files stories I've seen repeatedly, but the content of the story is really more about someone experimenting / good info.

I recently posted a story from a very technical source on another site and it was a great article, but the title was a little dramatic. The knee-jerk response by many people was to complain (probably just read the title) about how the recommendation was too broad / doesn't apply to most people... well yeah the article didn't even say you should do that thing ...

I see it with blogs that talk about mistakes, folks jump in to wag their finger when the person who wrote the blog already learned their lesson. They're not proposing you do it the same, they're talking about their mistakes.

I get it, I do it too, but sometimes we respond to everything as if it's some absurd claim when sometimes it's more measured.
by basfo | 2025-07-23 15:56:07+00:00
This will happen in production at a large company in the near future.

I keep seeing more and more vibe coded AI implementations that do whatever... by anyone. And managers celebrate that the new junior engineer created something that "saves a lot of time!" (two full time positions in their heads)

I agree it can be useful for some tasks, but the non deterministic nature of AI will inevitably impact production once someone plugs an AI tool into a critical part of the system, thinking they’re a genius.
by mc32 | 2025-07-23 15:56:18+00:00
Who are the "we"?

By and large developed countries are not paving it --and in many cases are greening their countries. Developing countries, on the other hand, are paving and, in many cases, exporting people to some developed countries which then at the margins causes some paving in already developed countries.

Given that, what is the solution to this problem? Stop development in now developing countries, retard their growth both economically as well as populationally? Or...?
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-23 15:56:50+00:00
So, first of all, trusting the NYT - or most major newspapers - on any article involving “science” is… somewhere between delusional and hilarious. They get things wrong at roughly the same frequency as a Facebook meme page.

Secondly: “Scientists” are not some monolithic group. On any subject you can imagine there are scientists claiming they know all, some claiming we know nothing, some with hypothesis A and some with B and some with Z.

Finally… I outlined a reasonable mechanism in my comment (indoor air pollutants increasing by orders of magnitude; home air tightness increasing by orders of magnitude; many of these pollutants are known to increase the risk of lung cancer.) Why not debate the argument itself, instead of making appeals to authority?
by californical | 2025-07-23 15:57:02+00:00
I’ll fill the role to push back on your Java coder idea!

First, Java code tends to be written a certain way, and for certain goals and business domains.

Let’s say 90% of modern Java is a mix of: * students learning to program and writing algorithms * corporate legacy software from non-tech focused companies

If you want to build something that is uncommon in that subset, it will likely struggle due to a lack of training data. And if you wanted to build something like a game, the majority of your training data is going to be based on ancient versions of Java, back when game development was more common in Java.

Comparatively, including C in your training data gives you exposure to a whole separate set of domain data for training, like IoT devices, kernels, etc.

Including Go will likely include a lot more networking and infrastructure code than Java would have had, which means there is also more context to pull from in what networking services expect.

Code for those domains follow different patterns, but the concepts can still be useful in writing Java code.

Now, there may be a middle ground where you could have a model that is still general for many coding languages, but given extra data and fine-tuning focused on domain-specific Java things — like more of a “32B CorporateJava Coder” model — based around the very specific architecture of Spring. And you’d be willing to accept that model to fail at writing games in Java.

It’s interesting to think about for sure - but I do feel like domain-specific might be more useful than language-specific
by agentultra | 2025-07-23 15:57:15+00:00
We don't need humans to be perfect to have reliable responses to critical situations. Systems are more important than individuals at that level. We understand people make mistakes and design systems and processes to compensate.

The problem with unattended AI in these situations is precisely the lack of context, awareness, intuition, intention, and communication skills.

If you want automation in your disaster recovery system you want something that fails reliably and immediately. Non-determinism is not part of a good plan. Maybe it will recover from the issue or maybe it will delete the production database and beg for forgiveness later isn't what you want to lean on.

Humans have deleted databases before and will again, I'm sure. And we have backups in place if that happens. And if you don't then you should fix that. But we should also fix the part of the system that allows a human to accidentally delete a database.

But an AI could do that too! No. It's not a person. It's an algorithm with lots of data that can do neat things but until we can make sure it does one particular thing deterministically there's no point in using it for critical systems. It's dangerous. You don't want a human operator coming into a fire and the AI system having already made the fire worse for you... and then having to respond to that mess on top of everything else.
by taylorallred | 2025-07-23 15:57:19+00:00
One thing that has always worried me about AI coding is the loss of practice. To me, writing the code by hand (including the boilerplate and things I've done hundreds of times) is the equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's paint-the-fence. Each iteration gets it deeper into your brain and having these patterns as a part of you makes you much more effective at making higher-level design decisions.
by the8472 | 2025-07-23 15:58:08+00:00
> So it would still be 500 years between message and Death Ray.

Yes of course, but you'd still act as if the death-ray is on its way, i.e. firing it already happened 500 years before you received the message. The systems may be causally separated but as long as each follows near-deterministic processes we can still calculate its state forward.

In the case of betelgeuse we could hypothetically, if we had sufficiently accurate models, derive from observations that it'll explode in 100 years (relative to the observed state) which given the separation means the light of that event would only be 100ly away which in a sense does mean the event already happened.

We can't be certain, perhaps a rogue black hole might swallow it in the meantime, but for casual conversation "predictable thing effectively already happened and its results are on the way" is good enough, and if one one had to worry about GRBs aimed at earth even prudent.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-23 15:58:32+00:00
> This should be a discussion on how valid it is for police to profile people. Or maybe if it's actually true that drug dealers are using GrapheneOS.

Why can't it be a discussion about how valid it is for police to use the desire for privacy as a basis for profiling? Is that not allowed?

Are you saying that we're required to either talk about:

1) whether the police should profile anyone at all for any reason (why not this particular reason again?), or

2) whether Spanish criminals desire privacy, and therefore more often choose GrapheneOS than other groups of people (is this controversial? Is it worth discussing? Can't we just take the Spanish police's word for such an unsurprising data point?)

Those are our only two choices? If so, than the conclusion is foregone. Police will be allowed to profile criminals and suspicious people, and criminals will attempt to refuse monitoring and searches.

I'd rather talk about whether refusing to be monitored or searched can be allowed to become official grounds for state suspicion, though. Even without your support.
by jacobr1 | 2025-07-23 15:59:01+00:00
Yeah - that doesn't work. We include our own guidelines and practices in the context. Basically an ever evolving wiki page of PR best practices. We had that before trying LLMs - so it was easier for us to start. Also we found doing an LLM reformat of that data to might a much tighter set of "rules" helped as well.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-23 15:59:16+00:00
> Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" as an environment you can run on top of their desktop OS's for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different from Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.

It does work really well, almost too well. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that even though it's providing a useful feature, particularly for devs, it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom, going "See - you can have all your same Linux tools right from [macOS/Windows/ChromeOS/Android] - please stay on our proprietary and telemetry infested OS, don't free yourself.

OTOH, WSL was a godsend when I had to use Windows, and actually made Windows relatively pleasant to use outside of the recent copilot everywhere shenanigans. There's something nice about having an integrated Linux environment (or "app") within a polished desktop environment with access to all the big commercial software. It doesn't feel good to use, from an ideological standpoint, but damn if it isn't productive.
by EsportToys | 2025-07-23 15:59:33+00:00
A middleground is to use fixed timesteps with the closed form solution. Then the integration factors can be statically precomputed as constants, and every frame becomes just a 2x2 matrix multiplication.

And even if you are to calculate the integration factors based on dynamic frame rates, they only need to be computed just once per frame for all objects that share the same damping configuration.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-23 15:59:38+00:00
How good are LLMs at writing Perl? I've tried to use Perl a few times, even being pretty conversant with shell scripting, sed, awk, etc. I found Perl to be difficult because it's so full of idioms that you "just have to know" and (to me anyway) TIMDOWTDI actually makes things harder for a new/learning perl developer.

What I want is TITBWTDI (this is the best way to do it).
by F-loat | 2025-07-23 15:59:55+00:00
Show HN: A modern, high-performance WebDAV browser written in Tauri + React + TypeScript. • Streams & displays multi-hundred-GB text files without choking your RAM • Instant in-file full-text search powered by chunked streaming + SIMD grep • 100 % AI-generated (GitHub Copilot + Claude) – zero human code Open-source, cross-platform, ready for your NAS or S3-backed WebDAV share.
by smnrchrds | 2025-07-23 16:00:07+00:00
Semi-related:

"Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop

British paratroopers recreating an airdrop behind German defences to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day were met by French customs officials at a makeshift border checkpost.

Moments after the paratroopers had hit the ground and gathered up their chutes, they formed an orderly queue and handed over their passports for inspection by waiting French customs officials in a Normandy field."

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/passports-please-britis...

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZY4rlAQus
by jonahbenton | 2025-07-23 16:00:11+00:00
Gotcha, yeah, hear you about the current state of vuln assessment. Many commercial vuln detect tools that work at the source level are very mature; the most critical recent issues have been supply chain- a trustworthy library suddenly becoming untrustworthy- and which could be scored (evaluating contributor behavior in the repo on top of the code itself). But google and other folks are all over oss supply chain security now, so it is more commercial/mature than research.

Going after LLM generated code will present the opposite problem- instead of "oh someone is doing this and someone is doing that and so and so is doing the other thing, what could I possibly do", you have "there is this problem and this other problem and that other other thing and no one is really paying attention to any of this, how can I pick just one thing to do." Still a tough problem but a better landscape for a researcher, looking for ways to contribute. Good luck.
by npteljes | 2025-07-23 16:01:46+00:00
From the user's perspective though, however safe is GrapheneOS, the banking app won't work, Google Pay won't work, Google Play asks a good bunch of questions and might work only some of the time, and the bootloader cannot verify the OS, it will say that there is something unknown on the device, on every restart and powerup.

I know what I'm doing so I don't mind these at all, but they need to be considered when planning with GrapheneOS.
by dandanua | 2025-07-23 16:01:50+00:00
Every government should have a tool to check if a transaction is illegal or not. In normal countries this should be done via a judge order if there are serious suspicions. This is how governments suppose to work. And there are checks and balances against power abuse, which were invented centuries ago. If a government doesn't work like that - then this is a problem of this specific government, not the laws. "All governments are bad" is a stupid idea, intentionally put onto the masses by the current US ruling party and their enablers (Musk), who are trying to seize all the power for themselves.