MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GolfPopper | 2025-07-16 17:45:54+00:00
History is full of stuff so commonplace that no one ever wrote it down. One example (mentioned in passing here [1]) is that from the Medieval period up until the mid-19th century, European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

Another is the rune 'Peorð'.[2] All the Anglo-Saxon runes have names in the Rune Poem, all the rest of which are known words in the corpus.But 'Peorð' isn't recorded anywhere else. No one knows what it means.

1.https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26482/mind-boggling-fact...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peor%C3%B0
by jerf | 2025-07-16 17:46:44+00:00
I couldn't pull the link up easily, since the search terms are pretty jammed, but HN had a link to paper a couple of months back about how someone had the LLM do some basic arithmetic and report with a chain-of-thought as to how it was doing it. They then went directly into the neural net and decoded what it was actually doing in order to do the math. The two things were not the same. The chain-of-thought gave a reasonably "elementary school" explanation of how to do the addition, but what the model basically did in English was just intuit the answer in much the same way that we humans do not go through a process to figure out what "4 + 7" is... we pretty much just have neurons that just "know" the answer to that. (That's not exactly what happened but it's close enough for this post.)

If CoT improves performance, then CoT improves performance, however the naively obvious read of "it improves performance because it is 'thinking' the 'thoughts' it tell us it is thinking, for the reasons it gives" is not completely accurate. It may not be completely wrong, either, but it's definitely not completely accurate. Given that I see no reason to believe it would be hard in the slightest to train models that have even more divergence between their "actual" thought processes and what they claim they are.
How and where will agents ship software?
by stopachka | 2025-07-16 17:47:08+00:00
The linked article explains this in detail, but today we're releasing:

1. An API to spin up apps programmatically. This is great if you are building platforms, where you can spin up databases and backends with 0 additional compute

2. An MCP server, which lets you and your agents talk to Instant and create apps

3. Agent rules, which tell agents how to use Instant

If you want to try this yourself, we have a tutorial that lets you run Instant in your own workflow: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial. Let us know what you think!
by ggm | 2025-07-16 17:47:17+00:00
Analogous beliefs about new RAM models up-ending the market for memory turned out to be far slower to hit the streets, and had far less impact on the DRAM market.

I would love to have something at modern memory speed, which behaved like core: Turn off the machine, its run-state is frozen. Turn back on, the memory state is still there.

But the reality is that machines are built to DRAM, and DRAM persists as the basic memory model for the "architecture" of a system
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-16 17:47:33+00:00
Huh, I overestimated SLS? My bad - I think I must have used Block 2 numbers by accident. Thanks for the correction.

My point stands though: no Artemis mission has plans to launch a full Apollo style capsule + lander stack. Artemis HLS, SpaceX and Blue Origin versions both, flies entirely on its own. So what's required of both SLS and any would-be SLS replacement is a far less demanding mission than what Saturn V has done in the past.

Which calls into question: what SLS is even for? Does it add value to the mission, or is the mission subtracted from to justify adding SLS to it?
by computator | 2025-07-16 17:47:45+00:00
> We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)

> the last link is also a lie

I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:

“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”
by calpaterson | 2025-07-16 17:47:57+00:00
> But I think believing your requests wont block just because you're using async is a bit naive at this point in Django

TBH personally I have yet to work on any professional async Python project (Django based or not) which did not have event loop pauses due to accidental blocking IO or CPU exhaustion.

I take your point fully though that a lot of Django's "async" methods are really using a thread pool. (True for much closed source async code as well!)
by Emdeha2357 | 2025-07-16 17:48:54+00:00
Yes, the S.A.I.B. was about the switch, which is used in many airplanes, and _should_ be checked and replaced. But they didn't. Because it wasn't mandatory. So my guess is those 50-70€ per switch were too expensive for the airline?

They reported that they replaced the whole middle console twice, so I cannot accept the 'it's pricey' or 'it's non-mandantory' as an excuse.

Hackers gona hack, so I'd like to get my hands on those switches, or better the whole fuel control panel. The pictures don't let me see or feel if a loose front panel could lift those shiny glowy locking knobs up by, say, 2.3mm and therefore unlock those switches, for example.

Only picture I could find online about this malfunctioning switch:

https://www.xuefeiji.org/public/uploads/weixin_mpimgs/e3/e36...

which looks like a really nasty 'mechanical inadequacy': half of the locking mechanism is the shiny glowy knobs. And they could _turn_. WTHolyF!? What where they smoking when designing or reviewing this?

In this fine post here, if you can read chinese or click the translation button on your browser:

https://www.xuefeiji.org/bbs/show-294.html

(CAVE: I'm not inside boeing's tech support system so I cannot verify this from the original maintainance manual, since they seem to be practically guarded as trade secrets...)

I tried to order some of those switches (766AT613-3D and 766AT614-3D) and hope they get delivered ... this year. Anyone here got their hands on those switches to test their feel when handling or their resiliency?

(My hypothesis is:

Hand on throttle, Hand pushes throttle full forward to start, Hand rests on throttle while accellerating, then pilot does the routine rotate and plane takes of and all is fine and Hand lets go of throttle, Hand falls on both switches directy behind the throttle: Click-click-WTF?-BOOM.)

Of Course almost anyone involved in the airplane industry would prefer this to be a clear-cut case of 'pilot error' or 'Terrorism/Insanity' - but that doesn't exnorate the manufacturer or owner of building and flying an airplane where the engines can be shut off while taking off, IMHO.

As an aside, I especially like the disclaimers on the last page of Honeywells catalogue (this one: https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2604543.pdf) - don't use it for anything safety-of-live related. - if it breaks because we delivered junk, we'll replace the switch - nothing else.

(I'm paraphrasing. Some laywers migth find a way to get out of this. I hope Boeing doesn't.).
by nemo | 2025-07-16 17:48:55+00:00
Knitting hadn't been invented when these were around - we know the Romans made gloves, socks, and other garments with a great deal of supporting evidence, there's not a single example of a mitten, nor of any kind of knitting like this. The Romans wove cloth on a loom and stitched it together. There's no signs of wear on any examples of the dodecahedra, so it's not a hand tool that comes into contact with wool or metals which would leave at least micro-abrasions. Whatever these were they were not a hand tool. It snows in north Italy, why wouldn't they need gloves in some places where it snows outside of Gallia? The knitting tool is among the weakest hypotheses in terms of evidence.

If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-07-16 17:49:11+00:00
The problem is that there are two things going on.

1. “HDR” is often referring to a tone mapping to convert the 10-14 bits of dynamic range in a camera’s raw file into the 8bits that fit into a jpeg (and often the screen).

2. HDR also refers to actually showing more than those 8bits of information. Saving more than 8bits in the image and having a screen that can show more than 8 bits of color.

#1 is real easy to make look unnatural, and most phones go over the top with it. #2 is a straightforward improvement and basically always makes the photo better.
by throwaway7356 | 2025-07-16 17:49:43+00:00
> You mean the troll that in that same thread is called out for being an off-topic spammer and blocked?

Where was this valued community member blocked? I thought the Xlibre project rejects censoring people for their political positions...

> Yes, leftist spammers are posting antisemitic memes and getting banned, nothing new.

They aren't getting banned. And claiming these are "leftist spammers" would sound more believable if the project founder would not have a history of posting how regretful it is that Holocaust denial is not legal is his home country together with crude theories about World War 2 on Linux distribution mailing lists.

Apparently the Xlibre community also likes to call out 11 year old children "pedophiles"...

From outside, calling children "pedophiles" seems a rather strange concept, but you be you. Though some might find the Xlibre and Lunduke communities being obsessed with investigating and collecting information on preteen children somewhat questionable.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-16 17:49:48+00:00
Hey! I just gave your project a star.

If you’re up for it, I’d really appreciate your support as well — I’m working on an open-source terminal-based image viewer called PIT (Phono in Terminal), built for speed and clean rendering (even 4K support in raw ANSI!).

You can check it out here: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/phono-in-terminal-image...

A star would mean a lot — not just for the number, but because people often judge usefulness by GitHub stars. Thanks either way, and keep building cool stuff
by jksmith | 2025-07-16 17:49:53+00:00
Comment generator: "Concerns about privacy invasions, adware, and forced updates in Windows are pushing users away. Many users are fed up with Microsoft "urging users to train their AI for free"."

1) Windows chatting behind your back causes distrust. And for good reason. 2) Yes, forced updates, but the consumers don't understand that they're just crofters in MSFT's world with all MSFT's products. MSFT will update as much as fits their needs to protect their property, not yours. 3) Re: adware. Part of your relationship with MSFT is that you are the commodity. It's a general internet business revenue model.
by tristor | 2025-07-16 17:49:57+00:00
Makes sense, I now do the majority of my personal workflows, except for photography, on Arch Linux on a Framework 13 laptop. I still have a M1 MBP for personal use that I primarily use for photography and not much else. There's a very minimal set of "normal" use cases that cannot be served on Linux at this point, and Linux desktops are more stable in the ways that matter to users now than the alternatives.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-07-16 17:49:57+00:00
Here's the wonderful thing: he'll be gone in 3.5 years or less. You're stuck with your guy until he dies because like the people that voted for Trump, you don't mind abject corruption if you get the appearance of strength. The difference is, annexing Greenland is just bluster to distract from the corruption. You guys actually invaded Ukraine and are paying dearly for it.
by simonw | 2025-07-16 17:50:04+00:00
I've tried a couple of things. I wrote a tool for exporting them to SQLite: https://github.com/dogsheep/github-to-sqlite

I've also tried a mechanism where I have GitHub Actions write them out as JSON files in the repo itself, then I can git clone them in one go: https://gist.github.com/simonw/0f906759afd17af7ba39a0979027a... and https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-16 17:51:03+00:00
I have a similar story, one that also took place in London. I had my bag stolen from under a chair outside a pub near UCL. It contained various important things including my passport, a journal with about six month’s of writing in it, critical notes for a project I was working on, etc. I was devastated.

A week later I had mostly made my peace with losing all my stuff and was about to apply, for a new passport, when I received a very posh letter in the post with an imposing coat of arms atop it; it was from the Duke of Bedford’s estate, which owns most of the land all around Bloomsbury. They told me they had found my bag in the locked garden in the middle of Bedford Square. The thieves must have thrown it over the railings, and fortunately there was a letter addressed to me inside it that gave away my address. I went to their very grand estate office to collect it and, amazingly, everything was still there, including the passport which the thieves apparently did not want.
by erikerikson | 2025-07-16 17:52:04+00:00
I have to admit it's been a bit but when I first made the transition after a couple years using JetBrains, everything I actually used in Visual Studio was in VsCode. I should also admit that a big part of Microsoft strategy from as far back as 2003 was to make things "easy" in a non-translatable way which kept people locked into Visual Studio. Having traversed this divide, I see it now as something akin to different languages for the same concepts. Not unlike learning further programming languages after your first.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-07-16 17:52:10+00:00
Seems like drone warfare is just democratizing what e.g the US has in capabilities with their precision munitions already, in a perhaps less capable but far cheaper manner. Put it in other words if this was the US directy engaging russia, it would probably be tomahawk missiles or something along those lines just like we’ve seen last few decades, vs a sort of Air Hogs with a bomb.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-07-16 17:52:21+00:00
I've reviewed the privacy policy and performance of various DoH servers, and determined in my opinion that Cloudflare and Google both provide privacy-respecting policies.

I believe that they follow their published policies and have reasonable security teams. They're also both popular services, which mitigates many of the other types of DNS tracking possible.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...
by 12_throw_away | 2025-07-16 17:52:30+00:00
Dear god. Just, look at this one report [1] - it's worthless LLM slop iterating on top of more worthless LLM slop, but the initial report is just plausible enough to waste a huge amount of time and energy to investigate and respond. Personally, I would try to run as far away as possible to avoid having to deal with this bullshit. Sternberg has the patience of a saint.

[1] https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307
by red-iron-pine | 2025-07-16 17:52:47+00:00
Krebs on Security talked about this. He kept getting death threats and swat'd.

You setup corporations who own your shit. The mortgage and house ownership is handled by the corp. You own the corp, and in some cases there is an umbrella corp that owns other corps.

The corporation then rents you your house. Mortgage and related points back to the corpo address, and you use a PO Box for personal stuff.

Ditto for phones, domains, etc. -- run through the company.
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-16 17:53:22+00:00
You are completely missing the point just like Mozilla.

This is the same a surgeon saying they refused to perform life-saving surgery on you because they don't believe you understand the consequences of the possibility of dying in surgery.

The average person cannot be an expert on surgery or on browser security it's up to the people that have the education and work experience in there to make those decisions and handle them. Mozilla as another poster said has taken their toys home because they didn't get what they want.
by notthemessiah | 2025-07-16 17:53:39+00:00
@steamdb.info‬:

Steam has added a new rule disallowing games that violate the rules and standards set forth by payment processors and card networks, or internet network providers.

This is possibly related to PayPal because people in certain regions have not been able to use it to pay on Steam for the past five days.

At the same time, many incest themed games were removed from the store.
by al_borland | 2025-07-16 17:53:46+00:00
> was once referred to as the Paris of America

Interesting. I heard that Detroit was known as the Paris of the West. Looking it up, it seems this was a fairly common phrase applied to many cities over the years. [0]

Detroit also has had $1 homes, but as with everywhere else, that isn’t the end of the story.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_of_the_West
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-07-16 17:54:26+00:00
In the book Ministry of the Future, a near-future look at a world dealing with devastating climate change, wars become somewhat obsolete because drones get so good it's always possible to kill someone anywhere in the world. The smallest faction can easily kill the leader of any country. It's an interesting thought. I don't recommend the book, one of those thought experiments with lots of interesting ideas with not enough story.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-16 17:54:44+00:00
If the existence of states is fundamentally incompatible with markets, markets will ultimately prevail at the expense of the world order.

Conversely, everything incompatible with markets eventually yields to them. We have almost never clawed back a public sector from marketization[1].

The trajectory of world order is toward a patchwork of states under corporate control. That model accommodates marketized defense - a new equilibrium in the political landscape.

1. With rare exceptions: UK rail, water in Paris, remunicipalization of some utilities, some NHS services, and some prisons.
by riknos314 | 2025-07-16 17:54:59+00:00
DSQL only uses Postgres for the query processor layer, so it doesn't require a replication library within postgres itself. Definitely NOT from DSQL.

> We’re not using any of the storage or transaction processing parts of PostgreSQL, but are using the SQL engine, an adapted version of the planner and optimizer, and the client protocol implementation. [1]

Rather, DSQL seems to do its region replication using the distributed journal abstraction [2].

[1] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12/04/inside-dsql.html [2] https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12/06/inside-dsql-cap.html
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 17:55:02+00:00
Almost certainly an LLM has, in response to a prompt and through sheer luck, spat out the kernel of an idea that a super-human centaur of the year 2125 would see as groundbreaking that hasn't been recognized as such.

We have a thin conception of genius that can be challenged by Edison's "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" or the process of getting a PhD were you might spend 7 years getting to the point where you can start adding new knowledge and then take another 7 years to really hit your stride.

I have a friend who is 50-something and disabled with some mental illness, he thinks he has ADHD. We had a conversation recently where he repeatedly expressed his fantasy that he could show up somewhere with his unique perspective and sprinkle some pixie dust on their problems and be rewarded for it. I found it exhausting. When I would hear his ideas, or if I hear any idea, I immediately think "how would we turn this into a product and sell it?" or "write a paper about it?" or "convince people of it?" and he would have no part of it and think that operationalizing or advocating for that was uninteresting and that somebody else would do all that work and my answer is -- they might, but not without the advocacy.

And it comes down to that.

If an LLM were to come up with a groundbreaking idea and be recognized as having a groundbreaking idea it would have to do a sustained amount of work, say at least 2 person × years equivalent to win people over. And they aren't anywhere near equipped to do that, nobody is going to pay the power bill to do that, and if you were paying the power bill you'd probably have to pay the power bill for a million of them to go off in the wrong direction.
by wolrah | 2025-07-16 17:55:20+00:00
This is basically what a Chromecast was. Internally they were basically just an appliance that booted to a very minimal version of Chrome which could be remote controlled by a compatible application, web site, or device.

It was a neat concept but I always found it annoying to have to keep going back to the app to control it when I was doing something else, or keep a tab open in my web browser, and it would often disconnect the session so no one could control it without just stopping and restarting entirely.

You can still use that interaction model on the newer Chromecast-branded devices but they're also full-fat Android TV devices that can be used standalone with a dedicated remote control and run actual apps, which I think is a nice balance.
by averynicepen | 2025-07-16 17:55:33+00:00
What do you want to make?

A quick primer. There are two forms of 3D modeling - parametric solid body modeling, used in engineering CAD programs like Solidworks, and mesh modeling, used in CGI industries from programs like Blender. Hobbyist 3D printing currently exists between these two audiences of engineers who design for function and designers who design for design, and all the newbies get caught up in the mosh pit between them all and it gets crazy confusing. It doesn't help that some software (like Fusion360) integrates both in the same software, or that STL is a mesh format and not a solid body format (like STEP).

If you want to make things that have any importance put on things like fit, function, dimensions, tolerances, etc., then you want to learn CAD (Solidworks) and find resources that teach the basics of mechanical engineering parts design (intro to CAD courses, basically). If you want to design from a more artistic standpoint, then use a mesh modeling software (Blender).

Fusion360 is actually quite usable for both, but my problem is that the Fusion resources for functional design are frequently non-engineers trying to teach engineering concepts and it's just a longer and more frustrating process.

BTW, their Maker version locks Maker-created files to ONLY be editable in Maker, which means upgrading to normal Solidworks renders your previous files unusable. The $60/year student edition is better. Avoid cloud versions of anything you pick. Up to you on your use case.

This was also posted to HN 2 months ago and is a gold mine of useful info for designing for function. https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/
by unethical_ban | 2025-07-16 17:55:39+00:00
For shadow IT, anything that requires "installation" vs. being in the base system or being added as a file to a project is an inconvenience.

It's why I like using Bottle for small Python frontends: download the file and import.

(I'm ranting based on personal experiences with IT in the past. Yes in general virtualenv is the baseline)