MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aurizon | 2025-07-04 19:52:52+00:00
There is evidence of lava tunnels and some show collapsed parts. The millions of years of thermal cycling with the lunar day/night might have annealed them, making them less likely to collapse and act places where long term sealed/insulated filled with low pressure pure oxygen at about 3 psi(same partial pressure of O2 as earth - less danger of any blow out. I can see the need for permanent roof/wall support as well as a sealed membrane with fiber glass for strength to make them safe for people and sheltered from some impacts
by BJones12 | 2025-07-04 19:53:27+00:00
If I had 8 billion in cash in my bank account and put in a transfer order, they'd block it, call me, make me come into a branch, make sure there weren't any burly guys with wrenches escorting me in, and maybe call the FBI if anything seemed off.

And if it was still legit after that, there would be days or weeks of waiting for the transfer to actually happen, during which time I could call and cancel.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 19:53:29+00:00
Good tools can be used incorrectly.

I wouldn't want to go back to a world without LLMs, but I wish people were more thoughtful in how we use them. Right now, we're seeing AI being slapped on everything like every other trend in the past. When things settle after this upheaval, whether in 20 years or 100, I'd bet AI will still be here and be more useful than ever.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-04 19:53:54+00:00
The reason coyotes don't eat children is that they're kept separate. Same reason sharks don't eat children. Left to their own devices, coyotes obviously will eat children.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707064

> I used to go for six mile walks in the High Desert for exercise. I routinely ran into coyotes. They never bothered me.

> I did tell my children to not go out alone at night. There had been two or three attacks on children in the previous five years.

Another story that came up on HN was someone describing how he used to adventure through the wild areas near his home, and was never bothered by the lone coyotes he saw, but that on one occasion he met two coyotes together, and they began circling him. I didn't manage to find that one today.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-04 19:53:54+00:00
Streaming also changed the landscape.

The game meta/knowledge spreads through realtime video and incidental entertainment instead of through slow message boards only frequented by power users who would do something as lame as spend time on a 2005 message board.

It's amazing how deeply knowledgable everyone is about every game because of it.

I guess it's not good or bad. It's nice that gaming is mainstream instead of being a stereotypical loser activity it was when I was in high school.
by stackbutterflow | 2025-07-04 19:54:18+00:00
This just reminds me to never assumes someone's reality. I speak more than two languages. And I disagree.

Papers are read by all type of people, I don't know why you assume scientific papers which are almost all written in English are read solely by native English speakers.

People have been doing science in broken English, French, German, Arabic, Latin and more for as long there has been science to be made.
by mumbisChungo | 2025-07-04 19:57:01+00:00
It's the same problem that crypto experiences. Almost everyone is propagating lies about the technology, even if a majority of those doing so don't understand enough to realize they're lies.

I'd argue there's more intentional lying in crypto and less value to be gained, but in both cases people who might derive real benefit from the hard truth of the matter are turning away before they enter the door due to dishonesty/misrepresentation.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-07-04 19:58:32+00:00
I used physical samples of pebbled glass, curved glass, and clear glass. You can get the same effect using curved glass because of how natural light bounces off of the surface of the subject object and onto the glass, but you don't get this pronounced of effect with a flat panel of glass, frosted or not.

It's too exaggerated for, say, a kernel of 32px.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-04 19:58:59+00:00
This randomly reminded me of when I grinded dwarf reputation in World of Warcraft so that at level 40, I was the only human riding a goat/ram (dwarf mount) instead of the horse.

I remember killing endless crocodiles in STV so I could turn in their heavy leather I think during the event where the realm works together to open the AQ gate.

I'll see a 13yo gardener here in Mexico and wish he could be doing that instead of working. :(
by Quekid5 | 2025-07-04 19:59:05+00:00
> However, it’s getting frustrating to see all of the reductionist claims that “chronic pain is psychological”.

It's incredibly frustrating and disheartening... For obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but chronic (non-visible) pain is the worst of the worst. People will either think you're "faking"[0] or it's "just psychosomatic"[1]. I actually relish being able to work for a good long day because I'm lucky enough to actually enjoy making computers do stuff.

[0] Yes, I love to miss lots of family occasions, just because.

[1] I'll just will myself better. Nevermind the MRI scans and all that.

EDIT: I should add... the cognitive biases at work are understandable because they've probably been around since proto-humanity, but that doesn't change the outcomes.
by eesmith | 2025-07-04 20:00:19+00:00
Feel free to check some print dictionaries.

New Merriam-Webster dictionary, 1989, def. 4 "an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/newmerriamwebste00spri/page/180/...

Pocket Oxford English dictionary, 2005, def. 3 "(informal) an indefinite small number" - https://archive.org/details/pocketoxfordengl0000unse_p5e4/pa...

The Random House college dictionary, 1975, def. 6, "a couple of, (Informal) a small number of, a few"
by qwertox | 2025-07-04 20:00:24+00:00
This is full ECC, the CPU supports it (AMD Pro variant).

DDR5 ECC is not good enough. What if you have faulty RAM and ECC is constantly correcting it without you knowing it? There's no value in that. You need the OS to be informed so that you are aware of it. It also does not protect errors which occur between the RAM and the CPU.

This is similar to HDDs using ECC. Without SMART you'd have a problem, but part of SMART is that it allows you to get a count of ECC-corrected errors so that you can be aware of the state of the drive.

True ECC takes the role of SMART in regards of RAM, it's just that it only reports that: ECC-corrected errors.

On a NAS, where you likely store important data, true ECC does add value.
by Latty | 2025-07-04 20:00:32+00:00
> This is not an official EU Commission or Government resource. [...] Nothing found in this portal constitutes legal advice.

It's easier and safer to just claim that you must prompt for everything, and it serves the goal of obfuscating bad behaviour.

Cookies that are functionally necessary to do what the user is there for, not to track them, are OK, that's the spirit and intent of the law. Even if you think the wording means that, realistically, the EU isn't coming after anyone for a legitimate good-faith use of language cookies without a banner, and they'd clarify if that was how they intended to enforce it.
by dist-epoch | 2025-07-04 20:00:35+00:00
You are confused. The people with guns will come for you if you steal bitcoin and they know who you are.

> Bitcoin thief sentenced to 5 years in prison for stealing $1 billion in crypto and laundering it with his social-media rapper wife ‘Razzlekhan’

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/15/bitcoin-thief-sentence...
by coderatlarge | 2025-07-04 20:00:52+00:00
“ The second of these scenarios featured a piece of software called the SRI-ARC Online System being developed at Stanford. This was a fancy piece of software with lots of functionality (it was the software system that Douglas Engelbart demoed in the “Mother of All Demos”), but one of the many things it could do was make use of what was essentially a file hosting service run on the host at UC Santa Barbara. From a terminal at the Washington Hilton, conference attendees could copy a file created at Stanford onto the host at UCSB simply by running a copy command and answering a few of the computer’s questions: “

ii reminds me of typing .. at a / prompt on an AFS connected system and realizing there was more to see above my local system.
by guerby | 2025-07-04 20:01:01+00:00
Related question: does anyone know of an usb-c powerbank that can be effectively used as UPS? That is to say is able to be charged while maintaining power to load (obviously with rate of charge greater by a few watts than load).

Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.

Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.
by oblio | 2025-07-04 20:01:06+00:00
I'm a big fan of agriculture as a civilizational stepping stone, but apparently the diet (and height, and risk of malnutrition, etc) of the average hunter-gatherer was richer in vitamins, minerals, etc, than the diet of a the average farmer.

Since most of the world switched to farming around 5000 years ago (I think), that means that our average diet regressed for at least 3500 of those years.

So, if you think about it, assuming the much larger farming tribe next to you did not kill you and your entire tribe, agriculture was a bit of a mistake, at an individual level.

I agree with the other commenter, there's a chance the current incarnation of LLMs (and social media, etc) might be looked upon, in the future, as equivalent to the discovery of tobacco or leaded gasoline.
by mihaaly | 2025-07-04 20:01:23+00:00
I believe both arguments assume honest contributors, which may not be completely true. I have no reference but vague recollection of doctored data, made up results (basically cheating) due to publication pressure or just dishonesty/lazyness plaguing the reliability of scientific publications. Some may even be happy of the twisted reality or halucinations producing novel sounding results advancing the scientific career similar to those occured in the past. Reproducibility crisis is their friend to get away with it for a long enough time to have the personal gain harvested.
by rescripting | 2025-07-04 20:01:50+00:00
What evidence do you have that the birds killed by cats are mainly old or ill?

Cats being an invasive species in most places on earth means that most bird species have not evolved with them as a natural predator, and so are at an innate disadvantage.

And yes, birds hitting man made structures is a major problem. There can be two bad things at once. Just because there are two bad things doesn't mean we give up tackling one or the other.
by throw0101d | 2025-07-04 20:02:27+00:00
>> > some sort of data error detection (and ideally correction).

> That's pretty much built into most mass storage devices already.

And ZFS has shown that it is not sufficient (at least for some use-cases, perhaps less of a big deal for 'residential' users).

> The likelihood and consequence of this occurring is in many situations not worth the overhead of adding additional ECC on top of what the drive does.

Not worth it to whom? Not having the option available at all is the problem. I can do a zfs set checksum=off pool_name/dataset_name if I really want that extra couple percentage points of performance.

> Without an fsck what mechanism do you suppose would manage these errors as they're discovered?

Depends on the data involved: if it's part of the file system tree metadata there are often multiple copies even for a single disk on ZFS. So instead of the kernel consuming corrupted data and potentially panicing (or going off into the weeds) it can find a correct copy elsewhere.

If you're in a fancier configuration with some level of RAID, then there could be other copies of the data, or it could be rebuilt through ECC.

With ext*, LVM, and mdadm no such possibility exists because there are no checksums at any of those layers (perhaps if you glom on dm-integrity?).

And with ZFS one can set copies=2 on a per-dataset basis (perhaps just for /home?), and get multiple copies strewn across the disk: won't save you from a drive dying, but could save you from corruption.
by preisschild | 2025-07-04 20:03:46+00:00
Have you even read what it does in the link? How is it "dumbing down and opaqueing" to just encode the kernel panic in a QR code?

Its not like in windows where you get some cryptic error code. This is just encoding kernel panic traces as a QR code, so more can fit on the screen without scrolling and copying is easy.
by webstrand | 2025-07-04 20:04:20+00:00
I use CoW a lot just managing files. It's only an efficiency gain if you have enough space to do the data-copying operation. And that's not necessarily true in all cases.

Being able to quickly take a "backup" copy of some multi-gb directory tree before performing some potentially destructive operation on it is such a nice safety net to have.

It's also a handy way to backup file metadata, like mtime, without having to design a file format for mapping saved mtimes back to their host files.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 20:04:36+00:00
If no one on a given team fluently speaks, writes, and understands the cultural context of the required output language, that team will need to find a solution.

It should not be a word machine (which, I should point out, does not have a brain)

Solving this problem might just involve using some of the resources to support the output being correct in the required language. You can call that a "cost"
by ineedasername | 2025-07-04 20:04:59+00:00
>”How well does a zero-shot, 4K token context ChatGPT 3.5 fed hand-typed Zork states and a pruned action list cope with a single play-through of Zork I”

This is the more accurate title and actual question they answered, and the answer unsurprisingly was “not great”. But my rewritten title is still understated for the poor quality of the protocol they used for this.
by Nextgrid | 2025-07-04 20:05:08+00:00
What's so bad about it? Windows to this day doesn't have FOSS drivers as standard and despite that is pretty successful. In practice, as long as a driver works it's fine for the vast majority of users, and you can always disassemble and binary-patch if really needed.

(it's not obvious that having to occasionally disassemble/patch closed-source drivers is worse than the collective effort wasted trying to get every single thing in the kernel and keep it up to date).
by asdf6969 | 2025-07-04 20:05:14+00:00
In my experience I have no leverage and the contract is too vague to mean anything. The contract I signed says my job conditions and work hours are subject to change at any time. I understand I took a risk, but things were fine for years before they wanted me to start being available 24/7 or work late into the night. In environments like this the only sane thing to do is reluctantly accept the terms of the contract and push as many boundaries as I can.

Just because the employer pays me and I signed a contract doesn’t mean I can’t complain or push back. Do you think I should also dance like a Walmart employee in the morning if my employer tells me to? The contract I signed says yes but in reality it doesn’t matter
by EGreg | 2025-07-04 20:05:24+00:00
On a side note, if quantum algorithms break elliptic curve cryptography, then wouldn’t Satoshi’s wallets and others be flooding the market with coin transfers?

The BTC network will need to require all addresses with large Bitcoin UTXOs to send them to new wallets, that are quantum-resistant, by a certain date, or lose the ability to move that money.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-04 20:05:28+00:00
> I'm not (...) producing technical literature for others to consume, but I feel like I'd want my humanity to come through on important topics like this.

This will absolutely be just an opinion, but the kind of documentations I dislike the most are the ones that are (full of) arbitrarily structured prose. There's a time and place for self-expression and phrasing liberties; intricate, brittle, and especially long technical descriptions I don't think is one of them.
by p_ing | 2025-07-04 20:05:47+00:00
A single SSD can (or at least NVMe can). You have to question whether or not you need it -- what are you doing that you would go line-speed a large portion of time that the time savings are worth it. Or it's just a toy, totally cool too.

4 7200 RPM HDDs in RAID 5 (like WD Red Pro) can saturate a 1Gbps link at ~110MBps over SMB 3. But that comes with the heat and potential reliability issues of spinning disks.

I have seen consumer SSDs, namely Samsung 8xx EVO drives have significant latency issues in a RAID config where saturating the drives caused 1+ second latency. This was on Windows Server 2019 using either a SAS controller or JBOD + Storage Spaces. Replacing the drives with used Intel drives resolved the issue.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-04 20:05:53+00:00
I played Runescape back when it was just Falador and Varrock, and it all started because I saw a kid at the public library playing it.

And not long after that I was waking up at 2am to mine or grind some skill before I had to go to football practice at 5:30am.

I wonder what kind of permanent damage that did.
by pcrh | 2025-07-04 20:06:32+00:00
An LLM would only be able to "polish" a non-native speaker's writing. Otherwise it is not conceivable that it could improve the essential nature of original research being communicated, this is as said original research will not be part of its training dataset.

Scientists who hope that using an LLM to help write a paper will improve the quality of their output are deluding themselves.
by cb321 | 2025-07-04 20:06:53+00:00
While all you say is true, it bears note that it didn't need to be decisive. The current mob branch of tcc is such that a `#!/bin/tcc -run` "script" is about 1.3x faster than perl</dev/null on two CPUs I tried.

Besides your two slower examples, Julia and Java VMs and else thread PHP also have really big start up times. As I said up top, people just get addicted to "big environments". Lisp culture would do that with images and this is part of where the "emacs is bloated" meme came from.

Anyway, at the time getline wasn't even standardized (that was 2008 POSIX - and still not in Windows; facepalm emoji), but you could write a pretty slick little library for CGI in a few hundred..few thou' lines of C. Someone surely even did.

But things go by "reputation" and people learn what their friends tell them to, by and large. So, CGI was absolutely the thing that made the mid to late 90s "Perl's moment".
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-07-04 20:07:08+00:00
> No, the assertion is that the proper response to a bug often (and if it's high impact - always) involves a lot more than just the bugfix.

Then what you do is you try to split your work in two. You could think of a stopgap measure or a workaround which is small, can be reviewed easily, and will reduce the impact of the bug while not being a "proper" fix, and prepare the "properer" fix when the merge window opens.

I would ask, since the bug probably lived since the last stable release, how come it fell through the crack and had only been noticed recently? Could it be that not all setups are affected? If so, can't they live with it until the next merge window?

By making a "feature that fixes the bug for real", you greatly expand the area in which new, unknown bugs may land, with very little time to give it proper testing. This is inevitable, evident by the simple fact that the bug you were trying to fix exists. You can be good, but not that good. Nobody is that good. If anybody was that good, they wouldn't have the bug in the first place.

If you have commercial clients who use your filesystem and you have contractual obligations to fix their bugs and keep their data intact, you could (I'd even say "should") maintain an out-of-tree version with its own release and bugfix schedule. This is IMO the only reasonable way to have it, because the kernel is a huge administrative machine with lots of people, and by mainlining stuff, you necessarily become co-dependent on the release schedule for the whole kernel. I think a conflict between kernel's release schedule and contractual obligations, if you have any, is only a matter of time.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-07-04 20:07:24+00:00
Oh my, that long journey is one of my fondest memories of the game as well. Absolutely terrifying as a low level with barely any information on how to pull it off, having to ask strangers for help. The fear of losing all of your stuff on the way and having to run all the way back. Magical. I was just a humble human paladin on the Mithaniel Marr server.

I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.
by leakycap | 2025-07-04 20:08:42+00:00
Sounds like you would be a perfect person to help clear up misunderstandings in texts being translated if your skills are as keen as you describe.

You mention being reminded not to assume someone else's reality by our conversation--I would encourage you to also be reminded of the common fallacy where people wildly overestimate their own abilities, especially when it comes to claiming to speak/read/write multiple languages with knowledge akin to a native speaker.

It is unfortunately very common to mislead oneself about abilities when you haven't had to rely on that skillset in a real environment.

I would venture that you don't regularly work with multiple languages in your work outputs, or you would have likely received feedback by now that could help provide understanding about the nuances of language and communication.
by cubefox | 2025-07-04 20:08:55+00:00
The box art by Keith Parkinson is a classic:

https://www.keithparkinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EQ...

This seems to be entirely hand drawn (acrylic painting?) with a lot of skill.

A Google Image search for "Keith Parkinson" shows more of his great paintings. Unfortunately he died in 2005.
by asdf6969 | 2025-07-04 20:09:03+00:00
Salaried positions are explicitly not selling time. Whether I work 2 or 12 hours the compensation is the same. The only reason these contracts make sense is the unstated agreement that my employer won’t abuse the contractual power they theoretically have. And what’s the alternative? Signing bad contracts and leaving when things go to shit is probably 10x better for my career than pretending that I have agency in contract negotiations
by alganet | 2025-07-04 20:09:56+00:00
Some 15 years ago, I made a small configuration language:

https://github.com/Respect/Config/blob/master/docs/README.md

Then, two years later, toml (by a GitHub founder) appeared. It is almost an exact clone of it.

https://github.com/toml-lang/toml

--

You could say that is just a coincidence, and it's an obvious idea that anyone could have had.

But then again, also around that time, a sibling component for the configuration language was featured on "The Changelog" (then, a very popular website featuring interesting projects).

https://changelog.com/posts/validation-the-most-awesome-vali...

It stayed on trending PHP repositories for months.

--

So, either toml was stolen or I independently invented it years prior.

Don't do easy to implement DSLs kids, there's no way of licensing them.