MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boricj | 2025-07-21 21:33:43+00:00
> There was some design oddness that plagued early MIPS and SPARC that future architectures avoided.

I wrote a Ghidra extension that can export relocatable object files. The MIPS analyzer for it is the hardest algorithmic challenge I've ever tackled, by far. The quirks of that architecture offer an endless supply of frustrating edge cases.

It uses split HI16/LO16 relocations because the earliest versions couldn't use literal pools due to a lack of PC-relative loads/stores, so figuring out pointers within the instruction stream require elaborate register dependency and code block graph traversal. Branch delay slots further scramble that instruction stream because compilers will attempt to stuff them with useful instructions. The System V ABI reference documentation for MIPS is woefully outdated and incomplete, with various extensions left undocumented.

The x86 analyzer in comparison is very straightforward. I haven't tried to add support for another RISC instruction set, but I struggle to think of one that would be even harder to deal with than MIPS (except SPARC, maybe).
by caconym_ | 2025-07-21 21:33:55+00:00
Seems like generally it ended up being a surveillance play, in practice if not original intent. For example, Dog coin has been reported to be passing data taken from other agencies directly to ICE^[1] for law enforcement applications, and there was that other matter of logins apparently from Russia using accounts the Dog coin personnel demanded agencies create on their internal systems with (auditable) logging disabled^[2]. And probably more that I'm forgetting.

One does wonder whether this was all part of Musk's vision, or more thanks to the scum he hired to staff Dog coin and/or other lawless opportunists in the Trump administration.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/16/medica...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/whistleblow...
by pessimizer | 2025-07-21 21:34:19+00:00
It is true. Denying trivial truths with the purpose of not giving an inch does not add to one's argument, it weakens it.

Plenty of closed source products will happily backdoor their products on request, without a warrant, if they are confident they will never be found out. That's the point. Not that FOSS source is somehow inviolable to nation-states with virtually infinite resources, many of which sponsor or contribute to the finance of a huge percentage of the development of FOSS themselves.

It's easier to find backdoors in FOSS if you're looking, because you're allowed to look. But somebody has to be looking.
by saagarjha | 2025-07-21 21:34:30+00:00
I feel like there’s this misconception that mapping data from disk is free (this is also mentioned in the README you linked). It’s not. If the pages are clean then you do get the benefit of being able to discard them when pressure is high, but if you need them again they have to be paged in. And for most apps there is no sharing of this data, so loading it will be accounted for against your process rather than being amortized across several like system libraries might be. Sure, it’s definitely better than dirty anonymous pages, but it’s not free.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-21 21:34:44+00:00
> My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place

"Willfully causing injury in this way should not be a wrong at all" is a very different argument than "the damage award was inappropriate for willfully causing injury in this way", so it would help if you would not disguise your argument for the former positions as one for the latter position if you want to have a productive exchange.
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-21 21:35:13+00:00
Most houses are not built 1:1 with the land underneath it. Builders buy larger plots and then use it to make multiple houses. So a builder would need to enter at least the land risk in your scheme still.

Then if they had to wait for each plot and future house sale to occur before pricing the sale they couldn't get economies of scale.

Effectively your scheme turns every house into a more complicated bespoke futures contract with more parties involved.

There maybe benefits to that but it doesn’t seem like a system designed to get more houses built.
by chrisco255 | 2025-07-21 21:35:21+00:00
Sorry if you ban speech to the right of center then you don't have freedom of speech. "hate" is a loaded term, poorly defined. To me, it might seem you hate everyone right of center, while you think there's some clear line where speech crosses such that it can be labeled far right and a ministry of truth can slap a fine down to halt this "dangerous" speech. Meanwhile, is the "danger" equally regulated across the political spectrum and covering far-left speech as well? Of course OP didn't even bother to balance the concern about far right speech with equal concern about far left speech. You can be certain that such biases exist in any institution in which you might construct to attempt to regulate and that it would be absolutely impossible to obtain a perfect and permanent balance between the factions. Inevitably the balance of power would shift in favor of one faction or another and the more likely outcome is that the faction would use its monopoly over "truth" or "hate" to redefine even valid and factual criticism to be hate speech. Perhaps your country has already hit that tipping point and you can't even save it because you lack the liberty to do so?
by dustingetz | 2025-07-21 21:35:22+00:00
see also “Notational Intelligence” https://thesephist.com/posts/notation/

“The value of notation lies in how it enables us to work with new abstractions. With more powerful notation, we can work with ideas that would have been too complex or unwieldy without it. Equipped with better notation, we might think of solutions or hypotheses that would have been previously unthinkable. Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division. Without chess notation, the best strategies and openings may not have been played. Without a notation for juggling patterns called Siteswap, many new juggling patterns wouldn’t have been invented. I think notation should be judged by its ability to contribute to and represent previously unthinkable, un-expressible thoughts.”

This is pretty much the whole point of programming languages imo
by kristian1232 | 2025-07-21 21:35:40+00:00
Thanks for the great questions!

Query Latency Query latency is highly variable and depends on several factors:

Query Type: A simple SELECT with a WHERE clause on a single table will be much faster than a complex multi-table JOIN that requires shuffling data between workers.

Data Size: The total volume of data being scanned from disk or object storage is a primary driver of latency.

Execution Plan: The system chooses between different plans. A

- LocalExecutionPlan that runs on a single node is fastest. A

- DistributedBroadcastJoinPlan is used when one table is small and is generally faster than a DistributedShuffleJoinPlan, which is the fallback for large tables and tends to have the highest latency.

Fault Tolerance: If a worker node fails, the system will automatically retry the task up to a configured maximum, which can add to the total execution time.

Caching Yes, caching is a key feature! Your team's approach sounds very thorough. Our current implementation focuses on caching the final results of queries to avoid re-computation.

Here’s how it works:

In-Memory TTL Cache: We use a simple, time-to-live (TTL) in-memory cache for the /query endpoint. When a query is executed, a SHA256 hash of the SQL string and the requested format (e.g., "json" or "arrow") is used as the cache key.

Cache Check: For every incoming query, we first check the cache. If a valid, non-expired result is found, we return it immediately, which is significantly faster.

Cache Population: If it's a cache miss, the query is fully executed, and the final result is stored in the cache before being sent to the client. The TTL is configurable, defaulting to 300 seconds.

This approach caches the final output rather than lower-level data like file metadata or individual data blocks, but your point about caching Parquet metadata and S3 listings is excellent—that would be a great way to further optimize the planning phase.
by whamlastxmas | 2025-07-21 21:36:20+00:00
I had a recent example of ChatGPT giving me a really fishy answer I didn’t believe after it searched online, so I looked at the cited page, and it was clearly hallucinated slop written by another AI.

I wish for it to only use sources that are older than 2019 and have zero ads and referral links, haha.
by thor-rodrigues | 2025-07-21 21:36:23+00:00
I spent a good amount of time last year working on a system to analyse patent documents.

Patents are difficult as they can include anything from abstract diagrams, chemical formulas, to mathematical equations, so it tends to be really tricky to prepare the data in a way that later can be used by an LLM.

The simplest approach I found was to “take a picture” of each page of the document, and ask for an LLM to generate a JSON explaining the content (plus some other metadata such as page number, number of visual elements, and so on)

If any complicated image is present, simply ask for the model to describe it. Once that is done, you have a JSON file that can be embedded into your vector store of choice.

I can’t say about the price-to-performance ration, but this approach seems to easier and more efficient than what is the author is proposing.
by charles_f | 2025-07-21 21:36:27+00:00
> CISA advises vulnerable organizations [...] to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available.

It's interesting to me that you'd go the hassle of hosting your own SharePoint on prem, but leave it internet facing. I would have assumed a the Venn diagram of these organizations to be entirely contained in orgs forcing you to use a VPN.
by keeda | 2025-07-21 21:36:41+00:00
That's what the code review is for :-) But to echo the sibling comments, I've not caught a subtle edge case or bug in the generated code in more than a year and half. There are mistakes and failure modes for sure, but they are very glaring, to the extent that I simply throw that code away and try again.

That said, I've adopted a specific way of working with AI that is very effective for my situation (mentioned in my comment history, but echoes a lot of what TFA advises.)
by scarecrowbob | 2025-07-21 21:37:37+00:00
I suppose that position comes down to weather you feel like these folks are representing you or you feel like they govern you.

Having read a couple of popular histories of the CIA and knowing how they thought about how folks like me live in the world, it is easy to understand that they are decidedly not acting in my interests.

If you find the interests of the US power to align with your own, that's probably pretty normal for US citizens. But even just looking at Paperclip and Phoenix, I'd be sad to be aligned with either of those crimes, and that's not even looking at the horrible outcomes of their work in Guatemala, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia, etc.

The CIA is a pretty handy thing I suppose, as it's existence has convinced me that the US gov neither has my interests in mind nor represents me in any meaningful fashion.

Given the fact I think that they have done an immense amount of harm in the world, that fact has made my conscience much lighter.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-07-21 21:39:04+00:00
Refueling is not why tokamaks are pulsed.

A smooth toroidal magnetic field cannot confine plasma. The field at the outer side (further away from axis) are spread more widely and weaker than in the inner side. In a very short time, this will cause ions to drift out of confinement at the outer side. The solution is to produce a twisted, helical field, where the field lines go in circles in both directions of the toroid simultaneously, like the stripes of a candy cane in the bend.

Different reactor designs have different solutions to this. Tokamaks use a solenoid to drive a strong toroidal current in the plasma. This, in turn, causes a poloidal magnetic field, which provides the second half of the field needed for confinement. But this only works when magnetic field of the solenoid coil is varying smoothly over time in a single direction. Eventually, you hit some limit in your ability to do that, at which point you lose your ability to confine the plasma and the pulse ends.

Stellarators do not have this issue. They get the full field geometry needed from their primary field, by twisting it around the toroid in a very complex path. The downside is that they are much more difficult to design and build.
by rednafi | 2025-07-21 21:40:15+00:00
Most of the DevOps folks I’ve encountered, unfortunately, couldn’t code much. So it was mostly ops work with a fancy new title.

The idea of a single entity being responsible for development, operations, observability, and support is flawed from the start. That’s not a one-person job, and the expectation simply doesn’t scale. So DevOps often ends up being either ops folks or dev folks, and rarely a true blend of the two.

What we need are feature-focused developers, ops-savvy devs who can deploy their own work, and a strong team dedicated to observability and applying modern SRE practices.

So I think curious developers who aren’t afraid of infra, along with a solid platform engineering team, are a real improvement over the status quo.
by godelski | 2025-07-21 21:40:41+00:00
First off, I love Luma Field. Always incredible to see what's going on inside things. Even just fun to scroll through their Twitter.

Second, Anker is one of the few companies I actually have a very high trust for. A few years back I bought a wall charger[0] from them, it has 2 USB-C and a Type A. A month in, one of the Type-C ports wouldn't charge if the other port was being used. If you send a support ticket they annoyingly give you a response with very basic trouble shooting. But if you respond to that you get a person. They just sent me a new one right away (<10 days) and there was no need to return the charger or anything. So I still use it, just blocked the bad port. I gotta say, whenever I encounter good customer service I become loyal.

I wanted to say this because I think a quality matters. Quality often takes nuances and this can often run counter to maximizing profits (Lemon Markets and all that). Looking at Luma's report, I don't get the indication that they had this issue because they were cutting corners but looks like it must be upstream[1]. But am happy to see they were giving gift cards along with the recall. Companies should minimize mistakes as best as they can, but it is important to judge them by how they handle mistakes. It can be easy to get caught in the negativity but I personally don't think I'll stop buying Anker products.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Q52CXX1

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639759
by anbotero | 2025-07-21 21:41:11+00:00
Wait, why are there so many skeptics in this thread?

I have setup AWS + SOPS in several projects now, and the developers do not have access to the secrets themselves nor the encryption key (which is stored in AWS). Only once did we ever require to rollback a secret and that happened at AWS level, not the code’s. Also it happened within the key rotation period, so it was easy.

For us it’s easier to track changes (not the value, but when it changes), easier to associate it with incidents.
by kuhsaft | 2025-07-21 21:41:16+00:00
It’s impossible to stop using M365 while stopping usage of SharePoint (cloud or on-premises). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640219

Here’s just one example:

Each M365 Teams Team creates an M365 Group which creates a SharePoint site and Exchange mailbox. Teams channel files are stored in that SharePoint site. Teams channel messages are stored in the Exchange mailbox.

Private files dropped in Teams are stored in OneDrive (rebranded SharePoint). Private Teams messages are stored in the sender and recipients’ Exchange mailboxes.

M365 is SharePoint and Exchange. EVERYTHING is built on top.

EDIT: changed ‘individual’ to ‘sender and recipients’
by apronchenkov | 2025-07-21 21:42:40+00:00
It was fun to explore the CT scan on my own, then read the article to see what was actually identified, and go back to the scan to find those things myself (despite the limitation of having scans from only one unit -- it was still great!). Initially, I thought there were no details of insides of the battery units, but after adjusting the settings, I was able to see the internal layers!
by consp | 2025-07-21 21:43:00+00:00
If they have flat batteries you could be safe if they are LiFePO which are quite hard to light on fire. YMMV depending on the actual battery. Usually the come from batches of old phones which went out of production are put into these kind of things since they can be bought on the cheap.

If they put in a round cell I'd stay away. I usually replace the cell with one I know is good and check the circuit for protection. Wouldn't be the first time I've seen something with no over or undervolt protection whatsoever.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-21 21:43:22+00:00
Eh. Anker did the bare minimum to address their liability.

They won’t pay for devices that Amazon says are in scope, but the black on black serial number is illegible.

For devices that are covered, they advise you to not dispose of them at a retailer like Home Depot that accepts lithium batteries, but provides no means to safely dispose of this fire hazard. So I got my $40 payment, but I assume now that will disclaim any liability when my house or car goes on fire while I try to find a facility that accepts dangerous batteries.
by yoz-y | 2025-07-21 21:44:30+00:00
I would be willing to bet that vast majority of “subscribed” newsletters are spam.

I always receive a ton of newsletters. Never once have I signed up, I always uncheck all sign up prompts and always immediately unsubscribe if I receive one.

Even then, immediately after any sort of purchase I get resubscribed. I’m convinced that most shops completely ignore all user choices and resubscribe everyone to all mailing lists after purchase.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-07-21 21:44:38+00:00
I have spent far too much of my life on SharePoint. Having it internet facing has never been a good idea. Not really what it is meant for, though the promo verbiage on that has changed over different versions.

Some folks wanted SharePoint as their "web server", I would set that installation up entirely separted from all other instances they may have on the network.
by metabagel | 2025-07-21 21:45:02+00:00
It's a bit more nuanced than what you are saying. Here's what Yoni Appelbaum said:

> I should start by saying this: Jane Jacobs is right about almost everything. She was right about what makes cities vibrant and vital. She was right about the ballet of the sidewalk. She writes brilliantly about needing to treat cities as living things, that if you try to centrally plan them and assign all of their functions, it doesn't work very well. They need to evolve over time. They need a diversity of peoples, of uses.

She was right about all of that, and she sees great menace in the urban renewal schemes of the time, where the experts of her age looked at cities and saw disorderly places that needed rationality. In all of that, she was exactly right, but her solution was to reassert the original right of communities to define their own boundaries.

She said individuals, activists should have the right to veto new developments in their neighborhoods. And so you get the sort of endless processes of community hearings and reviews, and she's quite explicit that the goal of these reviews is not to gauge the actual opinions of the neighborhood or to balance the good of the community, but to empower activists like Jacobs to step in and say “no.”

She wants “right-thinking people” like her to be able to stop the government from doing bad things. It is a revolt against government from the left, and it is amazingly effective. But the new rules don’t just get exercised by right-thinking people, and one of the things about right-thinking people is they're often wrong about the things they're thinking about. And so, she imagines this as the ability to veto lots of destructive changes. But in practice, it emerges as a simple collective veto of almost all change, and it has had tremendous costs for Americans as a whole.
by aredox | 2025-07-21 21:45:03+00:00
>France is from the legal past that the US emerged from

The French legal system has been completely revamped by Napoleon far after the US independence, and has been so successful that countries invaded by Napoleon have retained his system after being freed from him.

Meanwhile the us system is still based on a mediaeval system where nothing is ever certain and everything depends on how good a lawyer you can pay.
by maxglute | 2025-07-21 21:45:20+00:00
>Chabuduo mindset [1] is a very real thing

IMO high tech cost optimization is like the opposite of chabuduo - it's not half-assing, but over value engineer under pressure. The PRC's "amazing" manufacturing system fosters adversarial competition down the supply chain because there are so many competitors, packed with technical talent incentivized to value-engineer the shit out of everything to squeeze out fractions of a RMB more per unit. Some engineering team probably poured thousands of man-hours and retooled $$$ manufacturing lines just to gain a tiny margin edge. Sometimes that backfires. But the pressure isn't about laziness - it's involutionary effort. The result is still a zero-trust environment, since when manufacturing base is so dense, everyone incentivized to cut corners or optimize/tweak silently, they usually do, forcing everyone upstream to stay hyper vigilant. So we end up in default equilibrium where it's cheaper/more optimal to squeeze downstream and inspect.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-21 21:45:30+00:00
The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.

Going public with that was a bold call - CIA put its reputation on the line. But Ukraine was more prepared because of it - and so were its allies.

A lot of Ukrainian officials didn't believe that the war was about to start up until the moment it did. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been without US beating the drum.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-21 21:46:24+00:00
Oh CISA...

What a pity that CISA has been purged down of effective useful people and turned into another sad selected-for-political-compliance-only force.

Arizona recently got attacked from Iranian hackers & didn't even bother trying to get help from CISA. https://archive.is/2025.07.19-143305/https://www.azcentral.c...

CISA is so so vital. Investigating incredibly wide ranging attacks like this, or the Salt Typhoon attack are vital for this nation. But the show is being run by a bunch of people who value political dogma far above anything else. https://www.techdirt.com/tag/cisa/
by LightBug1 | 2025-07-21 21:46:32+00:00
Always good to peel away at least the surface layer ... and ideally more ...

https://archive.ph/xBtFI#selection-3249.145-3249.167

A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services. “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met. “Where a malicious communications offence is believed to have taken place, appropriate action will be taken. Our staff must consider whether the communication may be an expression which would be considered to be freedom of speech. While it may be unacceptable to be rude or offensive it is not unlawful — unless the communication is ‘grossly offensive’.