MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 05:50:06+00:00
I certainly didn't take to Nix the first few times I looked at it. The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further (though I do recommend using them, once you set it up, it's simple and the added reproducibility gives nice peace of mind)

But once I fully understood how it's features really make it easy for you to recover from mistakes and how useful the package options available from nixpkgs are, I decided it was time to sink in and figure it out. Looking at other folks nix config on GitHub (especially for specific services you're wanting to use) is incredibly helpful (mine is also linked in the post)

I certainly don't consider myself to be a nix expert, but the nice thing is you can do most things by using other examples and modifying them till you feel good about it. Then overtime you just get more familiar with and just grow your skill

Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like?

I should add it to the article, but one of my anti-requirements was anything in the realm of high availability. It's neat tech to play with, but I can deal with downtime for most things if the trade off is everything being much simpler. I've played a little bit with Kubernetes at work, but that is a whole ecosystem I've yet to tackle
by topspin | 2025-07-19 05:50:37+00:00
> The question is why

I've had one or more around most of my life. They're fun to play with and comedic. They genuinely like their people. They're simultaneously willful and cooperative. They have many habits and preferences, and each one is distinct. They're highly communicative if you understand their motives and language.

If you need to control rodents they are extremely effective and earn their keep. There is nothing more endearing than a proud cat eagerly bringing its catch home to share with its pride. Some people are freaked out by this, not realizing that there is no higher praise a cat can express, hunting on your behalf.

So many dimensions. If a cat likes you it actually likes you: there is no lie in them.

All that said, I'm glad house cats are small. :)
by komali2 | 2025-07-19 05:51:54+00:00
> and got pushback for that from the Linux kernel community who said "We don't need our hands held and our feelings massaged, we're fine with a 'tough love' communication style".

Yes, because that was what was selected for, a toxic masculine form of communication. My point was I believe these emotional outbursts wouldn't have been treated as tough love if Linus had been a woman, they would have been perceived as hysteria, because the community had selected for a 98% male environment of men losing control of their anger at each other.

Now Linus has changed, and so has the community's communication style, and so too has the demographics of the contributors. People of all stripes that were turned out by the old brutish, uncontrolled way of communicating are coming back, and the project is much better for it.

Maybe it's unrelated but this new era of Linux, where the project has a code of conduct, is also the era of record high market share of Linux based desktop operating systems.
by niemandhier | 2025-07-19 05:52:36+00:00
Railroads lead to a distribution of capital into the society and to a long term increase of wealth for many.

Ai leads to a capital concentration on the hands of those that already have money and might lead to a long term reduction of wealth for the middle class.

Less purchasing power in the population usually is not good for economic development, so I have my doubts with respect to a boom .
by nathan_douglas | 2025-07-19 05:53:05+00:00
I credit homelabbing through my twenties with just about everything good that's happened to me in my career. I certainly didn't end up being moderately employable because I'm smart, charismatic, incisive, creative, lucky, educated, diligent, connected, handsome, sanitary, interesting, or thoughtful; no, it's because I have a tendency toward obsession, delusions of grandeur, and absolutely terrible impulse control.

So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do.

The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch.

So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-07-19 05:53:05+00:00
I scoured their website to look for any clues about how it might (allegedly) work and got a fat lot of nothing.

> Rest constantly monitors room air quality, using a proprietary algorithm to pinpoint any tobacco, marijuana, or nicotine presence.

So a smoke detector with an "algorithm" attached. Uh huh. How does that algorithm work?

> By analyzing various factors and patterns[...]

Some cutting edge shit here!

And as for accuracy, they don't even pretend to make promises about "99.99% success rates" or anything. This is the most detailed they get:

> Q: Is it accurate?

> A: Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested for accuracy in real-world scenarios, backed by years of development, and tens of thousands of hours of rigorous testing and validation.
by troupo | 2025-07-19 05:53:20+00:00
> Compliance is tricky

How is "not selling user data to 2000+ 'partners'" tricky?

> most site operators care about focusing on their actual business

How is their business "send user's precise geolocation data to a third party that will keep that data for 10 years"?

Compliance with GDPR is trivial in 99% of cases
by SteveJS | 2025-07-19 05:54:07+00:00
I made this to try out Claude code. I have the $17/mo thing, and i don’t know rust. (I do know plenty of other languages.) Rust felt like a scripting language when used this way. I used a task system to force getting to a git commit before auto-compact. The completed tasks are in the repo allowing one to see what starting context kicked off the changes. It worked much of the time. It’s 8k of rust, 12k of markdown and i think the markdown helps to correctly interact with a codebase using agents just as unit tests assist in refactoring. On my I9 with a local gutenberg mirror this e2e discovers 20k+ english novels, splits them into sentences, normalizes the sentences, keeps the origination text span and writes it out as tsv’s. It takes 7 seconds to complete that for 7 Gb of novels. Most importantly it splits the sentences the way i needed for the start of my pipeline.

Definitely interested if anyone find cases where it mis-splits english text from a novel.
by xelxebar | 2025-07-19 05:55:27+00:00
> unprofessional

This label is such a blatant Americanism. AFAICT it simply communicates a social threat for violating implicit cultural norms, shutting down communication, and carries virtually no useful content beyond that.

Communication takes two. If we want peers to take responsibility for their words and actions, then shouldn't we also take responsibility for our role in interpreting and reacting the same?

Some of the best work environments I've been part of allowed space for people to accept the fact that we're all human with human emotions. If someone blows up, maybe they're overstressed or maybe they're yelling at a kid about to get run over by a car.
by parineum | 2025-07-19 05:56:12+00:00
> There are laws that created departments that the president does not have the power to destroy.

That's true but what you're leaving out is that those laws were passed by Congress to give their authority away to these agencies and give the management of them away to the executive branch.

Congress is wholly at fault for all of the power they've ceded to the executive.

Trump has the authority, granted by Congress, to appoint the people in charge of those agencies and has the authority to dictate their agenda (by appointing someone who will carry it out).

> One study estimates that the Supreme Court will be "conservative"

First of all, "one study..." isn't a great way to make a point but, regardless, "conservative" justices doesn't mean politically conservative, it means judicially conservative and that is a completely separate concept.

Trump has been ruled against several times already on judicially conservative grounds.
by pstuart | 2025-07-19 05:58:01+00:00
There's been several companies promising a way to "recycle" plastics and other waste via pyrolysis that have yet to actually succeed. They all seem to be technically viable but not profitable (enough) and then go out of business.

It seem like it would be a better option to subsidize those efforts and maybe just break even rather than this environmental three card monte.

In a different universe, the government would invest in that solution rather than dumping it in third world countries and pretend it was taken care of.
by dash2 | 2025-07-19 05:58:05+00:00
For sure Fox et al. have been pushing the idea that scientists have biases, but it can also be true that science has become more biased.

Update: a little evidence. This doesn't cover change over time, but it strikes me as fairly extreme, unless you are willing to go very far down the "reality has a liberal bias" road: https://github.com/hughjonesd/academic-bias
by btilly | 2025-07-19 05:59:18+00:00
It is a positive sign, and here are three reasons why.

First, even if space is smooth, it is sometimes well-approximated by a singularity. In which case understanding that approximation has value for real universe predictions. As https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/naked-singulariti... points out, models strongly suggest that it is possible for naked singularities to form in GR. If we understand better how GR with singularities behaves, we may be able to make testable predictions about what astronomers should look for to verify them.

Second, it may be that the right quantum theory of gravity, contains singularities after all. QM is filled with smooth fields that are quantized particles. For example smooth electromagnetic waves give rise to discrete photons. Shouldn't we expect that a graviton, in the right quantized particle, also looks like a discrete particle? In that case, shouldn't it be some kind of singularity? If so, then a better understanding of singularities in GR may help us find a unified theory.

And third, extending from a smooth model to one with singularities, may result in developing better mathematical tools. For a historical example, consider the development of distributions such as the Dirac delta as an extension of theories built using Calculus on smooth functions. There is a chance that history will repeat. But we won't know until we try to develop these new tools.
by justsee | 2025-07-19 06:00:47+00:00
Numerous studies have found vax-derived spike persisting for months and even years after vaccination, giving rise to concerns expression of spike can continue long after the claimed 24-48 hours.

A recent study found spike protein persisting for 17 months in the cerebral arteries of stroke victims. [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096758682...
by consp | 2025-07-19 06:01:43+00:00
> The awesome thing about black-box algorithms is they can't be challenged when they're wrong. And errors reliably favor the institution that manages (and profits from) them.

Doesn't the US have false advertisement rules/scam prevention? Around here one person would have to fight this in court to tumble the whole thing down as there is no way Rest can prove it's claim is airtight (pun intended) due to simple statistics and physics (e.g. hair drying leaves burn particulates as well). I doubt it will even come this far as it's obviously a money making scheme over the customers back and acts in bad faith ("The sensor's don't make mistakes" is a claim to innocence where none is valid as almost everyone can smell). It's probably fine as an early detection agent but you'd have to actually check.

Also the charges are disproportionate to the beach of contract, unless they steam clean the room every time they claim the money. Which they obviously don't according to the "dirty room" comments.
by actinium226 | 2025-07-19 06:01:44+00:00
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a lot more confidence in my own 20k lines of code than an AIs. I've built up skills to write performant, readable, functional, maintainable code. I build it up slowly and I can anticipate bugs as I write. I'm not perfect, but when bugs do arise, since I've built up the code, I have some idea of where to look and where not to look in order to fix them.

As for coworkers, I would really try to get them to work in chunks smaller than 20k loc. But at some point you have an expectation that coworkers will be accountable for their area of responsibility. If there's a bug in their code, they're expected to fix it. If there's a bug in the AIs code, I'm expected to fix it....
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 06:01:53+00:00
I think planning for what happens once you aren't there to manage the setup (whether it be a vacation, hospital stay, or death) is important. It's not something I built specifically to make easy and I should think more on it

The most important thing is to be able to get important data off of it and have access to credentials that facilitate that. You could setup something like Nextcloud to always sync important data onto other people's devices, so make part of that easier

But I think another important aspect is making folks invested in the services. I don't expect my partner to care about or use most of them, but she does know as much as I do about using and automating Home Assistant (the little we've done). Things like that should keep working because of how core they can become to living our lives. It being a separate "appliance" and not a VM will also help manage that

But also that's a lot of hope and guessing. I think sitting down with whoever might be left with it and putting together a detailed plan is critical to any of that being successful
by redrove | 2025-07-19 06:02:07+00:00
>The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further

Those are my chief complaints as well, actually. I never quite got to the point where I grasped how all the bits fit together. I understand the DSL (though the errors are cryptic as you said) and the flakes seemed recommended by everyone yet felt like an addon that was forgotten about (you needed to turn them on through some experimental flag IIRC?).

I'll give it another shot some day, maybe it'll finally make sense.

>Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like?

* 2 UPSes (one for networking one for compute + storage)

* a JBOD with about 400TB raw in ZFS RAID10

* a little intertech case with a supermicro board running TrueNAS (that connects to the JBOD)

* 3 to 6 NUCs depending on the usage, all running Talos, rook-ceph cluster on the NVMEs, all NUCs have a Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt NIC

* 10 Gig unifi networking and a UDM Pro

* misc other stuff like a zima blade, a pikvm, shelves, fans, ISP modem, etc

I'm not necessarily thinking about downsizing but the NUCs have been acting up and I've gotten tired of replacing them or their drives so I thought I'd maybe build a new machine to rule them all in terms of compute and if I only want one host then k8s starts making less sense. Mini PCs are fine if you don't push them to the brim like I do.

I'm a professional k8s engineer I guess, so on the software side most of this comes naturally at this point.
by cornholio | 2025-07-19 06:03:09+00:00
It's easy to dismiss all such campaigns as religious prudes and moral crusaders, especially on a site with the demographics and political leanings of YC News.

But often time such campaigns are waged by former victims of trafficking. It's well documented that trafficking, prostitution and pornography are closely interlinked - this modern notion of a fully liberated "sexual worker" controlling their careers, choices and finance is substantially a fiction of the pornographic industry. So there is real merit în the anti porn stance.

Of course, once the camping is set in motion, it takes a life of its own, that has nothing to do with the concerns of the victims and more with prudishness; the religious circus will join hands and demand the removal of synthetic pornography etc.
Ask HN: How do we get an optimal neural network architecture?
by fbodz | 2025-07-19 06:03:27+00:00
I've been playing around with neural networks and looking at some of the recent llm architectures. I'm far from an expert in this but the way some of them are configured seems a little random? Like stack this layer on top of this layer with these dimension, we don't know why this configuration works well it just does etc. Do we have a way of proving ahead of training that one architecture will be better than another? Or is it just stack more layers, tweak these parameters, train the model and check the benchmarks (how the brain was architected)? In that case whoever has the most compute and can run more trials to find the optimal architecture wins?
by SwamyM | 2025-07-19 06:04:15+00:00
> Edit: When the democrats removed the filibuster for judicial confirmations they started us on this path. Predictably the Republicans responded by including the scotus. That was the end of an independent judiciary. It just took a while for it to be sufficient to kill democracy. And to be clear, no ratings agency in the world still considers the US a democracy. At years end it will be an official downgrade from flawed democracy to electoral autocracy or competitive authoritarian state.

While this is technically true, it conveniently ignores why the democrats removed the filibuster which is that:

“In the history of the Republic, there have been 168 filibusters of executive and judicial nominees. Half of them have occurred during the Obama administration — during the last four and a half years,” Reid said.

Source: https://apnews.com/united-states-government-united-states-co...

As always Republicans cause a crisis and then take it to the extreme and Democrats usually end up taking the blame.

Not that they are blame free but they are also usually inept and they defer too much to 'rules and order' when the other party is not playing by the same rules.
by conception | 2025-07-19 06:05:02+00:00
This is cool but that’s a big sell on uploading my life to yall without all sorts of security compliance and/or encryption options.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

Etc etc
by janjongboom | 2025-07-19 06:05:32+00:00
The removal (or moving) of the Bitnami images from Docker Hub is going to break a ton of systems that depend on them. I helped set up https://www.stablebuild.com/ some years ago to counter these types of issues, it provides (among other things) a transparent cache to Docker Hub which automatically caches image tags and makes them immutable - underlying tag might be deleted or modified, but you’ll get the exact same original image back.
by Rzor | 2025-07-19 06:05:39+00:00
Ah, the familiar pattern of generational bashing. It takes me back to when we millennials were painted as the lazy, good-for-nothing, ambitious-deprived, self-entitled, unmotivated bunch. I've seen Gen Z accused of the same, and additionally, they are supposedly awful at dealing with tech too, to spice things up a bit, I'll wager.
by justsee | 2025-07-19 06:07:44+00:00
Lipid nanoparticle toxicity has long been an industry concern.

In a profile of Moderna back in 2016, Katalin Karikó (instrumental in the development of mRNA vaccines) mentioned this issue:

“I would say that mRNA is better suited for diseases where treatment for short duration is sufficiently curative, so the toxicities caused by delivery materials are less likely to occur” [1]

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/13/moderna-therapeutics-bio...
by actinium226 | 2025-07-19 06:07:50+00:00
> it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

I agree. It reminds me of this one junior engineer I worked with who produced awful code, and it would take longer to explain stuff to him than to just do it myself, let alone all the extra time I had to spend reviewing his awful PRs. I had hoped he would improve over time, but he took my PR comments personally and refused to keep working with me. At least Claude doesn't have an attitude.
by wrp | 2025-07-19 06:08:15+00:00
When I was a kid, my family got a kitten and a puppy at the same time. There were no other domestic animals around, so the two had only each other for socialization. The dog apparently observed how much attention the cat got when it purred, so it developed a habit of making a strange guttural noise when it was petted. We figured it was trying to purr.
by sandreas | 2025-07-19 06:08:26+00:00
Nice writeup, thank you. I already thought about having NixOS on my server, but currently I prefer proxmox. There are projects with NixOS + Proxmox, but I did not test it yet.

> My main storage setup is pretty simple. It a ZFS pool with four 10TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 data vdev with an additional 256GB SDD as a cache vdev. That means two hard drives can die without me loosing that data. That gives me ~19TB of usable storage, which I’m currently using less than 10% of. Leaving plenty of room to grow.

I would question this when buying a new system and not having a bunch of disks laying around... having a RAID-Z2 with four 10GB disks offers the same space as a RAID1 with two 20GB disks. Since you don't need the space NOW, you could even go RAID1 with two 10TB disks and grow it by replacing it with two 20TB as soon as you need more. This in my opinion would be more cost effective, since you only need to replace 2 disks instead of 4 to grow. This would take less time and since prices per TB are probably getting lower over time, it could also save you a ton of money. I would also say that the ability of losing 2 disks won't save you from having a backup somewhere...
by a_bonobo | 2025-07-19 06:09:06+00:00
Germany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.

Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
by epic9x | 2025-07-19 06:09:55+00:00
This blog post covers in a lot more detail why the design behind mynd is actually interesting: https://blog.teufelaudio.com/visionary-mynds-insights-on-teu...

Nuts and bolts; - Users can replace batteries with just a few screws, and everything is modular. - Components like batteries, PCBs, drivers are from mainstream suppliers and easily replaceable to minimize waste. - Teufel has released full schematics, PCB layouts, firmware, and 3D-prints for the housing.