MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-07-19 03:08:07+00:00
In the 1950s, defense spending was about 40% of federal spending. Today, it's about 13%. A huge amount of military equipment was built during the Eisenhower administration:

- The Distant Early Warning line of radar stations, in northern Canada, along with the Mid-Canada Line and the Pine Tree Line further south. Plus Texas Towers off the coasts, picket ships, and radar search aircraft.

- Mass production of bombers and fighters, with generations coming one after another rapidly. Fighters went from the F-86 to the F-106 in a few years. Bombers went from the B-36 (six props, four jets) to the B-47 (a fighter design scaled up to bomber size) to the B-52. Despite being an interim design, over 2,000 B-47 aircraft were built.

- Mass production of ICBMs. Thousands of them. Thousands of silos to put them in.

- Nuclear-powered submarines. Nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. ICBMs for nuclear powered submarines.

- USAF bases everywhere, from the Aleutian Islands to the Middle East.

- Nike air defense missile sites around all major US cities.

- Fallout shelters.

- Enough conventional weapons to re-fight WWII kept in service.

SAGE was a tiny part of all that. It was just command and control for US and Canada air defense. Not offense; that was separate, under the USAF Strategic Air Command.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-19 03:08:44+00:00
Oddly, over a 25 year period, I worked with far fewer Asians than I did Indians. India has to be the #1 supplier of H1Bs to the US, hands down. I'm not sure I can assess how the average Asian software developer did compared to Indian ones since the sample size was so skewed for me. Maybe on the coasts it was different? I look at Japan as a nation that has its crap together, but they also have terrible work/life balance that has now led to massive depopulation. It's like every race has its own particular blind spots.
by sedatk | 2025-07-19 03:10:00+00:00
I think that confuses paradigm with configuration. Say, if one thread waits on another to finish, that doesn't mean the code suddenly becomes "single-threaded", it just means your two threads are in a serialized configuration in that instance. Similarly, when async code becomes serialized, it doesn't cease to be async: the scaffolding to make it concurrent is there, it's just unused in that specific configuration.

For example, C# uses this syntax:

await readA(); await readB();

when you have these two lines, the first I/O operation still yields control to a main executor during `await`, and other web requests can continue executing in the same thread while "readA()" is running. It's inherently concurrent, not in the scope of your two lines, but in the scope of your program.

Is Zig any different?
by mjg59 | 2025-07-19 03:10:07+00:00
At a social level we should know how to do this well because there are cases where it needs to be done well. Some hardware is operating in incredibly safety critical scenarios where you do want to have strong confidence that it's running the correct software[1].

Should this be shipped to consumers as a default? Fuck no. This technology needs to exist for safety, but that doesn't mean it should be used to prop up business models. Unfortunately there's no good technical mechanism to prevent technology being used in user-hostile ways, and we're left with social pressure. We should be organising around that social pressure rather than refusing to talk about the tech.

[1] and let's not even focus on the "Someone hacked it" situation - what if it accidentally shipped with an uncertified debug build? This seems implausible, but when Apple investigated the firmware they'd shipped on laptops they found that some machines had been pulled off the production line, had a debug build installed to validate something, and had then been put back on the production line without a legitimate build being installed - and if Apple can get this wrong, everyone can get this wrong
by xhevahir | 2025-07-19 03:10:44+00:00
The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-19 03:11:24+00:00
Sometimes being a parent is like this too.

But I think the "don't break user space" rule would be more effective if it was very clearly stated and you could point to a doc that made it obvious to the committer that it was against policy.

Linus seems to have a strong internal sense of what the policy means, and he heaps on Monty Python style verbal abuse to get his point across. But while that's good at indicating how angry it is, it's not clear to me that it's the most effective way of reducing violations of the rule.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-19 03:11:36+00:00
So grotesque violence appeals to fewer people, but banning gets focused on material more people find acceptable, even desirable?

This really is a culture/posture driven issue.

It is not as if many people think (emphasis on "think", as in being honest, reasoning carefully and being scientific about evidence) that banning sexy curves in a video game is going to impact the prevalence of sexy curve imagery, or "save" anyone from anything.

Imagine if financial companies required their employees to sign a legal statement committing to not "use porn, escorts, blow ... or spicy video games!" So strange that they don't do that!!

Financial companies like to make a show of having "high standards" when it comes to "controversial" segments of the market, or unfortunate individuals who don't fit the mold, when that gets them a lot of showy theatre for being hard asses to their audience of regulators.

While keeping very quiet, and not looking into things too hard, when it comes to tens of billions of sketchy dollars going through their systems associated with very high net worth criminal actors, organizations and corrupt governments.

Epstein did not lack for financial services.
by AraceliHarker | 2025-07-19 03:12:59+00:00
The games that got banned this time, even before considering their depiction of incest, are often of such poor quality that it's difficult to even call them 'games.' Valve itself should have removed them from Steam long before payment processors had to step in. Defending these kinds of games is like equating Blue is the Warmest Color with a random PornHub video, simply because they both contain sexual acts. If Baldur's Gate 3 ever gets banned, then you can truly make a fuss.
by k310 | 2025-07-19 03:14:36+00:00
You're welcome. Just make this info easier to find on your website. I may be old but I've been computing since Kim-1, and better than most at ferreting out info.

It's for all the others! I appreciate your reply.

P.S. I never used, but like the idea of a plausible deniability password, which unlocks nice looking but useless (or even incriminating) info, like the fake ID that came with a wallet, but I keep it the vulnerable back pocket in case someone lifts it. Unfortunately, it's very dated. I keep the real stuff in front.
by leptons | 2025-07-19 03:14:36+00:00
Maybe you didn't understand when I said "I do not want the extra hassle of containers". I don't care about start-up time, I don't care that it "isn't as bad as it used to be". I just do not want to have to create or maintain a "container" myself. That's why I chose Lambda to begin with. It's a FaaS, and that's where it ends for me.
by leptons | 2025-07-19 03:14:39+00:00
Psychedelics sometimes makes people wake up to the abuses of government, so they are pretty scary to governments.

But there's also the issue that not everyone should take psychedelics. They can have lasting negative effects on certain people that may already be experiencing issues with mental stability, or they may trigger such effects in people that don't necessarily know about their own mental wellbeing or how the psychedelic will affect them. These, like every drug, should be used with caution.
by jayshua | 2025-07-19 03:14:41+00:00
I think it's important to note a couple of things about this.

First, Casey offers refunds on the handmade website for anyone who purchased the pre-order. Second, the pre-orders were primarily purchased by people who wanted to get the in-progress source code of the project, not people who just wanted to get the finished game. I'm not aware of anyone who purchased the pre-order solely to get the finished game itself. (Though it's certainly possible that there were some people.) Whether that makes a difference is up to the reader I suppose, since the original versions of the site didn't say anything about how likely the project was to finish and did state that the pre-order was for both the source-code and the finished game.

Second, the ten-year timeline (I believe the live streams only spanned 8 years) should be taken with the the note that this is live streaming for just one hour per day on weekdays, or for two hours two or three times a week later in the project. There's roughly 1000 hours of video content not including the Q&As at the end of every video. The 1000 hours includes instructional content and white board explanations in addition to the actual coding which was done while explaining the code itself as it was written. (Also, he wrote literally everything from scratch, something which he stated multiple times probably doesn't make sense in a real project.)

Taking into account the non-coding content, and the slower rate of coding while explaining what is being written, I'd estimate somewhere between 2-4 months of actual (40hr/week) work was completed, which includes both a software and a hardware renderer. No idea how accurate that estimate is, but it's definitely far less than 10 years and doesn't seem very indicative that the coding style he was trying to teach is untenable for game projects. (To be clear, it might be untenable. I don't know. I just don't see how the results of the Handmade Hero project specifically are indicative either way.)
by raincole | 2025-07-19 03:15:02+00:00
You can do that currently. Steam already supports the exact process you described: top up your steam wallet and buy games with steam wallet balance. Actually, there are things you can only buy this way (some in-game items, not sure if it's to workaround gambling accusation or just coded so for no reason).

The issue is Visa/Mastercard/whoever is pressuring Valve isn't happy about the very existence of incest games. They don't want to be associated with incest/rape even indirectly.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-07-19 03:15:34+00:00
Visa and Mastercard aren’t skimming 2.5% off the economy; the majority of the interchange fees go to banks (which Visa is not; their actual product is VisaNet which provides payment infrastructure, broadly.)

Trivially verifiable by Visa’s revenue being $35B, which is not even close to 1% of just US GDP (about $30T).
by wavemode | 2025-07-19 03:16:03+00:00
"Inefficient" implies the money is being burned or something. It's flowing into the pockets of people who work in the financial services industry, who then spend it on other things. The economy isn't zero-sum.

And the industry itself greases the wheels of other industries. In other words without financial services like lending and payment processing there would be less spending and investment overall, so other industries would shrink along with it.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-07-19 03:17:18+00:00
Some people like that Helm:

- Makes it possible to go from zero to fully running k8s integrated components in 5 seconds by just running 'helm install --repo https://example.com/charts/ mynginx nginx' (very useful: https://artifacthub.io/)

- Gives the ability to transactionally apply k8s configs, and un-apply them if there is a failure along the way (atomic rollbacks)

- Stores copies/versions/etc of each installation in the server so you have metadata for troubleshooting/operations/etc without having to keep it in some external system in a custom way.

- Allows a user who doesn't know anything about K8s to provide some simple variables to customize the installation of a bunch of K8s resources.

- Is composeable, has templates, etc.

So basically Helm has a lot of features, while Kustomize has... one. Very different purposes I think. You can also use both at the same time.

Personally I think Helm's atomic deployment feature is well worth it. I also love how easy it is to install charts. It feels a bit like magic.
by lisbbb | 2025-07-19 03:17:22+00:00
One major firm I worked at built a giant campus in Mumbai, I believe it was. The huge office building here in the US was sold off and was just recently torn down to make way for I don't know what--a whole lot of lower paying jobs, if anything. Their footprint here in the states is now laughably small. It's beyond ridiculous that such a stable employer for decades would now look like this.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-07-19 03:17:26+00:00
The thing that still feels off to me is that you should be able to run 8 bit Shors algorithm without error correction, right? Sure we don't have reliable error corrected q-bits, but being able to factor a number that small should be possible (even if it had a fairly high error rate) with current computers. Sure it won't be 100% reliable, but if we had published results that in 2010 it got the right answer 10% of the time, and in 2025 it gets the answer write 25% of the time, that would at least be a measure of progress.
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-19 03:17:48+00:00
This is another mistake what people make when describing H1Bs. Yes there are abuses where bad actors abuse the system and undercut the local wages. But a huge portion of the annual H1B allocation goes to people who are not the “cheaper labor pool”. They get paid the same wages AND the companies spend additional money to the order of thousands of dollars to sponsor the visa. Google is not hiring H1Bs on a cheaper rate. They still get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

But I do agree with the theory that allowing a lot of these H1Bs would be a net benefit for the economy. A lot of people who naturalize end up leaving jobs and starting businesses that employ more people. We should be encouraging that, but instead the system actively discourages that.
by komali2 | 2025-07-19 03:18:09+00:00
Well great, you two are good people. I recommend searching through the mailing list and forums for when Sarah (now Sage) Sharp was recommending a code of conduct and pushing back on people for being brutes. Many were opining along the lines of Sharp was just a girl that couldn't take the heat, was trying to make the FOSS world all fluffy rainbows etc. Strong evidence that girl Linus wouldn't haven't had the same amount of success and his emotional outbursts would have been seen very differently by the community, despite us three staunch defenders.

Linus' whole come to Jesus and apology was kicked off by that and the code of conduct saga, which was predicated on the fact that 98% of kernel developers were men. I think we can agree it'd be naive, despite us three not being misogynists, to believe that the community wouldn't construe girl Linus' outbursts as hysterical?
by seanhunter | 2025-07-19 03:19:28+00:00
This works fine for me, so I don’t know what’s causing it to be different for you. The key in about:config is dom.security.https_only_mode and I have that set to “true”.

If you want to set this without using about:config you can go to Settings and search “https” you’ll see “https-only Mode” there and you can turn it on for all windows, private windows oonly or none. There is also an exception list should you want that.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-07-19 03:19:57+00:00
While I respect your opinion, I disagree mostly by observing the people I've known for decades.

Folks with maladaptive coping strategies tend not to age well, and it is unrelated to the specific pharmacological recreational preferences they have chosen.

Some people refuse help, and will despise folks for trying. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG4qp-2O3hs&list=RDjG4qp-2O3...
by l33tbro | 2025-07-19 03:20:04+00:00
I'd guess no. While they have similar training data, there is plenty of novelty and unique data entering each model due to how each user is using it. This is why ideas like model collapse are fun in theory, but don't really play out due to the irregular ways LLMs are used in the real world.

I could be wrong, but I have not heard a convincing argument for what you propose.
by the_af | 2025-07-19 03:20:11+00:00
> There is simply far more risk with adult content as a result and a lot more chargebacks from disatisfied customers with a post nut clarity.

Do you have any evidence to back this wild claim? I've never heard this argument about chargebacks made before.

I don't think it's about this at all. I think it's about policing content, but then the observation of GP's comment applies: why is violence ok, but sex is not?
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-19 03:20:51+00:00
DOL does have the data to determine prevailing wages. In fact the wages reported in the application for H1B is often lower than what the immigrant is getting paid because DOL does not accept bonuses and RSUs and other options as guaranTeed wage. So you could have an H1B petition with $200k but in reality they could be earning $300k+ with bonuses and RSUs.
by redrove | 2025-07-19 03:21:03+00:00
How are you finding Nix for the homelab to be? Every time I try it I just end up confused, maybe next time will be the charm.

The reason I ask is I homelab “hardcore”; i.e. I have a 25U rack and I run a small Kubernetes cluster and ceph via Talos Linux.

Due to various reasons, including me running k8s in the lab for about 7 years now, I’ve been itching to change and consolidate and simplify, and every time i think about my requirements I somehow end up where you did: Nix and ZFS.

All those services and problems are very very familiar to me, feel free to ask me questions back btw.
by noobly | 2025-07-19 03:21:56+00:00
Yeah, I have to keep my job or I can't afford to live (non-CS/blue collar job however). I'm done with CC, I only have two terms remaining to get a CS or Math degree now (was double majoring prior but life got in the way and will likely only complete one now). I'm unsure whether at this junction it'd be better to complete a math degree or CS degree, tbh.

My uni's online offerings drop off like a stone after a students sophomore year. Very little online classes for seniors, which has been a big problem for me as I work full time and live over an hour from campus. If I get a schedule change mid-term, I just have to drop out. It drive me nuts as this policy disproportionately impacts the lower income / higher expense students who can't afford to live in the city and need to work full time (i.e, we get 3/4 of the way through our degree via online classes and debt, then it becomes inaccessible as in-person requirements are required for completion). It's especially ironic as a CS major!

But anyway, I'll probably wrap it up this academic year if things remain stable for me, it's just a questionable time to complete a degree now more than ever. I just want to work on a team doing interesting, challenging work. If I could I'd go to grad school.
by ijk | 2025-07-19 03:22:13+00:00
In aggregate? Signs point to yes. For the general purpose SFT base models. We see some evidence even with RNNs vs Transformers. You're essentially finding a function that models language. Use the same optimization function, get a similar result.

However, the RL and especially the RLHF does a lot to reshape the responses, and that's potentially a lot more varied. For the training that wasn't just cribbed from ChatGPT, anyway.

Lastly, it's unlikely that you'll get the _exact same_ responses; there's too many variables at inference time alone. And as for training, we can fingerprint models by their vocabulary to a certain extent. So in practical terms there's probably always going to be some differences.

This assumes our current training approaches don't change too drastically, of course.
Show HN: Medici, a minimal, open-source, dead-simple Splitwise alternative
by mrkaye97 | 2025-07-19 03:22:47+00:00
Hey everyone!

I've been a Splitwise user for a long time (sometimes paying, sometimes not), and have been rather frustrated at their new-ish policy of only allowing N (small) expenses to be submitted per day. And I was curious to write some Rust and thought the expense simplification algorithm would be fun to implement, so I built this.

Thought others might find it fun or useful! It's dead simple to self host if you want to try it out :)
by zahlman | 2025-07-19 03:23:54+00:00
> yes there are a lot of random things that happen with type conversions and quite a few idiosyncrasies... the language makes sense at a lower level, scopes, values, bindings have their mostly reasonable rules

The "random things" make it practically impossible to figure out what will happen without learning a whole bunch of seemingly arbitrary, corner-case-specific rules (consider the jsdate.wtf test currently making the rounds). And no, nobody is IMX actually simply complaining about NaNs existing (although the lack of a separate integer type does complicate things).

Notice that tests showcasing JavaScript WTFery can work just by passing user data to a builtin type constructor. Tests of Python WTFery generally rely on much more advanced functionality (see e.g. https://discuss.python.org/t/quiz-how-well-do-you-know-pytho...). The only builtin type constructor in Python that I'd consider even slightly surprising is the one for `bytes`/`bytearray`.

Python's scoping is simple and makes perfect sense, it just isn't what you're used to. (It also, unlike JavaScript, limits scope by default, so your code isn't littered with `var` for hygiene.) Variables are names for objects with reference semantics, which are passed by value - exactly like `class` types in C# (except you don't have to worry about `ref`/`in`/`out` keywords) or non-primitives in Java (notwithstanding the weird hybrid behaviour of arrays). Bindings are late in most places, except notably default arguments to functions.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make about __add__; in particular I can't guess what you think it should mean to "inspect" the method. Of course things work differently when you use the C API than when you actually write Python code; you're interacting with C data structures that aren't directly visible from Python.

When you work at the Python level, __add__/__iadd__/__radd__ implement addition, following a well-defined protocol. Nothing happens "at creation time"; methods are just attributes that are looked up at runtime. It is true that the implementation of addition will overlook any `__add__` attribute attached directly to the object, and directly check the class (unlike code that explicitly looks for an attribute). But there's no reason to do that anyway. And on the flip side, you can replace the `__add__` attribute of the class and have it used automatically; it was not set in stone when the class was created.

I'll grant you that the `match` construct is definitely not my favourite piece of language design.
by beanjuiceII | 2025-07-19 03:24:36+00:00
so much BS in this...everyone near where I live has migrated to starlink and its a great service. Our current providers just shit all over everyone so one by one the dominoes fell. I was one of the last to migrate to starlink and is has been fantastic, which I was skeptical initially because we have a big household (8). hopefully readers realize that washington posts owner is trying to be a starlink competitor and take this with a grain of salt