MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JimDabell | 2025-08-23 14:18:49+00:00
> PRECISion · You may find yourself wondering why the IETF waited until 2025 to provide help with Bad Unicode. It didn’t; here’s RFC 8264: PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols; the first PRECIS predecessor was published in 2002. 8264 is 43 pages long, containing a very thorough discussion of many more potential Bad Unicode issues than 9839 does.

I’d also suggest people check out the accompanying RFCs 8265 and 8266:

PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols:

— https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8264

Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings: Representing Usernames and Passwords

— https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8265

Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings Representing Nicknames:

— https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8266

Generally speaking, you don’t want usernames being displayed that can change the text direction, or passwords that have different byte representations depending on the device that was used to type it in. These RFCs have specific profiles to avoid that.

I think for these kinds of purposes, failing closed is more secure than failing open. I’d rather disallow whatever the latest emoji to hit the streets is from usernames than potentially allow it to screw up every page that displays usernames.
by kartoffelsaft | 2025-08-23 14:19:18+00:00
Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.

(also not a lawyer)
by kragen | 2025-08-23 14:19:21+00:00
A million people like you can do a million times more things that require intelligence†, and would consume a million times more Taco Bell double deckers. Ergo, in that limited sense, more energy == more intelligence.

"Over time" clearly means that he's talking about the far future, not the next few years when they're cleaning up the low-hanging fruit. Rather than "absurd ... fantastic and impossible" I would describe the Dyson-sphere outcome as inevitable, unless humanity goes extinct within a few centuries. Maybe you thought he meant next March?

In https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg..., Josh You, Alex Erben, and Ege Erdil estimate that a typical GPT-4o query uses 0.3 watt hours, based on the estimates that it's a 400-billion-parameter MoE model in which ¼ of the parameters are activated for a given query, so each token requires 200 gigaflops (100 billion multiplies and 100 billion adds I guess), a typical query produces 500 output tokens (about a page of text), and they're running on 1-petaflop/s H100 GPUs, with the overall cluster consuming at peak 1500 watts per GPU, with a utilization rate of 10%, and that the cluster on average consumes 70% of peak power. This works out to 1.05 kilojoules, or about 0.25 kilocalories, the amount of food energy in one gram of carbohydrates.

So, a 320-kcal Double DeckerⓇ Taco™ works out to 1280 GPT-4o queries answered, and a standard 2000kcal/day diet works out to 8000 GPT-4o queries per day, if we believe You, Erben, and Erdil's estimate. For someone who is looking for GPT-4o-quality output, if you are producing less than 8000 pages of writing per day, you are less energy-efficient than GPT-4o.

______

† although there's no guarantee they would, and it's not obvious that they would be a million times more intelligent, or even 10% more intelligent; they might just post a million times more poorly-thought-out sarcastic comments on forums due to their poor impulse control, resulting in long pointless arguments where they insult each other and dismiss obviously correct ideas as absurd because they come from people they hate
by weinzierl | 2025-08-23 14:19:30+00:00
I think there should be a restriction in the standard on how many Unicode scalar values a graphical unit can have.

Last time I checked (a couple of years ago admittedly) there was no such restriction in the standard. There was however a recommendation to restrict a graphical unit to 128 bytes for "streaming applications".

Bringing this or at least a limit on the scalar units into the standard would make implementation and processing so much easier without restricting sensible applications.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-08-23 14:20:02+00:00
Interesting! I take the opposite of this argument.

I ride in Waymos constantly. They are boring technology to me that I no longer think about. Effectively complete trust in them for the areas they drive in. The driving is so steady and consistent that I forget I'm in an autonomous vehicle. The only thing I want is for them to be able to take me to Oakland and to SFO via the freeway, but am comfortable waiting for those to become unlocked on the assumption that my trust level will remain consistent as their unlocked region footprint grows.

I don't trust Tesla's self-driving as far as I can throw it. I'm not a huge Elon hater or anything like that. https://teslafsdtracker.com/ gives me pause! 1 in 10 rides has a critical disengagement and it hasn't improved in three years. I will concede that the distance travelled appears to be improving rapidly, and increasing distance could explain why rides continue to have a critical disengagement, but man I just can't overstate how uncomfortable that makes me feel. I want nothing to do with sitting in the back seat of an autonomous vehicle that needs someone to take over every 1 in 10 drives.

Also, as a consumer, the notion of wanting to choose a system that relies purely on vision over one that is a combination of lidar and vision is just nonsense. Just because humans drive with vision + thinking doesn't make me feel like that is the ideal solution. I want systems that use all the tech at the machine's disposal to make me as safe as possible by handling edge cases that a human driver would fail at.
by greenie_beans | 2025-08-23 14:21:01+00:00
what do they call it when a lot of the people in the state don't vote because of a history of disenfranchisement? or when power is taken away from groups of people due to redistricting? when many people can't get to the polls because it's far away or they have work? and when the absentee ballot process is hard? or when they purge the voter registration, requiring people to re-register, if they realize it before it's too late? this last one happened to me.

less than 60% of eligible voters in the state cast a vote in the 2024 election. there was lower turnout in 2024 election among black voters. here is more data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

what do you call it when both candidates aren't good enough for those people, so they resign to not vote?

what do you call it when college-educated liberals disparage the poorest, blackest state in the union? definitely not progressive. maybe "racist"
by wsatb | 2025-08-23 14:21:23+00:00
A mini van can hold a maximum of 7, maybe 8 passengers. That’s already worse than a bus because it means a lot more cars on the road. That’s also a best case scenario because you rarely have 7 or 8 people going from one exact location to another. Maybe your plan is instead to make multiple stops? That doesn’t sound like the best experience. Cramming 7 people into a smaller bus, sitting in traffic for an hour plus due to all the other “public taxis”.

Regardless, it means a lot more traffic and a generally worse experience for everyone. Cities should tax the hell out of these and put the money towards improving actual public transportation.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-23 14:21:47+00:00
My forum traffic went up 10x due to bots a few months ago. Never seen anything like it.

> Loading static pages from CDN to scrape training data takes such minimal amounts of resources that it's never going to be a significant part of my costs. Are there cases where this isn't true?

Why did you bring up static pages served by a CDN, the absolute best case scenario, as your reference for how crawler spam might affect server performance?
by ks2048 | 2025-08-23 14:21:56+00:00
It's worth noting that Unicode already defines a "General Category" for all code points that categorizes some of these types of "weird" characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property#Gen...

e.g. in Python,

import unicodedata print(unicodedata.category(chr(0))) print(unicodedata.category(chr(0xdead)))

Shows "Cc" (control) and "Cs" (surrogate).
by raincole | 2025-08-23 14:22:23+00:00
Even simplest (in terms of graphics) 2D games like Balatro have custom shaders today. It's an extremely valuable, and commonly applied skill set among game devs.

> game engines... all the possible style choices

Nah. Nope. Never happens.

Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL.

Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.
by scuol | 2025-08-23 14:22:35+00:00
The manufacturer obviously, but they can sell the car in the first place because this defect risk is quantifiable for their liability insurance provider, who can evaluate how risky said car company is in terms of their manufacturing and how likely it is they'll need to pay out a claim, etc.

For self-driving, that evaluation is almost impossible. Sure it can look good statistically, but for things like brake lines, brake pad material, brake boosters, etc, they are governed by the laws of physics which are more understandable than any self-driving algorithm.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-23 14:23:00+00:00
> I had to replace my full mainboard as the GPU was broken within the first two weeks, so that might be bad luck. But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.

Having to replace a board and only lasting 5 years is good?

I had a ThinkPad that lasted almost 10 years, then an Acer Swift which lasted 5 years and was doing great until our home burnt down in a wildfire (!!), and now I have a several years old MSI which is doing fine. Also never needed any repairs for any laptop I've ever bought...

Seeing that quote makes me think Apple quality is shit...
by noobermin | 2025-08-23 14:23:29+00:00
Some places essentially attempted ride-hail as public transport and just like all car based services, they're far worse in terms of capacity and cost and so they essentially siphon money away from already proven modes like buses and trains. In Columbus Ohio, the attempt at this saw the consultant basically wind up shop and run away with millions of dollars in federal grants that should have just gone to cota. I expect AV as public transit to be similar.
by kragen | 2025-08-23 14:23:43+00:00
That just means Xi doesn't believe AGI isn't around the corner. I think Xi is correct on this point, due to having watched Carmack's talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4epAfU1FCuQ last month, but Xi is certainly a fallible human being, and he's not even an AI researcher, so he's even more fallible than other people whose opinions you could consult.

Here's my summary of Carmack's talk from my bookmarks file:

> #video of John Carmack saying video games, even Atari, are nowhere close to being solved by #neural-networks yet, which is why he’s doing Keen Technologies. They’re going to open-source their RL agent! Which they’re demoing playing an Atari 2600 (emulated on a Raspberry Pi) with an Atari 2600 joystick and servos (“Robotroller”), running on just a gamer laptop with a 4090. (No video of the demo, though, just talking head and slides.) He says now he’s using PyTorch just like anyone else instead of implementing his own matrix multiplies. Mentions that the Atari screen is 160×210, which I’d forgotten. They’re using April-tag fiducials so their camera can find the screen, but patch them into the video feed instead of trying to get the lighting right for stickers. He says the motion-to-photons #latency at Oculus had to be below 20ms for avoiding nausea (26'58”). Finding the Atari scores on the screen was surprisingly hard. #retrocomputing
by lumost | 2025-08-23 14:23:49+00:00
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?

Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.

The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
by jplusequalt | 2025-08-23 14:24:02+00:00
>Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?

Learning something new is always worthwhile, even if you have no immediate practical usecase for that knowledge.

Also, neither Unity or Unreal are a drop in replacement for shader programming. If you want to do anything advanced you'll need to get your hands dirty rolling your own GLSL/HLSL.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-23 14:24:03+00:00
Ah yes, putting words inbetween quotes to, uh, quote someone is a very novel usage of quotes. As an aside, being indie isn't a guarantee for honestly: I have seen come incredibly scummy behavior from indies.

> zero cost (or even profitable)

Having to handle _more_ developers isn't zero cost, but let's assume they actually sell games and indeed, make profit. That would be great! I would love a mobile ecosystem where there is a variety of things, where my phone is an actual viable platform for more than just browsing online and shitposting on HN.

>financially

You fundamentally misunderstand just how much money gachas generate every year. You could release a dozen Hollow Knights, a dozen Balatros, a dozen Stardew Valleys every year, and you'd still make less money than taking 30% off of a _single_ gacha. Genshin Impact grossed $10 billion last year. WuWa, ZZZ, HSR all gross close to half a billion each, each year. Pokemon TCG is on track for 1.5bil. And that's just gachas: games like Call of Duty Mobile and other just print out money.

There are no universes, neither in Apple or Google's imagination (which is very locked in on how much money they're making right now, as opposed to how much they could) or in anyone reasonable's thoughts where indie games take off so much they overtake any amount of profit they're currently making. There's no catching up to the amount of content a team like Genshin's puts out every three months.

> reputationally

If you think Apple gives a single shit about reputation when they're the only dealer in town, I have news for you. If you think Google gives a single shit about reputation when 90% of traffic goes through their store anyways, I have news for you.
by almost_usual | 2025-08-23 14:24:16+00:00
I incorporate errands into my schedule. When I walk home from work from the train station I will stop by the local grocery store to pick up anything that is needed.

My employer is fine with me working from the train to and from work. I get there early and I leave early.

Weekends are arranged to buy other items in bulk.

My bed time routine is probably 15 minutes of reading a book before I fall asleep.
by BoxOfRain | 2025-08-23 14:24:24+00:00
I used a 2015 MacBook Pro up until 2021 when I replaced it with its M1 successor, the 2015 MacBook went to a sibling where it's still their main machine. Apparently it works fine, a little slow but perfectly usable for decade old hardware.

I'm in a similar position to you OS-wise, I still use my Mac for things I specifically need macOS for but my main OS is definitively Linux these days. I use Kubuntu at work and CachyOS at home, needing a machine with a decent GPU for some of my projects got me back into PC gaming after a decade or so and gaming on Linux is actually good now which surprised me. People meme about the year of the Linux desktop but modern KDE is legitimately really good and certainly the least annoying UX out of the major desktop OS environments in my opinion.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-23 14:24:32+00:00
I hate exercise and I can't even imagine doing it in the morning because it just makes me tired and sleepy. After two hour bike ride or 3 hour walk, I just drop and fall asleep in the middle of the day messing up my sleep schedule. Somehow I feel that even for the author of this article exercise would feel different if he wasn't chasing it up with 45 minutes of binging coffee.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-23 14:24:46+00:00
> The point being --- any "answer" from an LLM is questionable.

If that’s the point, then you should say that instead of saying that they don’t provide answers. They very clearly do provide answers and this weird rhetorical nonsense is grating.

If a human got the question wrong, would you conclude that “humans don’t provide answers”? Getting questions wrong is normal. It doesn’t mean that the entity class that got the questions wrong is incapable of giving answers, it just means they aren’t perfect.
by firesteelrain | 2025-08-23 14:24:52+00:00
This isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain.

For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good

https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
by MisterMower | 2025-08-23 14:25:05+00:00
Let me be more direct: because it’s legal for cyclists to run red lights, you think they should? I hope you can see what I am getting at now.

You can’t have it both ways. If cyclists are going to use roads designed for and paid by motorists, they should be subject to the same rules, regulations, taxes, and enforcement.

You’re welcome to defend a double standard for cyclists, but it won’t change the fact that it is indeed a double standard and is inherently unfair.
by louwrentius | 2025-08-23 14:25:41+00:00
I find the article a difficult read for someone not versed in “confidential computing”. It felt written for insiders and/or people smarter than me.

However, I feel that “confidential computing” is some kind of story to justify something that’s not possible: keep data ‘secure’ while running code on hardware maintained by others.

Any kind of encryption means that there is a secret somewhere and if you have control over the stack below the VM (hypervisor/hardware) you’ll be able to read that secret and defeat the encryption.

Maybe I’m missing something, though I believe that if the data is critical enough, it’s required to have 100% control over the hardware.

Now go buy an Oxide rack (no I didn’t invest in them)
by jibal | 2025-08-23 14:25:51+00:00
Indeed. Strange that the previous commenter attacked such an obvious strawman ... they responded to my statement about the purpose of proof with a statement about the purpose of math, which I hadn't mentioned. Also strange is the claim that the purpose of a proof is to show "why" a statement is true rather than that a statement is true. Some proofs help understand the "why" but many don't (proofs of the FLT included) and informal discussion is usually better for that, and is often why we believe that an unproven proposition is true -- e.g., it's widely believed, for good reasons, that P != NP, but no one knows how to prove it. Ditto for the Collatz conjecture.
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-23 14:26:06+00:00
I am mainly into Luanti [1], which actually is a game engine for Minecraft-like games but the community is slowly expanding so we are starting to see original games. Public servers run original games as well, which may or may not be technically open source.

In the same graphic style, there's Veloren [2] which is probably the most promising MMORPG-like FOSS game. This isn't Luanti, but a Rust project from scratch (not that I care about the implementation language, though, except when its poor performance becomes a limiting factor). Played some, but voxel graphics without a world fully editable by players makes less sense to me.

I used to play Cube2:Sauerbraten [3], which is an arena shooter. This is an old game, community is slowly shrinking. Was a good casual shooter when I played, but now probably the players that still play are probably accuracy monsters but I never was good getting old doesn't help. Offline vs bot is still fun, and there's a couple of campaigns in the box. Unvanquished [4] is an arena shooter as well with an original concept (played it a little a while ago, should check it out again).

Battle For Wesnoth [5] is top tier as far as turn-based strategy goes.

OOlite [6] is a recreation of the original Elite (Elite:Dangerous is the lastest Opus). Single player game, 600+ mods last time I checked. I was quite into it before moving to Luanti because my interests shifted. OOlite sort of runs at its own pace sometimes, that is the player doesn't have full control over the amount of "action" happening. It is also a difficult game, especially in the early game where it can be unforgiving if not unfair. IIRC, the game comes with a PDF file with some good piece of advice.

I sometimes play some SuperTuxKart [7] single player. Good for casual racing. There's also a football mode which is probably like RocketLeague, but that's not my thing. I used to play StuntRally [8] before the author rebased in on a more recent graphic engine after a long hiatus, which my rig cannot run for some reason. StuntRally has a lot of features - it had online mode before SuperTuxKart did.

0A.D. [9] is and AoE-like with top-tier graphics. Didn't play it a lot because I don't like much games when you mass-kill humans, especially women - call me old school.

In Zero-K [10] it's robots versus robots so it's fine by me. As an RTS, I find it in many ways superior to Starcraft except graphics, partly because it is tuned to handle a massive number of units (no population cap). It is based on the Spring Engine, which features pleasant unit positioning; recently I tried again Warzone2100, but the lack of this feature made it "unplayable" for me. Other games like Zero-K with better graphics are EvolutionRTS and Beyond All Repair, but I didn't play them because my rig can just barely handle ZK already.

[1] https://www.luanti.org/

[2] https://veloren.net/

[3] http://sauerbraten.org/

[4] https://unvanquished.net/category/news/

[5] https://wesnoth.itch.io/battle-for-wesnoth

[6] https://oolite.space/

[7] https://supertuxkart.net

[8] https://stuntrally.tuxfamily.org/

[9] https://play0ad.com/

[10] https://zero-k.info/
by jrmg | 2025-08-23 14:26:16+00:00
It’s thirteen years old now (2012), but there’s a fascinating old Forbes article (from when, I think, it was a respectable publication) about the cross-pollination between Palo Alto’s rug dealers, and Palo Alto’s venture capitalists:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...
by mythrwy | 2025-08-23 14:26:23+00:00
You can, if you keep them cool with shade and water if it's not excessively humid.

I practice zone denial with a shade house and have things like rhubarb, cilantro and lettuce growing right now. It's been over 100F many days this summer and these would not make it outside. I also have many varieties of tomatoes and pretty sure I'm the only one the region who does because they would not set fruit outside in these temperatures.

If it's a dry climate and you have water and shade, you can turn it into a moderate or cool climate.

My tomatoes a week ago or so https://youtube.com/shorts/wRHiiCCICmc?feature=share