MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-08-15 02:28:02+00:00
I mostly agree.

> There are a myriad of quality "gaming" laptops out there, but obviously that's not for everybody, and that's one of many reasons why workstation laptops exist (basically the same thing - ability to run at high loads for extended periods of time - without the gamer aesthetic).

For the last few years, I thought 'gaming' was more GPU heavy and 'workstations' were heavier on the CPU and RAM?

Though I wonder how much that has changed recently or will change soon: after all with the rise of (local) AI, perhaps more work will move to the GPU?
by pjbk | 2025-08-15 02:28:14+00:00
Probably correct. Different from the other cyphers, the number of symbols is short, and correlating part of the plaintext that has been revealed gives poor measures for the full string length. It has been said that the other solutions are required to solve K4, so if the solution relies on something like character alignment, matrix coding or an even more convoluted permutation arrangement, this can look (or directly be) a one-time pad cypher which are arguably the most difficult to solve.
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-08-15 02:28:17+00:00
It was interesting to read how much of the US drugs market relies on imports. The article deals with the high value stuff. However, by volume, 90% of drugs used in the US are cheaper generics often with no US manufacturers. The US is heavily reliant on India and ultimately China for both active pharmaceutical ingredients and key starting materials. With 80% of Indian production using starting materials from China.[0]

The US had no domestic production of penicillin between 2004[3] when its last plant shuttered until 2021 when a factory reopened.[1] (source 1 and 3 appear to contradict, the 2019 testimony states there was no manufacturer after 2004 whereas it sounds like the plant closed in 2020, regardless the domestic capability is extremely weak)

As usual for American sources this is painted as some nefarious scheme by the evil red Chinese to destroy America by making cheaper drugs available. To add my own editorialising I think US companies are easily capable of ruining US manufacturing and focusing on screwing US patients over.[2] The average citizen should probably be glad of low cost Chinese supply, but nurturing domestic capability as per Biden is sensible.

[0]: https://prosperousamerica.org/skyrocketing-pharmaceutical-im...

[1]: https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/reopening-penicil...

[2]: https://www.rand.org/news/press/2024/02/01/index1.html

[3]: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/RosemaryGibsonTesti...

[4]: sources per https://youtu.be/hS0-ugYA-ko?si=xCNzctCGr9f2M7ct
by adastra22 | 2025-08-15 02:28:35+00:00
How do they do that? Specifically, how? Moment by moment what does that look like? Usually it involves e.g. making a statement and “noticing” a contradiction in that statement. Very similar to how an LLM reasons.

I think a lot of people here think people reason like a mathematical theorem prover, like some sort of platonic ideal rationalist. That’s not how real brains work though.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-08-15 02:30:01+00:00
What is aphantasia, specifically?

I don't consider myself to have aphantasia. If I close my eyes and try to 'see' with my eyes the letter 'm' or an apple, all I see is the back of my eyelids– pitch black.

If I then try to 'see' with my mind the letter 'm', I can imagine the shape and drawing the shape, but it never appears in a physically visual manner. I can trace its lines with my eyeballs, but try as I may to hallucinate an image, it's still only pitch black always. The closest I come to seeing it is being very confident that I know exactly what 'm' looks like, and that I could take that mental model and draw it exactly on paper immediately.

Do some people have such a clear and strong mental image that they can effectively inspect, zoom in and manipulate a mental image as well as a real visual image, and that's considered not-aphantasia?
by timr | 2025-08-15 02:30:39+00:00
I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore.

It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards.

As a partial aside, the Heisig anecdote that leads off this piece is painful:

> Japanese children learn the spoken language first, then they learn how to write it in elementary school; Chinese students of Japanese (who tend to be pretty good at it) have pre-existing knowledge of character meanings and forms from their mother tongue, so they only have to learn how to pronounce them. Therefore, a Western learner should first focus only on the meaning and writing of those couple of thousand common characters and, only after having mastered those, should move on to studying the pronunciations.

Going from "Japanese people learn the spoken language first" to "you should spend a big chunk of time learning characters before learning sounds, words or grammar" is a pretty remarkable mental backflip.

The author says he spent eleven months doing this before devoting any time to the spoken language. If I could put the "head exploding" emoji here, I would do it. I spent only slightly more time than that at language school, and came out conversational.
by miggy | 2025-08-15 02:31:44+00:00
Author here. Absolutely, HAProxy’s sticktables is a powerful way to implement advanced routing logic, and they’ve been around for years. This series focuses on explaining the broader concepts and tradeoffs rather than diving deep into any single implementation, and since it also covers other aspects of reverse proxies, the focus on load balancing here is mostly to present the challenges and high-level ideas.

Glad you found it a good effort, and I agree there’s room to go deeper in future posts.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-08-15 02:32:37+00:00
> Is ワープロ馬鹿 really a word used by native Japanese speakers?

You probably mean idiom. ワープロ (word processor) and 馬鹿 (baka: idiot) are individually both words used by Japanese speakers. Japanese speakers would be more likely to say 漢字健忘 (kanji amnesia) to refer to the phenomenon though.
by Manuel_D | 2025-08-15 02:33:00+00:00
Because the former is a reduction in real terms. The latter is an increase in real terms. The increase from $2.15 2017 dollars to $3.00 2021 dollars is well above the inflation in that time frame. The article points this out quite explicitly:

> However, the IPL has also increased substantially, even after inflation adjustments. The poverty line has increased in real terms.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-15 02:33:30+00:00
Wouldn't it be nice if individuals decided at the start of their career how much money was "enough" for them, and made a pledge to retire once they hit that number. Then society can give them an "I won!" hat or gold card or something, and the next guy can take the role. In this way all enterprises become an engine pulling new hires off the street, and emitting independently wealthy people to go and enjoy their lives.

But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.
by mingus88 | 2025-08-15 02:37:01+00:00
It’s only a matter of time, maybe even weeks away, before this pops off with actual armed resistance. History has shown there is no peaceful disagreement with fascism, and you would have to be naive to listen to folk like Hegseth today and think otherwise.

They are going after immigrants without concealed carry licenses now, but it won’t be long before a leftist decides it’s past time to exercise their 2A rights.
by elahieh | 2025-08-15 02:37:19+00:00
I'm inclining to this too. I heard about it first on Usenet in the 90s, and started looking at it again seriously in June 2017 when I came across the Bauer paper.

But after the 2020 clues (another 13 letters), it became clear that it wasn't any single ACA cipher type, and it was probably something very difficult (because of K4's very low index of coincidence, i.e. 0.036 just below "random" 26-letter text at 1/26, plus the huge number of revealed plaintext letters "in place" i.e. letter-for-lettter correspondence).

That plausibly left a combination of two or more well-known cipher types, but if they were somewhat complex ciphers, the chance of solution would be rather remote.

Hence I always thought a "good" end to the puzzle would be like the book "Masquerade" by Kit Williams where the only guy in cahoots with the creator (Bamber Gascoigne) thought the initial puzzle was an unrealistic challenge, but Williams released clues which enabled two schoolteachers to solve it. So that part was satisfactory, even if hardly anybody remembers the solvers' names!

In contrast, the cribs for K4 haven't helped at all.
by nelox | 2025-08-15 02:37:42+00:00
Anything Hamas says must be judged against the track record of its past falsehoods and distortions, this is their norm, not the exception. If someone still takes their words at face value, no fact or evidence will change how they see them.

Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.

Sources: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelg... https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-politburo-member-bardawil-fif... https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
by armchairhacker | 2025-08-15 02:37:57+00:00
You can only use it once before it closes.

e.g. the machine is a big box. You can "start" the machine once and "end" it once. When you "start" the machine it instantaneously teleports everything inside it from when you "end" the machine.

If you "start" the machine and break it before "end"ing it, nothing gets sent through, or there's a giant explosion, or the universe collapses, etc.

Alternatively, you can "receive" and "send" any number of times on the machine. But every time you "receive" you get a unique ID, and you can only "send" to that ID once.
by tgma | 2025-08-15 02:38:10+00:00
If they can't explain what the product is, it is because they are effectively selling custom high margin consulting services anchored on a data pipeline product. This is not too dissimilar from Oracle, et al, that sell "solutions," "support," and "services" anchored on a not-so-special database product.

But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.
by lutusp | 2025-08-15 02:38:28+00:00
> I think that $10 million is a great answer for "how much money is more than you'll ever need".

Years ago I lived on $40 per month, after building my own cabin in Oregon -- wood heat, kerosene lanterns. Then I bought an Apple II and things got more complicated (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...). But basically I agree with you. Most people will never have that much, or need it.
by troad | 2025-08-15 02:39:17+00:00
> The typical approach to using C libraries from Rust is to create a "safe wrapper" around the unsafe FFI calls that uses Rust's type system and lifetimes to enforce the safety invariants.

Calling it a "safe" wrapper, when that safety is entirely dependent on (a) the correctness of the hand-written wrapper, (b) the safety of the underlying FFI code, has always been a huge stretch of terminology. It's more like a veil of safety, so we can shield our modest eyes from impure code that flaunts its unsafeness.

Rust has no magical ways of turning unsafe code safe, nor is it in any way special in being able to create statically-verifiable abstractions around an unsafe core.

Don't get me wrong, Rust is memory safe when used as a cohesive system, and I would encourage its use as such where memory safety is desired. But the idea of "safely" wrapping unsafe FFIs reminds me of the idea of packaging underwater mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and selling them as a safe investment.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-15 02:39:53+00:00
I think you are correct, although some work stations are possible to be specced with the "big" GPUs found in the gaming laptops. On the "gaming" side, the hulking neon plastic gamer aesthetic somewhat gave way to a new popular class of gaming-laptop that is more sleek, and those machines often have the mid-range GPUs that you'd find in a workstation. It's all fairly blurred now.
by tharkun__ | 2025-08-15 02:39:54+00:00
And in the example of "why" this 401 is happening that's another one of those. The spec might have said to return a 401 for both not being authenticated and for not having enough privileges.

But that's just plain wrong and a proper developer would be allowed to change that. If you're not authenticating properly, you get a 401. That means you can't prove you're who you say you are.

If you are past that, i.e. we know that you are who you say you are, then the proper return code is 403 for saying "You are not allowed to access what you're trying to access, given who you are".

Which funnily enough seems to be a very elusive concept to many humans as well, never mind an LLM.
by kmijyiyxfbklao | 2025-08-15 02:41:36+00:00
When software is written with the purpose to kill people, that is very important software. That makes the organizations that write it very important. The more important an organization is, the more people from outside the organization should know what they do, and the more they should have say on it. Private organizations don't meet those requirements, government approximates those requirements better.

Also, I don't know how you can't see the relationship between bugs and accountability.
by wvenable | 2025-08-15 02:41:49+00:00
> We no longer live in the era of a single family computer.

In that era, there were always other family's computers.

> Parents don't know about all devices their children will use to access the internet

That's why we need the parental controls! That's the entire purpose. All devices that all children have everywhere were given to them by an adult. If they have Internet access, some adult somewhere is paying for that service. We simply want more control over those things that is easier to manage.

It's not at all complicated.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-15 02:41:55+00:00
I had a Plex server for years. It just got to the point where it wasn’t worth the time or effort to find a high quality rip. If I can’t find what I want on streaming service I just buy it or rent it on iTunes.

For movies, if you buy it from one of the major movies studios that participate in Movies Anywhere, it is automatically added to your library in Amazon Prime, whatever Google is using these days, Vudu etc.

But to your other points.

2. If you can find a high quality rip

3. All the streaming services work on iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV, Windows and Macs and whatever Google device that Google decide not to abandon this week

4. I had a Plex server and 1000Mbps u/d and it still wasn’t as reliable when I was on a plane, outside the country etc
by lowsong | 2025-08-15 02:42:13+00:00
> it works about as well, if not better, than a human junior engineer.

I see this line of reasoning a lot from AI-advocates and honestly it's depressing. Do you see less experienced engineers as nothing more than outputters of code? Is the entire point of being "junior" at something that you can learn and grow, which these LLM tools cannot.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-15 02:44:08+00:00
What’s really amazing is the contrast with music.

Music has figured it out. I subscribe to one of the major services. In exchange for my money, I get access to music. For my purposes, I get access to effectively all music from that one service. When I want music, I open that app and play it. End of story. If I don’t like that service for some reason, I can pick a different one.

Obviously, the logistics for long-form video are not exactly the same. But still, surely this is possible.
by siddboots | 2025-08-15 02:45:10+00:00
In my experience, complicated rules like this are extremely unreliable. Claude just ignores it much of the time. The problem is that when Claude sees a failing test it is usually just an obstacle to completing some other task at hand - it essentially never chooses to branch out into some new complicated workflow and instead will find some other low friction solution. This is exactly why subagents are effective: if Claude knows to always run tests via a testing subagent, then the specific testing workflow can become that subagent’s whole objective.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-15 02:46:53+00:00
Border Patrol agents show up, in full combat gear, outside a press conference about redistricting? Seriously? That's not Border Patrol, that's brownshirts.

Look, I'm probably more conservative than a lot of people here. I claim that the federal government has the legitimate authority to remove everyone without the legal right to be in the country.

They don't have the legitimate authority to be brownshirts, thought. The only words I can think of for that are inappropriate for this site.
by kazinator | 2025-08-15 02:46:57+00:00
So you might think, but macro-expansion as it is implemented in mainstream Lisp dialects is separate from compilation and isn't informed by compilation.

A form to be compiled is first subject to expansion, and then the expanded result, now devoid of macros is compiled.

Implementations that have multiple modes of processing, such as both a compiler and interpreter, share the macro expander between them.

There is redundancy between macro expansion and compilation. The macro expander has to understand and properly traverse special forms, and build up an environment structure that follow lexical scopes. Then the compiler has to do the same. Of course, the compiler won't have macro content in its environment stacks (lexical macros); those are gone.
by gramie | 2025-08-15 02:47:24+00:00
This was happening to people I knew when I lived in Japan 30 years ago. Many people were using wa-puro (word processors that let you type in the phonetic form and choose from the appropriate kanji). I imagine the effect is far more common now.

I remember one time when a university engineering professor couldn't remember how to write the kanji for "police". He didn't seem embarrassed asking someone else. I don't know if they still do, but they would often demonstrate by writing out the character with their index finger like a pen in the other hand's palm.
by scared_together | 2025-08-15 02:47:51+00:00
> Want to import recipes from a website or pull your bank transactions into your new dashboard? Just ask. In this future of open pipes…

If we truly had open pipes devoid of ads, tracking, subscriptions, custom data formats and other obstacles to third-parties, we wouldn’t have needed AI or ephemeral software. There would have been an abundance of third party software for commonly-found backends.
If Chrome is forced to sell or perplexity buys it – Future of Google discover?
by gudipudi | 2025-08-15 02:48:10+00:00
If Google is forced to sell chrome, what will happen to Google Discover traffic ?

If Chrome is sold and the Discover feed becomes collateral damage, publishers face a generational traffic cliff. The combination of AI-driven search disruption and potential retirement of Discover makes the future for independent journalism and content marketers look frankly scary.
by cantrevealname | 2025-08-15 02:48:34+00:00
> These cryptographic systems were not designed by the sculptor himself but by Edward Scheidt, who retired as chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center in 1989.

The article left me with a nagging question: Doesn’t the designer of the codes deserve a share of the proceeds of the auction? He’s still alive according to Wikipedia. It sounds like the unsolved code is what makes the art especially valuable. Was the cryptographer’s effort a “work for hire”, so he doesn’t get anything from the sale?
by kristjansson | 2025-08-15 02:48:41+00:00
This whole line of reasoning is underpinned by such a fundamentally dim view of American[1] culture that it's hard to believe you and others who espouse it think yourselves its advocates. The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.

The consistent lane you're looking for is "let come those that will. give them all the freedoms and all the burdens of being American, and that's what they'll become. The character of our places might change, as they have in the past and as they will again in the future, but they will be no less American as long as they're full of people seeking liberty, justice, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families."

[1] and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
by chatmasta | 2025-08-15 02:49:37+00:00
I remember when Supabase launched calling themselves open source Firebase… it must feel good to be on the other side of that a few years later. That said, they invested in Postgres in 2021… which is different from investing in Mongo in 2025…

Congrats on the launch. But MongoDB seems like a risky horse to hitch your wagon… why did you choose it? I haven’t seen new MongoDB deployments in a _long_ time, and the audience who used to make them (bootcamp graduates, basically) has probably moved onto Supabase.

If I need a NoSQL database I’m going with Elastic/OpenSearch. And I’m using it for a specific reason, e.g. as a landing zone for JSON data with unknown shape at coding time (like for a web scraper). I’m not using it as an application backend and I wouldn’t use Mongo for that either. And of course I'll use Elastic as a search index, but I would never use Mongo for that. The Mongo use case has gotten increasingly narrow.