MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucb1e | 2025-08-29 19:03:44+00:00
The first article of our constitution says people shall be treated equally in equal situations. I presume that most countries have similar clauses but, beyond legalese, it's also simply in line with my ethics to treat everyone equally

There are people behind those connection requests. I don't try to guess on my server who is a bot and who is not; I'll make mistakes and probably bias against people who use uncommon setups (those needing accessibility aids or using e.g. experimental software that improves some aspect like privacy or functionality)

Sure, I have rights as a website owner. I can take the whole thing offline; I can block every 5th request; I can allow each /16 block to make 1000 requests per day; I can accept requests only from clients that have a Firefox user agent string. So long as it's equally applied to everyone and it's not based on a prohibited category such as gender or religious conviction, I am free to decide on such cuts and I'd encourage everyone to apply a policy that they believe is fair

Cloudflare and its competitors, as far as I can tell, block arbitrary subgroups of people based on secret criteria. It does not appear to be applied fairly, such as allowing everyone to make the same number of requests per unit time. I'm probably bothered even more because I happen to be among the blocked subgroup regularly (but far from all the time, just little enough to feel the pain)
by M95D | 2025-08-29 19:04:29+00:00
I've done the calculations just now:

10W constant over 10 years would cost me 275 euro. My hard drives (7 ST2000DL003 and one ST2000DL001) are 10-15 years old now. They're all different batches, none failed yet, so I expect it to last at least 5 more years, possibly a lot more.

The current NAS setup I have (router + DAS + 2 USB) is around 50W. Over 20years it will cost me ~2800 euro in today's prices. So you see, the electricity is a very significant portion of TCO. In fact, it's more than half, because I bought everything second-hand.
by golergka | 2025-08-29 19:05:17+00:00
I did a couple of quick searchers with help of ChatGPT, and it seems like in Norway, at least, a tenured professor would get ~$50k post-tax, a primary school teacher ~$35k, and a cleaner ~$20k. If anything, such low income inequality seems dystopian. I would expect talented and ambitious people rather move elsewhere.
by rcpt | 2025-08-29 19:05:19+00:00
There was no case against Hillary you're correct.

But that doesn't mean that there is no case against Elon. I'm not sure why you would draw an equals between the two. The SEC really does put people in jail, the stuff with Vlad is bordering on treason.

I think you may have forgotten that we actually used to have a government and there was rule of law.
by jama211 | 2025-08-29 19:05:20+00:00
My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well at all the places that didn’t hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.

I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.

In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.
by drob518 | 2025-08-29 19:05:20+00:00
There have been many attempts to get rid of sexprs in favor of a “better” syntax. Even John McCarthy, the inventor (discoverer?) of Lisp had plans for an “M-expression” syntax to replace “S-expressions.” It never happened. The secret is that Lispers actually view sexprs as an advantage, not something to be worked around. Once you discover symbolic editing and code manipulation based on sexprs, you’ll never go back to weak line editing. That said, some Lisp dialects (e.g. Clojure and Racket) have embraced other symbols like square and curly brackets to keep the code more terse overall and optically break up longer runs of parentheses.

Probably the best example of a “Lisp without parentheses” is Dylan. Originally, Dylan was developed as a more traditional Lisp with sexprs, but they came up with a non-sexr “surface syntax” before launching it to avoid scaring the public.
by zzbzq | 2025-08-29 19:05:23+00:00
the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
by zeldasecurity | 2025-08-29 19:05:29+00:00
Between August 8–18, a threat actor (UNC6395) exploited the Salesforce–Salesloft Drift integration to steal OAuth tokens, granting access to Salesforce customer environments. Attackers exfiltrated sensitive credentials, including AWS keys, Snowflake tokens, and passwords.

Salesforce and Salesloft revoked all Drift-related tokens on August 20 and removed the app from AppExchange. Security researchers estimate that hundreds of organizations may be impacted.
by burnte | 2025-08-29 19:05:55+00:00
There's a difference between taking one thing and putting something else in it's spot, and truly REPLACING something. Yes, some ads have AI generated actors. You know because you can tell because they're "not quite right", rather than focusing on the message of the ad. Noticing AI in ads turns more people off than on, so AI ads are treated by a lot of people as an easy "avoid this company" signal. So those AI ads are in lieu of real actors, but not actually replacing them because people don't want to watch AI actors in an ad. The ad ceases to be effective. The "replacement" failed.
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-29 19:06:09+00:00
Video games became a lot better when developers stopped saying, "You just haven't taken the time to learn it and don't understand it", and started saying, "That's my fault for designing it that way. Let me redesign it so that it's accessible to everyone in my target audience". I wish programming languages would be humble enough to do the same (although many are!).
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-29 19:06:14+00:00
> In the US, that kind of coordinated cross-discipline striking is explicitly illegal (I'd have to go look up my history to confirm, but I believe that was related to the federal intervention to stop the rail strikes because it disrupted mail delivery).

No, it’s just a straight up federal law that bans striking in the railroad and airline industries:

https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/16...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Labor_Act

The US’s people (by proxy of its democratically elected leaders) believe some workers deserve fewer rights than others.

It isn’t so different than an informal caste system, except it is far more flexible and allows a few to break through, especially if they can prove their economic mettle. The US makes a lot more sense once you realize much (the majority, I would say) accept that some people deserve more than others.

What is most important is trying to not be at the bottom, and staying ahead of those below you. Another easy example is the superior unions for cops and firefighters, who are typically used to maintain the status quo (similar to a king’s guards). These union members will readily support leaders who want to weaken other unions.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-29 19:06:18+00:00
> They're unphysical, and yet the very physical human mind can work with them just fine.

Can it? We can only work with things we can name and the real numbers we can name are an infinitesimal fraction of the real numbers. (The nameable reals and sets of reals have the same cardinality as integers while the rest are a higher cardinality.)
by nostrademons | 2025-08-29 19:06:20+00:00
It still exists!

https://csszengarden.com/

What doesn't really exist is the excitement about the web as a publishing platform. Those of us who still write CSS for a living probably do so in the context of a webapp, a product that's trying to help a user accomplish a task. We usually work with other developers, and writing CSS like you do on CSS Zen Garden would probably get you fired. If you are an indie publisher maintaining your own website where you can actually control the CSS - get ready for spam, and hackers, and bitcoin miners, and people using your server as a launchpad to do illegal things and get you blamed for it!

Social media won, and it's social media like Facebook or TikTok or Reddit where you have zero control over presentation, not even social media like MySpace or LiveJournal where you could do cool things with CSS.
by martin-t | 2025-08-29 19:06:41+00:00
Weapons are for hunting, target shooting and killing people.

These HR types (and many in the general population) need to understand that there's nothing wrong with the third point. Aside from the obvious case of self defense, people can only protect their freedom as long as they have equally powerful tools a those trying to oppress them.

Democracy can only work with the ability to kill evenly distributed.

There's a reason all dictatorships have strict gun control laws.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-29 19:06:59+00:00
Mostly by name association. The LLMs named Grok are good LLMs. The twitter bot of the same name, using those models and a custom prompt, has a habit of creating controversy. Usually after somebody modified the system prompt.

I use grok a lot on the web interface (grok.com) and never had any weird incidents. It's a run-of-the-mill SOTA model with good web search and less safety training
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-29 19:07:15+00:00
It sounds like this may not be happening on iOS. I have not found a way to access the Photos library, without the user being asked for explicit permission to do so.

But I also haven't really tried. I use Photos and the Camera in some of the apps I've written, and fully expect users to be asked. I ask for minimal permissions, as well.

If Meta is bypassing user permission, then that's a truly dire security breach, and Apple needs to bring down the banhammer fast.
by alwillis | 2025-08-29 19:08:10+00:00
No, this isn't a bunch of markdown files, has been in the works since at least May and has been dogfooded inside Apple [1]: "Apple Partners With Anthropic for Claude-Powered AI Coding Platform"

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/02/apple-anthropic-ai-codi...
by matharmin | 2025-08-29 19:08:12+00:00
wa-sqlite on top of OPFS is actually pretty great these days. Performance is about half of what I'd get in native SQLite, which is not too bad overall. It's around 10x faster than SQLite on top of IndexedDB for large databases in my experience.

It's much better than WebSQL could ever be. You get the full power of modern SQLite, with the version, compile options, additional extensions, all under your control.
by mlyle | 2025-08-29 19:08:29+00:00
> I don't think WAL can ever really have a durable transaction; it is essentially based on leaving a transaction open until it gets "check-pointed" or actually committed to the database file.

In general: WAL means you write the transaction to the WAL, fsync (in sqlite, this depends upon the sync mode], and then return it's done to the application. The transaction is then durable: even if the database crashes, the contents of the WAL will be applied to the database file.

Checkpointing later just lets you throw away that part of the WAL and not have to replay as much to the database file.
by golergka | 2025-08-29 19:08:31+00:00
> if a restaurant abuses its staff

What exactly counts as "abuse"?

Here's what I've seen first-hand in a "labour-friendly" country. An employee doesn't show up at his workplace a few days a week, for several months, without doctor's notes or any real reason. Employer finally fires them. Employee goes to court and after a year gets a $20k compensation for "unlawful termination", even though his absence on the workplace was documented (but not properly processed, apparently).
by Robert_MacWha | 2025-08-29 19:08:56+00:00
I’ve been frustrated with the tradeoff between hot wallets (convenient and risky) vs hardware wallets (secure and but clunky).

Working at SEAL (https://www.securityalliance.org/) and with SEAL911 I keep seeing the same pattern: One of the most common incident is private key theft, almost always from desktop wallets. Malware goes after browser extensions because your keys sit decrypted in memory.

So I built Lodgelock. It’s a small companion app for MetaMask that keeps keys off the desktop: - MetaMask works as usual but, when it’s time to sign, the request is proxied to your phone. - Keys live on your phone behind biometrics. - The signed payload is sent back to your wallet for deployment.

It adds ~30 seconds compared to a hot wallet, but the keys never touch the desktop.

Some choices I made: - No MPC or proprietary recovery methods, just a standard seed phrase. - Open source, GPL-3.0. - I'm planning to get audited and apply for a MetaMask Grant before calling Lodgelock production-ready.

This isn't a hardware wallet replacement. If you already use a Ledger every time, keep doing that. Lodgelock is for people like me who _should_ use hardware wallets but default to hot wallets because convenience wins.

If you think this would help you, sign up for the email notifications on the website (https://lodgelock.org/#email-signup) or check out the repo (https://github.com/Robert-MacWha/lodgelock-snap).
by agwa | 2025-08-29 19:08:57+00:00
My understanding of DELETE mode is that the transaction is not committed until the rollback journal file is deleted - if the rollback journal is present when sqlite opens a database, it applies the rollback journal to undo the changes that the transaction made. See https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html#1_deleting_the_roll...

If the directory containing the rollback journal is not fsynced after the journal file is deleted, then the journal file might rematerialize after a power failure, causing sqlite to roll back a committed transaction. And fsyncing the directory doesn't seem to happen unless you set synchronous to EXTRA, per the docs cited in the blog post.
by isodev | 2025-08-29 19:09:01+00:00
So freedom but not like that? I think if more of the world, especially people living in the US, had more of the Norway mentality, "big tech" abuse wouldn't have taken hold in the first place (e.g. the Apples and Googles and Metas of today would never get their sinks installed, let alone 3rd party apps made).
by EthanHeilman | 2025-08-29 19:09:09+00:00
> On the one hand, this article is talking about the hierarchy of "physicality" of various mathematical concepts, and they put Cantor's real numbers at the floor. I disagree with that specifically

I didn't mean to suggest that the reals are the floor of reality, rather that they are more floorlike than the integers.

> The other question is whether Cantor's conception of infinity is a useful one in mathematics. Here I think the answer is no.

Tools are created by transforming nature into something useful to humans. Is Cantor's conception of infinity more natural? I can't really say, but the uselessness and confusion seems more like nature than technology.
by TZubiri | 2025-08-29 19:09:20+00:00
There's people whose entire job is to list houses at 50% over the market pricing. And there's people whose entire job it is to offer 50% market price for houses. They only need to be successful once every couple of month. They flood the market with buying and selling signals, that's just the way the market works. I wouldn't be discouraged if my fair market offer were rejected by most bidders in a market, statistically they are professional over/under bidders, that's fine.
by Certhas | 2025-08-29 19:10:08+00:00
So source code needs to be UTF8 because it contains comments and string literals. And filenames need to be bytes. It seems that both of these are orthogonal to the question of whether non-ASCII code is desirable...

Restricting the program part to ASCII is fine for me, but as a fellow German it's also important to recognize that we don't loose much by not having ä cömplete sät of letters. Everyone can write comprehensible German using ASCII characters only. So I would listen to what people from languages that really don't fit into ASCII have to say.
by odie5533 | 2025-08-29 19:10:11+00:00
I'm pretty sure everyone knew it was xAI last week. It's a great model. I'll never pay to use it, but I like it enough while it's free.

> I miss the days where we just liked technology for advancement's sake.

I think you haven't fully thought through such statements. They lead to bad places. If Bin Laden were selling research and inference to raise money for attacks, how many tokens would you buy?
by bayindirh | 2025-08-29 19:10:32+00:00
The problem is not AI bot scraping, per se, but "AI bot scraping while disregarding all licenses and ethical considerations".

Freedom, the word, while implies no boundaries, is always bound by ethics, mutual respect and "do no harm" principle. The moment you trip either one of these wires and break them, the mechanisms to counter it becomes active.

Then we cry "but, freedom?!". Freedom also contains the consequences of one's actions.

Freedom without consequences is tyranny of the powerful.
by dasil003 | 2025-08-29 19:11:04+00:00
Yeah I think this is a great mental framework. Getting rejected hurts, it's natural to want to find a reason, and with some self-reflection it definitely can help one grow. But you gotta be very careful about over-indexing on any one interview where the reasons for rejection may or may not have anything to do with what you did and said during the interview (let alone your personhood).

Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.

One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet points—but if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.
by jama211 | 2025-08-29 19:11:38+00:00
Probably not even about whether it was good enough at all, just random managers making random decisions by how they were feeling the day they interviewed you. Any time a company has a LOT of applicants, like any big tech company does, the less you should take any info at all from a given rejection or even an offer. It’s kinda random.

You’ll typically get better info only when a company is small and has a role in low demand and they only had a couple of people apply. This situation is pretty rare.
by wjrb | 2025-08-29 19:11:52+00:00
Hey, my first "career" was also in theater!

Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.

And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.

Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.
by derefr | 2025-08-29 19:12:25+00:00
> There are no on-demand GPUs at this scale.

> These two factors mean that GPU utilization comes in at 10-20%.

Why don't these two factors cancel out? Why wouldn't a company building a private GPU cluster for their own use, also sit a workload scheduler (e.g. Slurm) in front of it, enable credit accounting + usage-based-billing on it, and then let validated customer partners of theirs push batch jobs to their cluster — where each such job will receive huge spot resource allocations in what would otherwise be the cluster's low-duty point, to run to completion as quickly as possible?

Just a few such companies (and universities) deciding to rent their excess inference capacity out to local SMEs, would mean that there would then be "on-demand GPUs at this scale." (You'd have to go through a few meetings to get access to it, but no more than is required to e.g. get a mortgage on a house. Certainly nothing as bad as getting VC investment.)

This has always been precisely how the commercial market for HPC compute works: the validated customers of an HPC cluster sending off their flights of independent "wide but short" jobs, that get resource-packed + fair-scheduled between other clients' jobs into a 2D (nodes, time) matrix, with everything getting executed overnight, just a few wide jobs at a time.

So why don't we see a similar commercial "GPU HPC" market?

I can only assume that the companies building such clusters are either:

- investor-funded, and therefore not concerned with dedicating effort to invent ways to minimize the TCO of their GPUs, when they could instead put all their engineering+operational labor into grabbing market share

- bigcorps so big that they have contracts with one big overriding "customer" that can suck up 100% of their spare GPU-hours: their state's military / intelligence apparatus

...or, if not, then it must turn out that these clusters are being 100% utilized by their owners themselves — however unlikely that may seem.

Because if none of these statements are true, then there's just a proverbial $20 bill sitting on the ground here. (And the best kind of $20 bill, too, from a company's perspective: rent extraction.)