MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattmaroon | 2025-08-16 15:31:27+00:00
It has that density when full of air? What about when it’s full of highly pressurized salt water?

Or, if it’s open to the environment on the way down, how does it evacuate the salt water and how much energy does that take?

Even if all this wasn’t a perpetual motion machine, which it is (the sea water is just part of the machine), wouldn’t it be easier to just float some solar panels to power a pump?
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-16 15:31:49+00:00
The screenshot from the article is for a single application that doesn't really have settings. The system settings panel does have a sidebar with separators, including group labels and contrast/color to make it easier to find things instead of a big panel of gray on gray. So... better than GNOME. Here's a screenshot I found:

https://static1.ahelpme.com/public/media/tutorials/review-fe...

You can also see that the KDE settings screen can fit more than 3 options at a time without scrolling, which is appreciated.

That said like I said I do sometimes feel that their more modern themes have random extra spacing that would be nice to be able to remove. Better then all the other modern DEs though (except for power user window managers like i3), so in that way they've done a fantastic job. KDE is vastly more usable than the alternatives, including commercial.
by altairprime | 2025-08-16 15:32:09+00:00
Insurance does not necessarily stop insuring modified cars. They do, however, require you to detail in depth your modifications and request a revised estimate of them. If your modification is “downloaded an Internet program and ran it to break the ECU lock”, they may be uncomfortable and either raise your premium or ask you to find another insurer. If instead it is “applied the attached two-byte change to the manufacturer-issued software after tracing all associated uses and determining that it exclusively activates a manufacturer-offered feature for the vehicle that is legal in my insured region(s)”, they’re probably not going to change your premium at all. Their job is to charge you a fee for the risk you pose to them, and the more effort you show in documenting and mitigating the risks of your mods, the more likely they are to be cool about it.
by kaindume | 2025-08-16 15:32:11+00:00
> Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer.

If we factor in that LLMs only exist because of Google search, after they have indexed and collected all the data on the WWW than LLMs are not surprising. They only replicate what has been published on the web, even the coding agents are only possible because of free software and open-source, code like Redis that has been published on the WWW.
by nephanth | 2025-08-16 15:32:15+00:00
On the subject of artificial monopoly, it's interesting to compare video streaming to music streaming.

Music streaming platforms (Spotify, deeper, apple music, tidal etc.) Generally work a lot better than movie/series streaming. It seems that competition between them works quite well, prices are reasonable, and more importantly, any subscription gives you access to pretty much all of mainstream music. There's hardly any content exclusive to one platform, so you can essentially get any of them and be done with it

Contrast that with video streaming, where content is pretty much exclusively tied to one platform. As a consequence, people routinely have several subscriptions instead of one, and platforms compete on library more than on price or quality of service. Overall experience is much worse

I wonder why this difference came to be, although these are very similar services (with basically the same copyright mechanism)
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-16 15:32:18+00:00
I suspect I understand our disconnect! I am looking at the GPOS as a tool for scheduling, driver interfaces, providing threads, and a GUI etc. I want it to get out of the way and let me run software. It's not something I'm intrinsically interested in, or want to tinker with, or config in a way that lets me break it.

We choose which things we want to tinker with and improve, and which we would like to use as-is for that and other goals. For me, the OS is in the latter category.
by fmbb | 2025-08-16 15:33:11+00:00
All living things have means and ends and pursue goals to completion. That does not make us call them intelligent.

Whenever the LLM fails to act intelligently, we blame the person who gave it the task. So we don't expect them to be able to figure anything out, we are just treating them as easily reconfigurable Skinner boxes.

I'm not an expert or even very interested in the field so I cannot judge what you propose, only intuit from the word "intelligence" and how these machines are described to work and how I observe them working. Reading a bit of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence leads me to believe these machines have even less to do with any classical definition of intelligence, but I did notice that

> Scholars studying artificial intelligence have proposed definitions of intelligence that include the intelligence demonstrated by machines

which seems rather relevant. Yeah when the AI researchers describe intelligence the machines are intelligent.
by mturmon | 2025-08-16 15:33:27+00:00
The article you link is not using the CLT correctly.

The CLT gives a result about a recentered and rescaled version of the sum of iid variates. CLT does not give a result about the sum itself, and the article is invoking such a result in the “files” and “lakes” examples.

I’m aware that it can appear that CLT does say something about the sum itself. The normal distribution of the recentered/rescaled sum can be translated into a distribution pertaining to the sum itself, due to the closure of Normals under linear transformation. But the limiting arguments don’t work any more.

What I mean by that statement: in the CLT, the errors of the distributional approximation go to zero as N gets large. For the sum, of course the error will not go to zero - the sum itself is diverging as N grows, and so is its distribution. (The point of centering and rescaling is to establish a non-diverging limit distribution.)

So for instance, the third central moment of the Gaussian is zero. But the third central moment of a sum of N iid exponentials will diverge quickly with N (it’s a gamma with shape parameter N). This third-moment divergence will happen for any base distribution with non-zero skew.

The above points out another fact about the CLT: it does not say anything about the tails of the limit distribution. Just about the core. So CLT does not help with large deviations or very low-probability events. This is another reason the post is mistaken, which you can see in the “files” example where it talks about the upper tail of the sum. The CLT does not apply there.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-16 15:33:37+00:00
The solution to this issue is regulation, pure and simple. It doesn’t even have to be a complicated bill, either:

“Financial institutions and financial services providers are barred from blocking, interfering with, restricting, or refusing any consensual transaction that complies with laws regarding content, materials, goods, or services.”

Admittedly in the USA this tees up a 1A case over whether companies have freedom of speech (they shouldn’t), but in other jurisdictions it could be the game changer needed to unshackle commerce from the control of a handful of boardroom puritans and risk-adverse compliance departments. If porn has a high rate of chargebacks, then stop allowing them without a higher burden of proof on the person requesting them, for instance. There’s ample room to enforce accountability on consumers and processors without upending the proverbial produce cart.
by dondraper36 | 2025-08-16 15:33:54+00:00
Yes, I would probably phrase it like this. "Under the current load, I would go super simple and use X, which can work fine long enough until it doesn't. And then we can think about horizontal scaling and use Y and Z". Then proceed with a deeper discussion of Y and Z, probably.

After all, interviewing and understanding what your interviewer expects to hear is also a valuable skill (same as with your boss or client).
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-16 15:34:07+00:00
Seems like a catch-22. Crypto can’t be used like legitimate currency because it’s not used like legitimate currency, and fraud can’t be addressed because there’s no regulation and no mechanisms by which to make victims whole.

There are parts of me that can see some appeal in cryptocurrency but I can’t see any way around this, at least not without impacting what made it appealing in the first place.
by lafalce | 2025-08-16 15:34:15+00:00
- A step-by-step guide to learn Python in 30 days

- Interactive web interface (no more scrolling through endless README files!)

- Clean, modern design that makes learning more enjoyable

- Based on the excellent content from Asabeneh's 30-Days-Of-Python repo

It's a

- Day-by-day structured content

- Clean, responsive design

- Easy navigation between lessons

- No ads, no tracking, just pure learning

https://30-days-python.duckdns.org/
by more_corn | 2025-08-16 15:34:33+00:00
Someone drives up to your house, cracks your Wi-Fi password, and then…

No. It’s not really possible to crack WiFi passwords these days with WPA-3. Also the overlap between electronic vulnerabilities and physical security is low. Remote vulnerabilities? Back doors? Yes, very worried. Someone coming to my house with advanced hacking tools, skills to attack my inverter? No.
by spauldo | 2025-08-16 15:34:51+00:00
You lose math quickly if you don't use it.

I took college algebra three times - not because I failed, but because I had a couple multi-year breaks in my college career and didn't do much math during them. It was definitely worth it - each time I took the class I picked up on things I had missed previously.

If I went back for my master's, I'd probably take it again.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-16 15:34:53+00:00
> I want you to start with these answers then we can layer on complexity if you’ve solved the problem and there’s time left to go into navel gazing mode.

Do you tell people this explicitly? If so, good on you; if not, please start! I think one of the biggest problems with interviews these days is misaligned expectations, particularly interviewees coming in assuming that what's desired is immediate evidence that they're so experienced in solving FAANG-scale problems that it's their default mode.
by jt2190 | 2025-08-16 15:35:17+00:00
I made a similar comment below, but I’ll add to this one too: If I, as a gym member, use their api when I run their app and that’s ok, why can I not run the same api from a third-party app for the exact same use-case? If his app asked me to punch in my eight-digit pin and then just kept that stored locally for convenience, what is the issue?
by Feeble | 2025-08-16 15:35:59+00:00
That's quite interesting, I wonder how they were fraudulent as bitcoin transactions dont have chargebacks etc. In the article they also mention that the price for the game would fluctuate which seems to indicate they actually priced the games in Bitcoin. Normally price would be Euro, USD etc and price conversion to Bitcoin would be done at check out. I guess these were the early days though =)
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-16 15:36:11+00:00
It was a while ago (2009-10ish) but I ran into an exceptionally interesting performance issue that was partly identified with RDTSC. For a course project in grad school I was measuring the effects of the Python GIL when running multi-threaded Python code on multi-core processors. I expected the overhead/lock contention to get worse as I added threads/cores but the performance fell off a cliff in a way that I hadn't expected. Great outcome for a course project, it made the presentation way more interesting.

The issue ended up being that my multi-threaded code when running on a single core pinned that core at 100% CPU usage, as expected, but when running it across 4 cores it was running 4 cores at 25% usage each. This resulted in the clock governor turning down the frequency on the cores from ~2GHz to 900MHz and causing the execution speed to drop even worse than just the expected lock contention. It was a fun mystery to dig into for a while.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-16 15:36:55+00:00
A lot of backend engineers are obsessed with infrastructure.

I've seen engineers have servers spin up lambdas to do async jobs that are just database calls.

So the server essentially waits for lambda which waits for a database. Why? Why can't you just have the server wait for the database?

It's like I'm going to pay a person to wait in line for me while I wait for him. Why? You're waiting anyway!? And you just paid to involve an additional person to unnecessarily wait with you for what?

When I told the engineer that you can just spin up a coroutine or like maybe you can allocate some cores before you spin up a new server... he looked at me like I was crazy. He said I was doing things so low level it was like assembly language programming. Going to low level and that lambdas were so cheap it was inconsequential.

If you're reading this and you're thinking, wow that other engineer is right, well this quote from the article refers to you:

"I’m often alone on this. Engineers look at complex systems with many interesting parts and think “wow, a lot of system design is happening here!” In fact, a complex system usually reflects an absence of good design."
by toast0 | 2025-08-16 15:37:26+00:00
IIRC, VWs in the wild would pass emissions tests, as long as only the drive wheels moved and the steering wasn't touched.

Of course, most people drive on roads, so the non-drive wheels move, and most trips involve turns.

Since the emissions tests were conducted on a dynamometer, the average affected car would likely pass. Researchers did tests in real world conditions and found the emissions varied significantly.
by teamonkey | 2025-08-16 15:37:33+00:00
That’s interesting, I’m more-or-less the same.

I ask because FPS gameplay contains a whole host of different skills, including the precision of your movements, the ability to accurately predict and track the enemy’s position on screen, as well as your reaction times, sequencing movements and so on. Potentially you could be exceptionally good at some of these and unusually bad at others and still emerge as a good FPS player.

Fighting games are a bit more pure, leaning more heavily on reaction times, timing and sequencing of moves.

Recent understanding of dyslexia is that it’s actually a kind of sequencing problem in the brain. I wonder if this is more descriptive of the issues faced by ADHDers?
by altairprime | 2025-08-16 15:38:16+00:00
To translate the final answer from math to human (as I’m going to be explaining this to my mother when I chat with her next!):

Imagine the half onion is a half rainbow. You know there’s another half rainbow lurking below the surface, the onion’s ghost of the sphere it once was. Place your knife as usual for each of your ten dice cuts, but instead of cutting straight down towards the cutting board, angle it slightly inward towards the end of the onion’s ghostly half-rainbow sphere below the board. Check your fingers for safety and then make your cut. Assuming your knife isn’t a plasma cutter, you’ll be stopped at the cutting board without ever reaching the onion at the end of the rainbow, and that’s cool. Set your knife at the next dice point and try again :)

(This still improves on the other dicing cases and only costs 1% uniformity by using 100% radius as the target.)
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-16 15:38:24+00:00
I think it'll be a while (10-20 years?) until we have AGI good enough to at least potentially replace a non-trivial number of workers as opposed to just being a productivity tool. LLMs are clearly just a tool.

We will of course eventually create human-level AGI, but things like emotions and empathy will come later, if at all, which may limit its utility in interacting with humans and therefore usefulness for many jobs.

The major job categories that AGI might be capable of is "professional and business" office jobs and many government jobs, which each account for about 15% of US jobs, but what that leaves is the other 70% which includes not only "blue collar" jobs such as trades, manufacturing, construction, transportation, but also major employers such as healthcare, education, leisure & hospitality, etc.

The future doesn't always turn out as expected though, especially when it comes to sci-fi visions of people in flying cars, living on mars, etc. AGI and robotics may well turn out to be the same - we may imagine humanoid robots and human-like "remote workers" doing many jobs, but it'll probably not be like that. Humanoid workers are probably about as likely as flying cars - problematic and just not that useful. AGI "workers" may well be just agents that are given well defined tasks to execute as opposed to fully autonomous human worker replacements.
by willguest | 2025-08-16 15:38:52+00:00
> There isn't anything here to suggest countries are bargaining in bad faith

1) "...countries reiterated familiar talking points" 2) "Instead of whittling down a draft of the treaty that had been prepared late last year during the previous meeting in Busan, South Korea, delegates added hundreds of suggestions to it, placing a deal further from reach" 3) "Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others will try to change the mandate so that it no longer refers to the “full life cycle” of plastics, but just plastic pollution — thus turning the treaty into a waste management agreement"

Not coming to agreement, though rhetorical posturing, bureaucratic leverage or the undermining of the core sentiment, means that the damaging status quo will continue, so I consider these to be bad-faith actions, taken in the interest of continued profiteering.

> Plastic is clearly of enormous value to society

This is absolutely true, and also myopic. Plastic is an astonishing material that can remain stable for thousands of years. Why, then, don't we make products that last this long? Because this would not be good for an economy that needs year-on-year production and consumption to increase.
by lanyard-textile | 2025-08-16 15:39:01+00:00
It is sketchy. :) Your intuition is correct.

The idea is that you will need to put some trust in the project anyway, since you’re trying to install it. Might as well make it easier with a one line install.

Edit: You should only do this if someone reliable tells you to, honestly. Doing this with truly random projects you aimlessly find is not a good idea.
by spcebar | 2025-08-16 15:39:03+00:00
Having engineers specialized in a specific stack learn on the job for the sake of/while working on a project is a great way to end up with really funky code and poor user experiences. I speak as a developer tasked with doing exactly that several times at a previous job, and the long-term is never pretty. The first code you write is immediately legacy code, but if you're learning as you write for a project that is already in motion, you're usually stuck with that legacy code until someone goes out of business or the rapture comes and they have to do a reorg because half the team was hauled to the kingdom of heaven, and now there's an MBA running the department who doesn't like you and wants to leverage AI to do the block chain.
by slt2021 | 2025-08-16 15:39:31+00:00
>I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that a company founded by Adolf Hitler behaves in this way.

this is pure anti-German hatred and bigotry, Uncle H has been dead for many decades, and there is nothing to suggest that the current VW is still somehow connected to the Third Reich, while ignoring all the alt-right/nazi undercurrent brewing inside the United States among the so called "foundational americans"
by philosophty | 2025-08-16 15:39:48+00:00
You reread the link?

He had the privilege of giving away a fortune, to causes he cares about, largely thanks to Steve Jobs.

He's never worried about money and has millions in the bank and multiple houses, thanks to Steve Jobs.

Some people love their celebrity. I've met more than a few, including Wozniak. He seems to genuinely love it, which doesn't mean it doesn't also get tiring at times.
by rasengan | 2025-08-16 15:40:48+00:00
> guy who destroyed Mt Gox

Let me correct that for you - the guy who brought you the first Bitcoin exchange and arguably helped pave the way for cryptocurrencies today.

> guy who destroyed Freenode

This was already debunked [1]. I tried to save freenode - I was the only one funding it up until the point where freenode's ownership "gave" it to me essentially which resulted in the non-developer staff to attempt to hostile takeover the network [2].

The end result was that they gave control of the domain back to me (and as a result, freenode).

> Personally, I'd rather trust in Mullvad.

Trusting random teams of people on the internet isn't exactly a form of security or privacy.

Developers and cypherpunks trust code, not words.

If you're a developer, I'd highly suggest you read the code.

> This VPN requires you to trust in Intel

You really can't use the internet or any internet-distributed software without trusting Intel. Maybe you're better off logging out if that is your policy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lee-side.pd...

[2] Funny how non-developers keep ruining Open Source (Mozilla, and many others - see Lunduke Journal for more).
by samuell | 2025-08-16 15:43:08+00:00
Also:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891333

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44902206

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44902941 (1 comment)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910951 (1 comment)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44918111
by Someone | 2025-08-16 15:43:16+00:00
> Java, C# and JS use UTF-16-like encoding for in-memory string

That’s incorrect for Java, possibly also for C# and JS.

In any language where strings are opaque enough types [1], the in-memory representation is an implementation detail. Java has been such a language since release 9 (https://openjdk.org/jeps/254)

[1] The ‘enough’ is because some languages have fully opaque types, but specify efficiency of some operations and through it, effectively proscribe implementation details. Having a foreign function interface also often means implementation details cannot be changed because doing that would break backwards compatibility.

> JS use floating point for all numbers. The max accurate integer is 2⁵³−1

That is incorrect. Much larger integers can be represented exactly, for example 2¹⁰⁰.

What is true is that 2⁵³−1 is the largest integer n such that n-1, n, and n+1 can be represented exactly in an IEEE double. That, in turn, means n == n-1 and n == n+1 both will evaluate to false, as expected in ‘normal’ arithmetic.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-16 15:43:51+00:00
I don't think any western car manufacturer will ever want to deal with the potential liability issues when it comes to having users screw around in a high voltage electric drive system. This is not like a normal 12V car battery that will not even hurt you if you directly touch the poles with your hands. These EV batteries contain more than enough juice to zap you out of existence if you don't have relevant training.
by debo_ | 2025-08-16 15:44:11+00:00
I've built a payfac before, and while I think this author is overstating the difficulty of doing so in 2025, I agree that it wouldn't help Valve to do so. We weren't the ones that decided it was too risky to deal with specific merchant categories; our processor did that for us. It wasn't even a discussion. (Nevermind such policies like "all of Puerto Rico is too risky to deal with.")