MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by XorNot | 2025-08-31 00:46:35+00:00
To some extent Ukraine has also given people are very distorted impression of what a modern war in other contexts would look like, adding an unhelpful data point to the other outdated one which is WW2.

WW2 was probably the last time you could fight a war, and do things like convert your local industry to produce weapons and tanks that were relevant. And even then, it only really happened because the US mainland was not contested territory during the conflict - it had the luxury of choosing when to enter the war.

Ukraine is simply not a "normal" looking modern conventional war. Both sides have receiving significant external imports which are various reasons are mostly untouchable by kinetic strikes till they cross the relevant borders (in this way it is much more like Vietnam in logistical respects). So you see assumptions like "mass production of drones will be key to the future!" in a context where the bulk of the critical components - microprocessors, cameras etc. - are not produced in the countries in conflict, and are imported from factories which are in no danger of ever being directly targeted.

So cheap mass producable systems have held the line in areas, but they're obviously drop ins for something you'd prefer to use instead - i.e. artillery - but there's a shortage of that. But conversely they haven't moved the line in a lot of areas - some of the biggest strikes of the war have been from conventional exploitation of defensive failures - i.e. the Kharkiv breakthrough, or from espionage operations which might be notable for using a lot of drones but the real accomplishment was getting them in position and the real success was still very typical: Operation Spidersweb taking out a large number of Russian long range strategic bombers.

Now people will point to the latter and say "see! strategic bombers are useless!" ... and yet that can hardly be true if a substantial operation to destroy strategic bombers was worth doing. A system being vulnerable in a way it previously wasn't does not make it ineffective (i.e. if strategic bombers at airfields intact would endanger the Ukranian position, then they're still an obviously necessary system, but they now need better protection then they had - or Russian counter-espionage just sucks).
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 00:47:25+00:00
I can't speak with any authority on ZFS, I know its structure the least out of all the major filesystems.

I do a ton of reading through forums gathering user input, and lots of people chime in with stories of lost filesystems. I've seen reports of lost filesystems with ZFS and I want to say I've seen them at around the same frequency of XFS; both are very rare.

My concern with ZFS is that they seem to have taken the same "no traditional fsck" approach as btrfs, favoring entirely online repair. That's obviously where we all want to be, but that's very hard to get right, and it's been my experience that if you prioritize that too much you miss the "disaster recovery" scenarios, and that seems to be what's happened with ZFS; I've read that if your ZFS filesystem is toast you need to send it to a data recovery service.

That's not something I would consider acceptable, fsck ought to be able to do anything a data recovery service would do, and for bcachefs it does.

I know the XFS folks have put a ton of outright paranoia into repair, including full on disaster recovery scenarios. It can't repair in scenarios where bcachefs can - but on the other hand, XFS has tricks that bcachefs doesn't, so I can't call bcachefs unequivocally better; we'd need to wait for more widespread usage and a lot more data.
by alphazard | 2025-08-31 00:49:30+00:00
An intro data structures course is worth watching if you haven't taken one. There are plenty of them on YouTube. Try to follow along with a language that has an explicit pointer type. Go is a good choice. Java and Python are worse choices (for this particular thing) IMO.

Assuming you are familiar with trees and hashmaps, you have all the important building blocks. You can imagine a database as a bunch of trees, hashmaps and occasionally other stuff, protected by a lock. First you acquire the lock, then you update some of the data structures, and maybe that requires you to update some of the other data structures (like indexes) for consistency. Then you release the lock.

By default, most data will live in a BTree with an integer primary key, and that integer is taken from a counter that you increment for new inserts. Indexes will be BTrees where the key is stuff you want to query on, and the value is the primary key in the main table.

Using just those data structures you should be able to plan for any query or insert pattern. It helps to figure this out yourself in a programming language for a few practice cases, so you know you can do it. Eventually it will be easy to figure out what tables and indexes you need in your head. In the real world, this stuff is jotted down in design docs, often as SQL or even just bullets.

That's really all you need, and that's where I recommend getting out of the rabbit hole. Query planners are pretty good. You can usually just write SQL and if you did the work to understand what the tables and indexes should be, the planner will figure out how to use them to make the query fast.
by verdverm | 2025-08-31 00:50:21+00:00
Seems like their poisoning is something that shouldn't be hard to detect and filter on. There is enough perturbation to create visual artifacts people can see. Steganography research is much further along in being undetectable. I would imaging in order to disrupt training sufficiently, you would not be able to have so few perturbations that it would go undetected
by com2kid | 2025-08-31 00:50:33+00:00
You can do a lot with a lot of VRAM and a reasonable amount of TOPS.

A 24GB affordable GPU can easily power an entire house worth of AI work, from real time voice chat, image generation, simple tool calls and task running, reminders, alerts, smart home integrations, etc.

IMHO a large set of potential use cases is being held back by Nvidia's high prices.
by echelon | 2025-08-31 00:51:31+00:00
> Edit: just to specifically address your argument, doing something evolution has optimized for hundreds of millions of years is much harder than something evolution “came up with” very recently (abstract thought).

You've got this backwards.

If evolution stumbled upon locomotion early -- and several times independently through convergent evolution --, that means it's an easy problem, relatively speaking.

We've come up with math and heuristics for robotics (just like vision and optics). We're turning up completely empty for intelligence.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-31 00:52:17+00:00
> Compensation is essentially top-of-industry, maybe with the exception of the Big 3 AI companies (that’s assuming you believe their RSU valuations, and that an IPO will occur).

I guess it comes down to betting on the IPO then?

The two recent data points I have are from one person who interviewed, got an offer, and his only reaction was “lol, not a chance”. The other person I know who works there now (according to LinkedIn) was a coworker who was cut for underperformance when we worked together years ago. I’ve heard so many different stories about what it’s like that I don’t know what to believe any more.

Calling Anduril comp “significantly higher” than Google does go completely against what I’ve heard from others though. I’ll have to go look again.

EDIT: The levels.fyi data looks great for juniors but definitely isn’t higher than Google for L5+: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anduril-industries/salaries...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-31 00:52:43+00:00
Which is what I do (add a space before and after). I didn't know you weren't supposed to put the spaces until someone pointed it out to me — suggested I was not an LLM because I added the spaces.

Makes me wonder if kerning is done correctly, if the em-dash would look like there were spaces before and after when there were not.
by aleatorianator | 2025-08-31 00:53:33+00:00
Telescreens here we come

it'll be a "low income hosing" like a spotify with "ads" but the ads are there's live surveillance in your home, for "safety" of the property or to offset the "cost" of your life or whatever....

at first we're gonna be able to pay to avoid surveilled housing, but eventually it'll be only the stupidly wealthy that can afford not being surveilled.
by 827a | 2025-08-31 00:54:15+00:00
Continuing the thought experiment: There's an interesting sort-of contradiction in this desire: I, being dissatisfied with some aspect of the existing software solutions on the market, want to create an isolated monastic order of software engineers to ignore all existing solutions and build something that solves my problems; presumably, without any contact from me.

Its a contradiction very much at the core of the idea: Should I expect that the Operating System my monastic order produces be able to play Overwatch or be able to open .docx files? I suspect not; but why? Because they didn't collaborate with stakeholders. So, they might need to collaborate with stakeholders; yet that was the very thing we were trying to avoid by making this an isolated monastic order.

Sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad. Or, uh, maybe Microsoft should just stop using React for the Start menu, that might be a good start.
by citizenpaul | 2025-08-31 00:55:03+00:00
Sure but again you are referring to somewhat structured systems that went off the rails a bit. Thats not what I consider a mudball.

I've seen numerous places trying to hire someone to fix a 5-10 year mudball that has reached a point where progress is no longer possible without breaking something else which breaks something else and so on.

There is an endgame to the mudball and it does end in complete and total development stopping and systems that are constantly going offline and take weeks to get restarted. Most of the time the place will say: "Oh we've already had several consultants tell us the same thing" The same thing being the situation is hopeless and they are facing years of simply untangling the mess they made.

Usually the mudball is held together by a chain of increasingly shorter senior positions that keep jumping the sinking ship faster and faster. Finally they can no longer convince anyone sane to take on the ticking time bomb they have created and they turn to consultants.

Also my advice is often you should bring back person X that was at least familiar with the system at whatever salary they require. I am inevitably told that that person will literally not even take calls or emails from the company any more, every time. Thats how bad a real world mudball is.
by DarkSucker | 2025-08-31 00:56:12+00:00
I think the alternative is shown in figure 2. SiN (silicon nitride) is different from optical fiber. Both versions shown in figure 2 lack detail, especially in the small boxes labeled GC, Mirror, and PD. Depending on the details, one might put micro optical assemblies between or in those boxes in the figure. In any case, SiN waveguides are small, so you can pack many lanes in a small space.
by trehalose | 2025-08-31 00:56:26+00:00
This is not a "climate change is getting worse" story, as I think you're implying :/ (I don't entirely blame you--I doubt you read the article, but I do think the title is misleading.) This is just a story of "The current hurricane categorizing system has always failed to correlate very well with deaths and destruction, because it only factors in wind speed. A category 1 hurricane can sometimes be more disastrous than a higher-category hurricane."
by com2kid | 2025-08-31 00:56:47+00:00
Even 40 tokens per second is plenty enough for real time usage. The average person reads at ~4 words per second, 40 tokens per second is going to be 15-20 words per second.

Even useful models like gemma3 27b are hitting 22 t/s on 4bit quants.

You aren't going to be reformatting gigabytes of PDFs or anything, but for a lot of common use cases, those speeds are fine.
Show HN: Android compass, location app without ads
by orn | 2025-08-31 00:56:58+00:00
If you are like me, you would like to have and Android compass application on your device when hiking or exploring new areas. The one I made also has location, altitude and weather.

Without ads - which is the main reason I created my own, most of the compass applications I find in the store are useless/frustrating because of the amount of ads.

Yes, I know it's very basic, but does what it's supposed to.

The apk is availabe under releases https://github.com/ornatwork/Sample-Location/releases
by zakirullin | 2025-08-31 00:57:06+00:00
> I like the article but the people who need it won't understand it

That's true. One doesn't change his mindset just after reading. Even after some mentorship the results are far from satisfying. Engineers can completely agree with you on the topic, only to go and do just the opposite.

It seems like the hardest thing to do is to build a feedback loop - "what decisions I made in past -> what it led to". Usually that loop takes a few years to complete, and most people forget that their architecture decisions led to a disaster. Or they just disassociate themselves.
by jliptzin | 2025-08-31 00:57:43+00:00
The average person should not even really pay attention to the category of the storm. That is mostly of scientific concern. It measures the maximum wind speed found at the relatively tiny center of circulation which may or may not have anything to do with how destructive the rest of the storm is hundreds of miles away from the center, as the article points out. That can also depend on things that have nothing to do with the storm itself, such as whether it’s impacting an area with lax building codes that is unprepared for storm surge. People should forget about that scale and focus on what local authorities are saying about the potential danger.
by cm2012 | 2025-08-31 00:58:35+00:00
It's good questions. Here's why this axis is the right one in my opinion:

1) As I mentioned, it has a lot of statistically significant correlations, including to all the variables of the Big 5. Example: Surveys show that % of the overall population that is each type (like INFJ) is very consistent across time and populations.

2) Beyond that, youre right, there are a lot of personality systems with pros and cons. But Myers-Briggs has by far the must supporting materials, tools, ease of use, and so on. I think its the quickest to make useful to the average person.

3) I've found it really helpful as a lens for self analysis in my own life.
by bitwrangler | 2025-08-31 00:59:25+00:00
it affects the whole country.

https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/

I got got off the phone with Verizon, and they said the issue started on Aug 28 where some phones got a network update that limits their ability to connect to the towers. He's making a ticket with the network team to bridge from the tower to our iphone to push the network software update.

I guess many phones can't connect to get the update to fix their last bad configuration.

I hope it gets resolved soon.
by noduerme | 2025-08-31 00:59:59+00:00
Gambling against the house is not in itself a scam as long as the games aren't rigged and the odds and payouts are as advertised. A game with negative EV is not a scam if it's entered into knowingly by a player.

For my money, games where people pay to win worthless digital goods are far more scammy than a fair game of Blackjack in Vegas where you actually might come out up.

The other aspects you mentioned are the scam.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-31 01:00:53+00:00
> but does it really enforce it

It warns you if you ignore handling a Result because the type is annotated with must_use (which can be a compile error in CI if you choose to enforce 0 warnings). Not that this is true with try/catch - no one forces you to actually do anything with the error.

> What about errors (results) that came from deeper?

Same as with exceptions - either you handle it or propagate it up or ignore it.
by cyberax | 2025-08-31 01:01:00+00:00
DRY means something completely different. It means that there should be just one source of truth.

Example: you have a config defined as Java/Go classes/structures. You want to check that the config file has the correct syntax. Non-DRY strategy is to describe its structure in an XSD schema (ok, ok JSON schema) and then validate the config. So you end up with two sources of truth: the schema and Java/Go classes, they can drift apart and cause problems.

The DRY way is to generate the classes/structures that define the config from that schema.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-31 01:01:54+00:00
Mine was out completely, here in East Bay. My wife’s identical phone, on the same account, worked perfectly.

I’m betting it’ll turn out to be an authentication issue: if you were already known to the system before it went down, you stayed connected. If your periodic auth refresh happened afterward, you couldn’t reconnect to the network.

I happened to be in a strip mall with a Verizon store when it went out, so I ducked in to see if there was a problem with my account. The manager was meeting people at the door. “Is your phone showing SOS? They called and told us it was a national outage, and we don’t know when it’ll be back up.”
by frumplestlatz | 2025-08-31 01:02:11+00:00
This is silly. We can avoid stack overflow by avoiding unbounded recursion.

In user-space, memory overcommit means that we will almost or literally never see an out of memory error.

In kernel space and other constrained environments, we can simply check for allocation, failure and handle it accordingly.

This is a terrible argument for treating all code as potentially failing with any possible error condition.
by alphazard | 2025-08-31 01:02:31+00:00
> Having a clear and minimalistic API doesn't mean that the underlying code is easy to understand.

Doesn't need to be. The API tells me what it does, hopefully there is a test suite to assure me. I can add to the test suite if I have a question, or want to lock in a behavior.

When it's a third party library, everyone assumes it's supposed to work? but when it's a system in the same repository, all of a sudden all bets are off, and you need to understand it fully to get anything done?

> It's good when things just work and you can use an API, but most of the time you have to dig whatever is under the rug.

If most changes require simultaneously changing multiple areas of the code, such that changing one system implies changing every other system with roughly equal probability, then it's not well designed.

I don't know what else to tell you. It's going to be hard to iterate or maintain that system, in part because it requires a high cognitive load. None of the code in such a system provides any cognitive leverage. You can't rule out, or infer behavior of a large amount of code, by reading a small amount.

If such a system is important, then part of the strategy has to be to improve the architecture.
by 0b110907 | 2025-08-31 01:02:34+00:00
How recently were the arguments around utility in human transplantation put forward? Are religious scholars the OG biotech founders?

Good paper on the history of human/animal transplantation: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3246856/

In the 1920s, Voronoff advocated the transplantation of slices of chimpanzee testis into aged men whose “zest for life” was deteriorating, believing that the hormones produced by the testis would rejuvenate his patients.
by stonogo | 2025-08-31 01:03:17+00:00
This is not evidence of doxxing, or evidence that the masks prevent it. This happened at an immigration facility, and the victim wasn't even ICE.

Every time I ask for evidence, I get something like this: only tangentially related. If someone is out there doxxing and attacking ICE agents, I expect to see charges brought. There'd be public record of that.
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-31 01:03:32+00:00
> Unfortunately, that hasn't been possible, and I have no idea what Linus's priorities except that they definitely aren't a bulletproof filesystem and safeguarding user data

Remarks like this come across as extremely patronizing, as you completely ignore what the other party says and instead project your own conclusions about the other persons motives and beliefs.

> his response to journal_rewind demonstrated that quite definitively

No, no it did not in any shape way or form do that. You had multiple other perfectly valid options to help the affected users besides getting that code shipped in the kernel there and then. Getting it shipped in the kernel was merely a convenience.

If bcachefs was established and stable it would be a different matter. But it's an experimental file system. Per definition data loss is to be expected, even if recovery is preferable.
by OBXfund | 2025-08-31 01:03:46+00:00
Version 1.0 is never perfect. I’m enjoying the app so far. My suggestion is to offer an Ai Prompt Builder as one of the starter apps. Just a walkthrough of the basics of what the user hopes to be built. I sent an email with my version of the prompt builder. I have made a few revisions to make it more concise and focused. I have several ideas that I would be happy to send over in an email.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-31 01:06:40+00:00
You have to choose in order to use Claude, it's not the type of default where you're opted in unless you go find the setting. This blog post misrepresents this.

I haven't seen what the screen for new users looks like, perhaps it "nudge"s you in the direction they want by starting the UI with it checked and you have to check it off. That is what the popup for existing users looks like from Anthropic's linked blog post. That post says they require you to choose when signing up and that existing users have to choose in order to keep using Claude. In Claude Code I had to choose and it was just a straight question in the terminal.

I think the nudge-style defaults are worth criticism but you lose me when your article makes false implications.
by thisislife2 | 2025-08-31 01:07:59+00:00
Orion indeed is a decent option for the privacy conscious as it is one of the few browsers that doesn't make any automated connections on startup (with the right config). But, if I remember right, they are still trying to get Ublock Origin to work perfectly on it (i.e. WebExtension support is still not fully supported on Orion).

PaleMoon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) is a hard fork of Firefox, with a mix of old tech (XUL) and new tech (from current codebase of Gecko), that is another full-featured zero-telemetry browser that doesn't make any automated connections. But on this too, the full features of uBlock Origin isn't supported as it is based on the abandoned uBlock Origin (legacy) codebase (though the legacy codebase has been updated by some PaleMoon developers, the original developers of uBlock Origin do not wish to support PaleMoon as it doesn't support WebExtension.

Then there's the Tor Browser ( https://www.torproject.org/ ) - it is a soft fork of Firefox, that supports the Tor network and has been configured by default to be "privacy hardened" - it has none of the crap that Mozilla bundles into Firefox, like Pocket, AI, Ads etc. The Tor software bundled in it can be easily deleted, to use it as privacy hardened Firefox. However, there are two issues with it - it does make unauthorised and unwanted automated connections (to SecureDrop) and you can no longer remove the NoScript browser extension that is bundled in it (you could from previous versions). When a browser maker forcefully bundles something in it, (however useful it may be), and does not allow you to modify it, that's well-founded ground to be suspicious of it. (Note: I did finally figure out that one can stop automated phoning to SecureDrop, after disabling it in about:rulesets ).

As the tor browser laid a good foundation to create a privacy hardened Firefox, there are many other browsers that are Forks of the Tor browser - the Mullvad Browser ( https://mullvad.net/en/browser ) is a popular one, and Mullvad bundles its VPN service in it instead of the Tor network. Last I checked, it made some automated connections on startup, so I didn't bother to explore it further).