MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-08-29 19:42:57+00:00
> So now you've got a binary fraction that most would say specifies a real number. An almost surely non-constructible one in fact.

Well no, you will never have it.

You can't start out with finite things, and built an infinite thing, even if you have infinite components to put together, and infinite time to do it.

That is what countably infinite means. It is a very practical kind of infinity.

And the concept comes directly, and inevitably, from the integers.

Just like integers, and all the theorems/patterns we discover in them, reality may be countably infinite. Filled with an infinite number of structures of unbounded sizes, and infinitely large structures parameterized with finite constraints.

The class of real numbers is not what our familiarity with its name makes us think it is. It is a mathematician's mind game, regarding properties of abstract made up things that got called numbers by fiat. Not by induction or other mathematical inevitability. Nowhere in the chain of numbers built up from the integers. With no hope of ever encountering a single concrete instance that isn't already in a smaller better defined subclass, that doesn't require the concept of reals.

Mathematicians get to have their games. At a minimum they are useful as ways of stretching mathematical skill. Concepts that don't correlate with things that exist, can still be interesting, challenging, and spin off insights.
by bobbiechen | 2025-08-29 19:43:16+00:00
Cloudflare is implementing the (still-emerging) Web Bot Auth standard. We're working on the same at Stytch for https://IsAgent.dev .

The discourse around this is a little wild and I'm glad you said this. The allowlist is a Cloudflare feature and their customers are free to use it. The core functionality involving HTTP Message Signatures is decentralized and open, so anyone can adopt it and benefit.
by TFYS | 2025-08-29 19:43:18+00:00
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "easy" jobs those talented people wouldn't have time to build and use their talents. The cleaners enable the talented people and so deserve a fair share of what they produce.
by postquantumfax | 2025-08-29 19:44:13+00:00
DNS allows search so we really should have started rejecting everything that isn't qualified with an end dot as punishment to ICANN.. Instead random common names might be treated differently on every network to make sure these people can't issue certs that will be trusted for them in your own network, etc.

Now prioratizing unambiguos naming would be somewhat acceptable if ICANN was tacobell and just a steward of naming on the side.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-29 19:44:15+00:00
Oh to be clear, the API prompts/completions can't be stored longer than 14 days or used for anything other than debugging — the data retention section takes priority over everything else. I believe the other requests mentioned refer to general web traffic requests and web UI data. Thank you for the great question!

For requests, it depends on the agent framework to a certain extent. We just count API requests. For frameworks that support parallel tool calls, assuming they're using the standard OpenAI parallel tool call API, the entire parallel batch only counts as one request — since it only generated a single API request, and we just count API requests. I don't know exactly how Cursor structures it but I'd be surprised if they were making 100 API requests per message — I assume they're using the normal parallel tool call API to send all tools in a single batch, which equates to only taking 1 request of your quota in the rate limit.
by csb6 | 2025-08-29 19:44:26+00:00
The employees knew that they would probably get fired for protesting/breaking/entering at work. The idea is to make what they perceive as Microsoft’s involvement in the Gaza crisis a topic of national discussion and criticism. They felt that doing this was more important than their jobs. Smugly saying “actually, you’re asking to be fired if you break into an office and do a sit-in at work” is missing the point of direct action like this, which is meant to be disruptive and understood by the protesters to have likely consequences.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-29 19:44:31+00:00
If you're handling billions of requests per second, you're not a self hoster. That's a commercial service with a dedicated team to handle traffic around the clock. Most ISPs probably don't even operate lines that big

To put that in perspective, even if they're sending empty TCP packets, "several billion" pps is 200 to 1800 gigabits of traffic, depending on what you mean by that. Add a cookieless HTTP payload and you're at many terabits per second. The average self hoster is more likely to get struck by lightning than encounter and need protection from this (even without considering the, probably modest, consequences of being offline a few hours if it does happen)

Edit: off by a factor of 60, whoops. Thanks to u/Gud for pointing that out. I stand by the conclusion though: less likely to occur than getting struck by lightning (or maybe it's around equally likely now? But somewhere in that ballpark) and the consequences of being down for a few hours are generally not catastrophic anyway. You can always still put big brother in front if this event does happen to you and your ISP can't quickly drop the abusive traffic
by a_sydelov | 2025-08-29 19:44:40+00:00
A structured look at data modeling techniques and their trade-offs — from foundational normalization and dimensional modeling to more advanced approaches like Data Vault 2.0 and Anchor Modeling.

Covers:

Why normalization matters for consistency in OLTP

How star and snowflake schemas enable analytics

The role of Data Vault 2.0 in large-scale, auditable warehouses

When Anchor Modeling becomes practical for fast-changing domains

The focus is on how each technique shifts performance, flexibility, and compliance in real-world systems.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-29 19:44:43+00:00
A similar anti-pattern - WhatsApp has it's own contact list and list of users. However, you can't use it without granting the Contacts permissions. On my phone, though I have WhatsApp installed, I can't create a new chat - It just brings up the "Enable Contacts" dialogue. I can however use their web-client to initiate a chat, and when people can message me I can respond.
by SirMaster | 2025-08-29 19:45:34+00:00
Your setup is a tiny niche of a niche. Nobody using a NAS is using tiny 2TB HDDs in 2025 when 20+TB drives are so available.

I feel like you are making your setup more complicated than is even worth and searching for a weird solution when all you need is a RasPi with a big 16+TB USB HDD connected to it.
by orochimaaru | 2025-08-29 19:45:53+00:00
It was a good faith question. I use perplexity for my searches/research today. I have NO intention of moving that to X (although grok maybe one of the models I can use underneath, I haven’t explicitly enabled it).

I don’t use social media in general, maybe YouTube but it’s been a real challenge to get rid of all the political content - both left and right wing.
by ctoth | 2025-08-29 19:46:12+00:00
The web doesn't need attestation. It doesn't need signed agents. It doesn't need Cloudflare deciding who's a "real" user agent. It needs people to remember that "public" means PUBLIC and implement basic damn rate limiting if they can't handle the traffic.

The web doesn't need to know if you're a human, a bot, or a dog. It just needs to serve bytes to whoever asks, within reasonable resource constraints. That's it. That's the open web. You'll miss it when it's gone.
by derefr | 2025-08-29 19:46:33+00:00
Actually, no — it's an evaluation fee, simply to review your application; and they will reject applications that don't meet their criteria.

One of those criteria is that you actually do something with the gTLD — per their FAQ:

> ICANN expects all new gTLDs to be operational. One of the reasons ICANN is opening the top-level space is to allow for competition and innovation in the marketplace. The application process requires applicants to provide a detailed plan for the launch and operation of the proposed gTLD. gTLDs are expected to be delegated within one year of signing a registry agreement with ICANN.

A few highlights from the full evaluation criteria (https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/evaluation-qu...):

- They will reject applications made by known cybersquatters

- They will reject your TLD string if it has rendering problems on major OSes (e.g. if its codepoints aren't covered by at least fallback fonts)

- They will reject your registration policies if they're incoherent or unenforceable

- They will reject your application on behalf of a community if you can't provide sufficient references establishing that you actually represent the interests of that community

- They will reject your application if you haven't outlined to their satisfaction a plan for continuity/migration of control of the gTLD from your organization to some other organization in case of the bankruptcy/dissolution/etc of your organization (note: this is a separate thing from the technical considerations of registry fail-over et al, which are more something that most applicants would have a technical registry partner fill out on their behalf)

---

In all, the process actually seems quite thorough — but as with regular domain-name registration, it's a default-accept, not a default-deny, policy. The more arbitrary gTLDs that have been established so far all just-so-happen to be "innocent" of all of the disqualifiers.

Specifically, I think, given the criteria, that any multinational company could probably expect to be able to acquire its own name and trademarks as gTLDs without much fuss; and recognized leaders/stewards of any major religion (or other non-country-endemic sociocultural group) could likely get any jargon term specific to that religion/subculture as a gTLD. Those two cases together cover most of the "weirdness" in approved applications.

One assertion I might make after reviewing the evaluation criteria, is that very few of the criteria look at the gTLD string itself. Almost any gTLD string is a potentially valid registration. Almost all of the evaluation process is set up to establish whether you, the applicant, have a valid claim for stewardship over the given gTLD string.
by thenewwazoo | 2025-08-29 19:46:43+00:00
> Why wouldn't a company ... let validated customer partners of theirs push batch jobs

A company standing up this infrastructure is presumably not in the business of selling time-shares of infrastructure, they're busy doing AI B2B pet food marketing or whatever. In order to make that sale, someone has to connect their underutilized assets with interested customers, which is outside of their core competency. Who's going to do that?

There's obviously an opportunity here for another company to be a market maker, but that's hard, and is its own speciality.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-29 19:47:15+00:00
The quantity of matter and the quantity of electricity are discrete, but work, time and space are continuous, like also any quantities derived from them.

There have been attempts to create discrete models of time and space, but nothing useful has resulted from those attempts.

Most quantities encountered in nature include some dependency on work/energy, time or space, so nature deals mostly in continuous quantities, or more precisely the models that we can use to predict what happens in nature are still based mostly on continuous quantities, despite the fact that about a century and a half have passed since the discreteness of matter and electricity has been confirmed.
by jameshart | 2025-08-29 19:48:07+00:00
While this point might be open to debate, the original claim, which I definitely stand by, was not that Musk is a Nazi, but rather that xAI have put out a product under the grok brand which manifestly promoted nazi ideas.

If Musk is not in favor of those ideas he might need to work a bit harder to make that clear, because he does tend to leave people with the impression he’s okay with it.
by IAmBroom | 2025-08-29 19:48:10+00:00
What sibling comment? I couldn't find any such.

I'd like to point out that any country providing universal healthcare is going to be a big improvement in standard of living for many of my friends. The sometimes hellish nature of the USA's for-profit healthcare system is very real.

Then there's crippling student debt following you nearly to the grave, gun violence, etc.

We grew up being told we had more freedom than anybody else, only to learn as adults that not only does freedom carry a heavy price, but so does every flu and broken bone.
Show HN: RAG Firewall – retrieval-time guardrails for LangChain/LlamaIndex
by talbuilds | 2025-08-29 19:48:12+00:00
RAG pipelines are great, but they can still retrieve "toxic" chunks: – prompt injection attempts – leaked API keys/secrets – stale or conflicting content – unapproved external URLs

We built an open-source "retrieval firewall" that scans chunks before they reach the LLM: – denies injection & secrets – flags/reranks PII, encoded blobs, untrusted URLs – audit log (JSONL) of all decisions – drop-in wrappers for LangChain and LlamaIndex retrievers

Install: pip install rag-firewall Repo: https://github.com/taladari/rag-firewall

Curious if others here handle retrieval-time risks, or just ingest/output filtering. Would love feedback and red-team payloads.
by randomtoast | 2025-08-29 19:48:25+00:00
> It's straight dishonest to get hung up on some single incidences, which may, or may not have happened.

I think we now agree that if such incidents did occur, you acknowledge that charges could be pressed. However, I may not have made my point clearly enough. My intention was not to highlight random YouTuber incidents, but to draw attention to misconduct by officials in the course of their duties and our restrictions/regulations.

For example, just four days ago the headline read: "97 Bundeswehr soldiers dismissed for right-wing extremism." [1]

We could argue that the Bundeswehr is not law enforcement, but there have been similar right-wing issues within police departments, where officers have shared extremist content. What I want to emphasize is that this is not about single incidents, but about a growing systemic issue of misconduct in law enforcement. And those who could provide the strongest proof of such misconduct - through video evidence - (journalists) are often prohibited from doing so.

> Did those YouTubers press charges?

Imagine your word against two or more officers. Who will the judges believe? Most likely the officers, unless you have very strong proof, such as video evidence. I hope my point is clearer now: this is not about isolated incidents, but about a broader systemic problem, fueled by the growing popularity of right-wing views within law enforcement and our harsh restrictions and regulations, which are strictest in the free world. It is the combination of both which is dangerous.

[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/wdr/bundeswehr-rechts...
by davepeck | 2025-08-29 19:48:57+00:00
> Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?

I'm old enough to remember when people asked the same questions of Hotbot, Lycos, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, and -- eventually -- Google.

Then, as now, it never felt like the right way to frame the question. If you want your content freely available, make it freely available... including to the bots. If you want your content restricted, make it restricted... including to the humans.

It's also not clear to me that AI materially changes the equation, since Google has for many years tried to cut out links to the small sites anyway in favor of instant answers.

(FWIW, the big companies typically do honor robots.txt. It's everyone else that does what they please.)
by simne | 2025-08-29 19:49:25+00:00
Well, I want to be honest, and from what I see, gamedev is not in best shape now, I even seen some decline in number of hires on few markets.

And as I know, most gamedev companies already use AI to generate game assets, if not all.

If you planning to sell AI tools to gamedev industry, I think, main question, would be, how good your tool integrated into their pipeline.

What I mean, most I see, used some sort of AI generators, essentially making bitmap images. Sure, also used AI code generators and narrative (text) generators.

I seen demo of Unity official AI system, which include image generators, code generators and narrative (text) generators, and it is now provided as free beta, but announced paid tiers for heavy usage (you could google freemium model).

If you have some money, you could pay for cloud servers and provide some limited time service (for example 10 minutes per day), and gather money for additional usage.

If you have not money, but have good fantasy, you could yourself make game and sell it. I agree, 6x reduction of developer time is really significant for gamedev, but from my experience, when talked to tops, they answered "we will buy your solution just now, if it will give 10x improvement, but for 6x, we will note your address and may be phone you at beginning of next fiscal year").
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 19:49:28+00:00
It's specifically about fsyncing journal deletion. The problem isn't that it would reapply it if it was already used to rollback. Rather, the problem is that if you commit, and that commit has succeeded (and so your app believes that it has written the data and might e.g. perform some other actions on it), the deletion of the now-unneeded journal might not be flushed to disk in event of power loss or similar. So when you start the app again, SQLite sees said rollback journal, and - since it would be considered "hot" - applies it, effectively reverting the transaction that was supposedly already committed.

FWIW I don't think it's wrong per se. The article links to a HN comment in which Richard Hipp explains why this is the default behavior, and it does make sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45014296. At the same time, clearly, the definition of "durable" here could use some clarification.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-29 19:49:33+00:00
I'm on plane wifi right now but I'll benchmark later today — when I benchmarked GLM-4.5, I could get 150-200tps in the Bay Area, California. Qwen3 is probably somewhat lower TBH. We have an open-source coding agent that includes a TPS benchmarker that works with any OpenAI compatible API, including ours: https://github.com/synthetic-lab/octofriend

To run the TPS benchmark, just run:

octo bench tps

All it does is ask the model to write a long story without making tool calls (although we do send the tool definitions over, to accurately benchmark differences in tool call serialization/parsing). It usually consumes a little over 1k tokens so it's fairly cheap to run against different usage-based APIs (and only consumes a single request for subscription APIs that rate limit by request).

Edit: forgot to add — for Qwen3 everything should be running in FP8.
by wk_end | 2025-08-29 19:49:42+00:00
There’s a few orders of magnitude between “human-speed trading” and the absolute bleeding edge of HFT. A company like Jane Street still does automated trading far faster than any human could.

Sure, Jane Street probably isn’t the fastest in the business, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got FPGAs or ASICs, dedicated high speed pipes to shave off milliseconds of latency, things like that.
by jitl | 2025-08-29 19:49:43+00:00
We do see about 10x the database row corruption rate w/ WASM OPFS SQLite compared to the same logic running against native SQLite. For read-side cache use-case this is recoverable and relatively benign but we're not moving write-side use-case from IndexedDB to WASM-OPFS-SQLite until things look a bit better. Not to put the blame on SQLite here, there's shared responsibility for the corruption between the host application (eg Notion), the SQLite OPFS VFS authors, the user-agent authors, and the user's device to ensure proper locking and file semantics.
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 19:50:19+00:00
I was responsible for investigating m7* machines for the main cluster at my last job, and elected to keep our largest services on m6i and c6i because they fiddled with the prices and for our applications the new machines didn’t perform enough better to offset the price hike. With autoscaling there would be times of the day where we saved a half a machine, and that would cost us less, but it just wasn’t worth the migration effort. The AMD migration shockingly would have cost us more, entirely due to the price hike being out of proportion to other generations.

They used to keep the prices flat, so there was always an incentive to move off the old hardware if there weren’t compatibility problems. But that changed with m7 and seems to have continued with m8.

We went from 0.096 to 0.1008 to 0.10584, for the smallest instance, which is a 5% bump.
by SabrinaJewson | 2025-08-29 19:50:22+00:00
We can work with unnameable things very easily. Take, for instance, every known theorem that quantifies over all real numbers. If you try to argue that proving theorems about these real numbers does not constitute “working with” them, it seems you have chosen a rather deficient definition of “working with” that does not match with how that phrase is used in the real world.
by epc | 2025-08-29 19:51:35+00:00
Do the AI training bots provide free access to the distillation of the content they drain from my site repeatedly? Don't they want a free and open web?

I don’t feel a particular need to subsidize multi–billion even trillion dollar corporations with my content, bandwidth, and server costs since their genius vibe coded bots apparently don’t know how to use modified-GETs or caching, let alone parse and respect robots.txt.
by legitster | 2025-08-29 19:51:42+00:00
On their website, total traffic is 50 million, of which Brightline only anticipates about 9 million riders annually.

Their pricing is expected to be over $100 a person one-way: https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/ticket-prices-leaked-h...

So this puts it at pretty low ridership and much higher ticket prices than equivalent lines around the world. (I'm very supportive of the project! It's just worth being realistic about the economics here.

My understanding of Germany's high speed network is that it is pretty comparable to the Acela - high speed in certain corridors, reasonably affordable, and dense population along the corridors. Which is pretty realistic goal for parts of the US. But often we compare to France's network which really outperforms nearly every other country outside of Japan.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-08-29 19:52:03+00:00
I haven't really kept up with the state of WebAssembly in .NET (mostly because I'm entirely uninterested in Blazor), but I don't think we're at a point yet where we can simply reference a .wasm file and invoke code in it regardless of the underlying platform, right? Until that is the case: no, not really.
by Bender | 2025-08-29 19:52:53+00:00
Off topic but are people ever going to give up on this nonsense?

/shrug. FoxReplace [1] is a simple way to remove compelled speech from the internet for the client. People do not even realize when they say "Fart", I see "Fart". No idea if Chrome has an addon like this.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/