MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by colinsane | 2025-08-28 18:49:23+00:00
> I should be able to get a cheap / run my own 600B param model.

if the margins on hosted inference are 80%, then you need > 20% utilization of whatever you build for yourself for this to be less costly to you (on margin).

i self-host open weight models (please: deepseek et al aren't open _source_) on whatever $300 GPU i bought a few years ago, but if it outputs 2 tokens/sec then i'm waiting 10 minutes for most results. if i want results in 10s instead of 10m, i'll be paying $30000 instead. if i'm prompting it 100 times during the day, then it's idle 99% of the time.

coordinating a group buy for that $30000 GPU and sharing that across 100 people probably makes more sense than either arrangement in the previous paragraph. for now, that's a big component of what model providers, uh, provide.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-28 18:49:45+00:00
Well, I actually remember much of that time myself. About a year or so after that video was made I was learning to program in Fortran on the university's IBM-360 mainframe. (Learning to program was compulsory for anyone studying science, engineering and mathematics and the subject was a part of the math curriculum.)

So I was ready when the early processors, 8080/5, Z80 and 8086 arrived a few years later. In fact I was running both DR's CP/M and Tim Patterson's SCP DOS on an S-100 system around the time Microsoft bought the product and renamed it MSDOS.
by nomilk | 2025-08-28 18:49:48+00:00
> 90% of “citizen journalism” is (trash)

You're right. But compared to what?

I guess 99% of mainstream "journalism" is irrelevant and/or inaccurate, hence citizen journalism is a 10x improvement in accuracy and relevancy! Not 10% better, 900% better! This makes a huge difference to our society as a whole and in our daily lives!

But this misses the most important point which is that the user should have the right to choose for themselves what they say and read. Making citizen journalism unduly burdensome deprives everyone of that choice.
by kllrnohj | 2025-08-28 18:50:30+00:00
> Yeah; once you get deep enough, you realize you can just install things yourself, configure them with Ansible, or Nix, or whatever, and have full control.

I think if you've gone through the effort of setting up Ansible scripts for setting up & maintaining a NAS, you probably are not actually making a NAS anymore. Like maybe you're doing Ceph or Gluster cluster or something, which can be fun to play with. Heck, I did that with a bunch of ODROID-HC2's as well. It was fun to setup a cluster storage system.

It also wasn't practical at all and at no point did it ever seriously compete with replacing my "real" NAS (which currently is Unraid, but I'd absolutely consider switching to TrueNAS in a future upgrade), since the main feature that a NAS needs to provide is uptime.
by hinkley | 2025-08-28 18:50:44+00:00
I have a little, maybe enough to be dangerous. SSH won’t be sufficient to avoid all traffic analysis. Everyone can see how much traffic and the pattern of that traffic, which can leak info about the sort of things you’re doing.

If you’re worried about ending up on a list, using things that look like VPNs while the VPNs are locked down is likely to do so.

Also… your neighbors in Myanmar didn’t do a lockdown during the genocide and things got pretty fucking dire as a result. People have taken different lessons from this. I’m not sure what the right answer is, and which is the greater evil. Deplatforming and arresting people for inciting riots and hate speech is probably the best you can do to maintain life and liberty for the most people.
by Teever | 2025-08-28 18:50:48+00:00
I get the impression from your comment that you did not read the first source that I linked above. If you only read one of the many links that I provided please read this one:

https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...

The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China nor does it have the industrial capacity to scale up production in a timely fashion.

Additionally, American shipbuilding capacity has completely atrophied both from a decline of infrastructure and even worse a startling decline in blue-collar institutional knowledge. It has become so dire that the US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea.

It should be obvious at this point that China dominates in mass-production and they'll absolutely be able to out-produce the US in both ships and missiles in a long term conflict.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-28 18:51:40+00:00
Tunneling via SSH (ssh -D) is super easy to detect. The government doesn't need any sophisticated analysis to tell SSH connections for tunneling from SSH connections where a human is typing into a terminal.

Countries like China have blocked SSH-based tunneling for years.

It can also block sessions based on packet sizes: a typical web browsing session involves a short HTTP request and a long HTTP response, during which the receiving end sends TCP ACKs; but if the traffic traffic mimics the above except these "ACKs" are a few dozen bytes larger than a real ACK, it knows you are tunneling over a different protocol. This is how it detects the vast majority of VPNs.
by gf000 | 2025-08-28 18:51:46+00:00
Scala 3 has a compiler flag that makes `null` its separate type, making it completely null-safe.

This would e.g. make

``` val a: String | Null = someLegacyJavaCodeReturningNullableString()

```

and explicit null check would only make the non-nullable string continue onward.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-28 18:51:59+00:00
Since armament forms a oligopsony market [1] (i.e. there exist few buyers (countries) for big armament), why don't these buyers simply use their market leverage and refuse to buy equipment for which the producer rejects them the right to repair.

This should solve a lot of problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony
by Barrin92 | 2025-08-28 18:52:01+00:00
>Remember it doesnt matter what the video shows, it only matters who showed it to you

In an age of mass media (where there's a video for anything) or now one step further synthetic media knowing who makes something is much more important than the content, given that what's being shown can be created on demand. Propaganda in the modern world is taking something that actually happened, and then framing it as an authentic piece of information found "on the street", twisting its context.

"what's in the video" is now largely pointless, and anyone who isn't gullible will obviously always focus on where the promoter of any material wants to direct the audiences attention to, or what they want to deflect from.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-28 18:52:05+00:00
One thing that happens a lot in DOD is that you'll purchase something that, to an outsider, you'd think you just went to a store and bought. But no, the DOD goes through a contractor to procure it and often pushes the warranty/maintenance onto those same contractors instead of the original producer. It results in some odd, and often bad, situations.

You buy a bunch of HPE servers from HP? Nope. You buy them from Fly-by Night Contractor who won some contract and didn't document the HP support contracts they are wrapping their own support contract around so when it gets handed off at the end of their contract, you're SOL and can't get support from FbNC or HP without going through a lot of red tape. And by the time you succeed in identifying who is responsible for what, you're out of support anyways.

It's dumb, and happens way too often. DOD should be purchasing straight from those major vendors instead of purchasing through a contractor.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-28 18:52:08+00:00
I think most people who don’t want to tinker would prefer a Synology or similar NAS solution.

The problem with TrueNAS is it fills the niche where it’s targeting people who want to tinker, but don’t want to learn how to tinker. Which is likely a smaller demographic than those who are willing to roll their own and those who just want a fully off-the-shelf experience.

I also think Synology would be closer to the Dropbox experience than TrueNAS.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-28 18:52:19+00:00
Yes.

I've been learning how to build houses as my escape hatch. A lot of people like to talk about how AI isn't capable of this and that - the ONLY thing you will be complaining about in 5 years is the Basic Income programs needing to expand quickly and reform so we people can keep their 1.8M mortgages with $2000/mo taco bell income.
by ilovecollies | 2025-08-28 18:52:39+00:00
>If my gardener keeps calling me an asshole even when he's not working for me

It is a true factual statement, leon is an asshole. Also, since when does leon's freedoms trump mine? leon's free association gains precedent over my freedom of speech?

Where does it stop? Let's say I associate myself with a religion that leon doesn't like. You know the one that leon likes to salute in public. leon's free association gains precedent over my freedom of religion, too?
by bruce511 | 2025-08-28 18:52:44+00:00
>> That’s what gets people interested, inspires devs to contribute and fill app gaps.

Alas, no, sorry. It's really not the number of apps that matters. Any phone OS could have less than 500 apps and be wildly successful. On the other hand you can have a million devs cranking out apps and the device would still be useless.

Turns out the only apps that matters are the ones everyone actually use. Your banking app. Facebook. Whatsapp. Uber. Airbnb. Etc. All the product of big corporates.

And my bank (to pick just 1) is simply not interested in developing their app for yet another platform. The effort in building it, supporting it etc simply makes no sense.

Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, ESPN, and the next 40 "must haves" simply don't care. And independent devs simply cannot fill these holes. Without these the phone is simply useless as a daily driver for anything other than complete techno fanatics.

Crumbs Microsoft couldn't convince this cohort to get on board. Some random Linux phone certainly won't.

I don't say this with glee. They're nice toys. But Joe public doesn't reject them because of the hardware specs. He rejects them because they're functionally useless in the actual world.
by ddtaylor | 2025-08-28 18:52:56+00:00
Your first option until you get settled is to use an SSH reverse proxy:

ssh -D 9999 user@my.server

Then configure your browser to use local port 9999 for your SOCKS5 proxy.

This gets you a temporarily usable system and if you can tunnel this way successfully installing some WireGuard or OpenVPN stuff will likely work.

EDIT: Thanks it's -D not -R
by gmd63 | 2025-08-28 18:53:23+00:00
I don't think it's that nonsensical to realize that in order to have AI, you need generations of artists, journalists, scientists, and librarians to produce materials to learn from.

And when you're using an actual AI model to "train" (copy), it's not even a shred of nonsense to realize the prior model is a core component of the training.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-28 18:53:30+00:00
If China is more successful then we're rubes.

Every time an article like this hits, the Western brain spasms.

But…but they don’t innovate, they just copy!

But…but ghost cities, Evergrande, debt spiral. Any day now it all collapses!

But…but how do they even freedom?

We can't believe China is eating the world because it would mean Western Civilization is contingent - that everything leading up to this point wasn't an inevitability. That we actually had a choice and got tricked into strip malls, failed governance, and life long debt. That wealth inequality wasn't actually our destiny and the people who got rich off what we built didn't actually deserve it.

So we have to believe that people may ride those trains and pay with those QR codes, but deep down, their souls are yearning for suburban strip malls, CNN panel discussions, and 30-year mortgages.

China has to be perpetually both failing and knocking at our doorstep because the idea that then we’re left with the intolerable truth: they actually built things that work, and we chose not to.
by stouset | 2025-08-28 18:53:47+00:00
It's unpopular because it's ignorant, uninformed, and actively harmful.

To add to the rest of the comments, accepting and enrolling international students in our university system confers enormous benefits to this country. We drain the best and brightest from the rest of the world to come here, participate in our economy, start businesses, make research breakthroughs, start a life here, and teach future generations.

This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance. Willingly sacrificing this advantage is so profoundly stupid and self-destructive it beggars belief.
by makestuff | 2025-08-28 18:54:03+00:00
With so much money flowing into the massive funds, do you think more and more unicorn startups will just stay private? It seems like there are liquidity opportunities for employees/founders via tender offers, secondaries, etc.

If you are a profitable unicorn who can raise money in the private markets when needed, is there really a benefit to going public? Maybe I am missing something, but going public doesn't really seem to be as important as it used to be.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-08-28 18:54:29+00:00
>Also, in Nike's case, as they grow they get better at making more shoes for cheaper.

This is clearly the case for models as well. Training and serving inference for GPT4 level models is probably > 100x cheaper than they used to be. Nike has been making Jordan 1's for 40+ years! OpenAI would be incredibly profitable if they could live off the profit from improved inference efficiency on a GPT4 level model!
by fluoridation | 2025-08-28 18:54:47+00:00
>Reaching orbit and orbiting the planet are two different things.

LOL. Are you serious?

To reach orbit: to reach a horizontal speed such that the spacecraft can complete a revolution around the celestial object while in free fall, without having to execute any additional maneuvers.

Starship has yet to reach orbit. The reason doesn't matter. It hasn't done it.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-28 18:54:50+00:00
This isn't about armaments, at least not entirely. For the most part weapons and weapons systems procurement already has regulations which should be giving DOD the right to repair (or the data to perform maintenance and repairs). This is about everything else.

As the saying goes, "An army marches on its stomach". Weapons are critical, essential for a military to be a military. But everything else in logistics and support are what actually makes the military operational. A generator (the example in the article) is not an armament. And they need so many that there's no way they could lean on the entire generator industry without the support of law or other regulations to back them.
by pmyteh | 2025-08-28 18:55:00+00:00
People absolutely used to buy (paper) newspapers for the crosswords: they were incredibly sticky and not expensive to make. I don't know whether that still works in an era with tons of free online puzzles, but if the NYT crossword is particularly competent/unusual/good for some reason then I'd not be surprised at all if the crossword sub drove news reading rather than the other way around.

(My experience is more with the British-style cryptic crossword, where every pseudonymous setter has a different 'flavour' and fans have passionate favourite days of the week in a given publication, let alone preferring the Times to the Guardian or whatever. I don't think the American style generates quite such obsessive fandom, but people do love their games...)
by absolute_unit22 | 2025-08-28 18:55:20+00:00
> The case for writing and coding manually

I share much of the same ideas about this as the author.

For a long time, to make coding more natural (before and after LLMs) and not having to think about certain keywords or syntax, I would create little Anki decks (10-20 cards) with basic exercises for a particular language or tool I was using. One to two weeks of 5-10 minutes/day of doing these exercises (like, how to redirect both stout and strrr into a file, how to read from a channel in go, etc) and I was working without having to pause.

Writing code became less disruptive and much easier to get my ideas into a text editor.

I’m also the creator of typequicker.com (disclaimer) and we added Code mode as a typing exercise.

At first I thought folks wouldn’t be interested. I was pleasantly surprised though; many people are using it specifically for the same reason that the author is talking about.
by john-h-k | 2025-08-28 18:55:26+00:00
> And I agree that our formalism of integers is simpler and more elegant than our formalism of real numbers. But that could just be because we've done a worse job formalizing real numbers!

Everything you can express in integers you can express in reals, but there are many things expressable in reals not possible in integers. It would be surprising if the formalism for a thing that completely supersets another thing had an equally simple formalism
by dijit | 2025-08-28 18:55:33+00:00
Don't worry, you shouldn't underestimate the capability of society.

I grew up in a pretty deprived area of the UK, and we all knew "a guy" who could get you access to free cable, or shim your electric line to bypass the meter, or get you pirated CD's and VHS' and whatever.

There will always be "that guy down the pub" selling raspberry pi's with some deranged outdated firmware that runs a proxy for everything in the house or whatever. To be honest with you, I might end up being that guy for a bunch of people once I'm laid off from tech like the rest. :)
by skybrian | 2025-08-28 18:55:58+00:00
Analogies don't prove anything, but they're still useful for suggesting possibilities for thinking about a problem.

If you don't like "model as company," how about "model as making a movie?" Any given movie could be profitable or not. It's not necessarily the case that movie budgets always get bigger or that an increased budget is what you need to attract an audience.
by godelski | 2025-08-28 18:56:06+00:00
My favorite use is LLMs is a fuzzy search. Give them a description, to search that, iterate. Or get them to role play an expert in some field. Doesn't matter if they hallucinate. Take that jargon and use it to improve your searches.

They're super helpful in these contexts. But these are also contexts where I don't need to rely on accuracy.
by aldousd666 | 2025-08-28 18:56:17+00:00
Google probably feels they need to implement this restriction because too many people are installing apps that bypass their data collection tools and ad tech. Why they would take such a stance in the middle of an anti-trust litigation is beyond me. It makes them look even more like monopolists in light of Apple's recent App-store related foibles. (Aside, I don't personally feel that they are a monopoly, but you have to play the cards you are dealt.)
by crazygringo | 2025-08-28 18:56:35+00:00
I mean, this is one of the deepest questions of philosophy. Do or can concepts and categories exist without the beings that create them?

Does tuna casserole exist independently of humans? If not, how is the idea of the number 7 different from the idea of a tuna casserole? Or what about the concept of decision by majority, which isn't as basic as 7, but doesn't have the physicality of a casserole?
by WJW | 2025-08-28 18:57:06+00:00
I understand what GP meant, but extraction of values from a sparse matrix is an essential operation of multiplying two sparse matrices. Sparse matmult in turn is an absolutely fundamental operation in everything from weather forecasting to logistics planning to electric grid control to training LLMs. Radix sort on the other hand is very nice but (as far as I know) not nearly used as widely. Matrix multiplication is just super fundamental to the modern world.

I would love to be enlightened about some real-world applications of radix sort I may have missed though, since it's a cool algorithm. Hence my question above.
by jbm | 2025-08-28 18:57:14+00:00
I do not understand why so many companies have that charging issue with Linux devices.

Anbernic has the same issue with the RG35XX series. If the battery reaches 0, you may need to pull it out just to get the charging to work. And if you accidentally connect the wrong kind of usb-c charger, it won't charge, so you may have it plugged into the wall for days and come back to it being dead and needing battery surgery.

Great devices for hacking because they are cheap though — cannot understand why an expensive phone would have that problem too.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-08-28 18:57:14+00:00
It's not taboo, it's lowest common denominator demagoguery which overlooks that this is a mechanism to gain educated talent to become citizens even if those people do happen to be brown.

Recently a Haitian-American specialist solved in issue for me that several white doctors I'd seen had been unable to help. It's weird that I should have to cite an example of someone foreign-born being valuable to have here but this is 2025.
by ddtaylor | 2025-08-28 18:57:25+00:00
I do too. For many use cases it's awesome to use an ESP32, Raspberry Pi or Arduino when I want to stash some little widget that can sip a small battery over the next week. It's equally awesome that in many scenarios you can be net positive in your consumption with a super simple solar panel that provides a few watts here and there into a battery.

But at home things are different. While I want to use as little power as possible, the realistic plan for being sustainable at home is to use solar with batteries. That's a plan I actually think can matter and that I am able to participate in for relatively low cost ($10k)

Messing around with a system to save a few watts for me in this context isn't very valuable.
by WorldPeas | 2025-08-28 18:57:34+00:00
the problem with keyboards like this and the ones on the surface is that they have no connective hinge and rigidity. with my UMPC at least, I like to hold it by the base while looking at the screen. I really wish there would be a clampable keyboard that used nice membranes like the GPD but had a phone clamp on top like a selfie stick and a single swivel-hinge like those fujitsu convertibles
by mikewarot | 2025-08-28 18:57:42+00:00
In other words ChatGPT is catching up with my patterns of speech.

I really wish I had deleted all of my comments on Reddit before I nuked my account. It would have left a measurable hole.

I had a decade of being in a job with 80+% free time. It's quite possible 0.001% of everything in the training set came from me. I'm never going to be compensated, but I hope I didn't derange it too badly. ;-)
by geocar | 2025-08-28 18:57:42+00:00
> What if I want Bayesian?

Bayes is mentioned on page 46.

> And why does it need to be part of the type system? It could be just a library.

It is a library that defines a type.

It is not a new type system, or an extension to any particularly complicated type system.

> Am I missing something?

Did you read it?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

https://github.com/klipto/Uncertainty/
by arnarbi | 2025-08-28 18:57:57+00:00
> why they don't have TLS try and always create a client certificate per endpoint to proactively register on the server side

That is effectively what Token Binding does. That was unfortunately difficult to deploy because the auth stack can be far removed from TLS termination, providing consistency on the client side to avoid frequent sign outs was very difficult, and (benign) client side TLS proxies are a fairly common thing.

Some more on this in the explainer: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-dbsc#what-makes-device-boun...
by phkahler | 2025-08-28 18:58:10+00:00
Most the stuff on github is something one person wrote, stuck on there, and nobody uses. Then there's a bunch of things that are one person, but some small number of people use or have used it. Most big OSS programs have more than one person behind them. The vulnerable things tend to be dependencies of larger projects - small, but useful enough to get used in larger things.