MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 04:23:18+00:00
With apologies to gamers, I just think it's too cool not to post this recent low-cost-ish easy-to-add m.2 form-factor fpga that's designed for exploring PCIe DMA, the EPIC Erebus. https://www.hackster.io/news/epic-erebus-puts-a-tiny-yet-pow...

Maybe I'd just forgotten, but low key surprised to hear the Lattice Semiconductor ECP5 has a toolchains usable & hobbyist accessible enough to do PCIe on. Gods we would make so much more amazing computing stuff if fpgas weren't kept under lock & key.

Sure feels like an awful bad thing that the devices we own are falling more and more under control of the valent forces of the universe about us, that we are losing access to our own systems. I get that it's inconvenient to have users doing what they might and it sucks a lot in gaming, but this seems like such a sad slide down.

Gods, for gamign this this drm trend would be such a horrific disaster if Steam Deck wasn't such a fantastic & loved device. Linux is still a couple %, but it feels so much less ignorable with a mobile PC console that just shreds to shit what Windows can do (performance wise & with infinitely better control/input than anything else out there). Right now Big FPS doesn't care, but I feel like as this trend continues we'll see better Linux support for at least some basics.
by yes_really | 2025-08-18 04:23:25+00:00
The US are not providing Israel with heavy hardware and ammunition "to kill the Palestinian civilians". Israel seeks to MINIMIZE collateral damage to Palestinian victims while achieving the military objective of destroying the terrorist group Hamas and its military capabilities. The rate of civilians and combatants dead is lower than the average of urban wars (lower than when the US fought in urban wars). Israel performs precise attacks on Hamas combatants and military facilities. It sends communication before performing attacks though radio, leaflets, "sound bombs", etc, to allow civilians to escape even though this obviously hinders the effectiveness of its operations because this allows Hamas to change the location of its combatants and weapons. Israel even flat out cancels some operations on valid military targets (such as Hamas weapon deposits and launchers) in order to save civilian lives. In short, Israel seeks to MINIMIZE collateral damage to Palestinian victims while achieving valid military objectives.

Saying Israel seeks to kill Palestinian civilians is as absurd as saying that the US Federal Highway Administration seeks to kill American civilians in car accidents.
by commandar | 2025-08-18 04:23:29+00:00
Anthropic's models are fantastic, but they are -- by far -- one of the most expensive providers on an API basis. That's a large part of what makes the Max plans a great deal, right now.

Even on a Max plan, it's not hard to completely blow through your usage limits if you try to use Opus heavily.

All it takes is another provider to land a combination of model and cost that makes Code less of a deal for vendor lock-in to become a problem.
by Nullabillity | 2025-08-18 04:23:40+00:00
(Author here.)

> fork the repo (at whatever tag makes sense), then periodically sync with the latest code for that version.

Yeah, this is the workflow that Lappverk is trying to enable.

The problem is that neither of Git's collaboration models works well for this problem. Rebasing breaks collaboration (and history for the patchset itself), and merging quickly loses track of individual patches. Lappverk is an attempt to provide a safer way to collaborate over the rebase workflow.
by kens | 2025-08-18 04:23:58+00:00
Coincidentally, I have a blog post on that subject :-)

Yes, during the construction of an IC, a wire can act as an antenna and pick up charge that can destroy the chip through ESD. Specifically, if a wire is connected to a transistor gate but the other end is not yet connected, it can pick up charge when the chip is plasma etched, and then blow up the gate. The solution is an "antenna diode", a diode that connects the wire to the substrate to drain off the charge. When the chip is completed and in use, the diode is reverse-biased so it has no effect.

https://www.righto.com/2024/11/antenna-diodes-in-pentium-pro...
by supertrope | 2025-08-18 04:24:14+00:00
To add an anecdote my city has a publicly owned electric utility. Most of the surrounding metropolitan area is served by an investor owned utility. My city has noticeably fewer outages than nearby areas. Although that might be because this city has buried utilities and was built later but this trend of fewer outages includes the main drag that was built in the 1800s. The private utility has raised bills much faster than the public utility. Both utilities face the same underlying cost push factors of labor costs, materials, and rising wholesale prices. The private utility announced a record quadrupling of quarterly earnings to 1.2B (year over year).

The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.
by chillfox | 2025-08-18 04:24:57+00:00
Try https://www.startpage.com/, https://search.brave.com/, https://kagi.com/ or https://github.com/searxng/searxng.

You.com used to have really good search, but it looks like they have veered off into the AI chat space instead.

searxng is a self hostable meta search engine that allows you to basically just use the best search engines and easily switch between them.
by noduerme | 2025-08-18 04:24:57+00:00
Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-18 04:26:41+00:00
This sounds like a company using DNS to direct _other_ peoples' web traffic through _their_ proxies. Cloudflare started this way. That's why signing up for Cloudlfare requires using _Cloudflare's_ DNS servers

The so-called "DNS trick", which is defintely not a trick, is to redirect traffic though a proxy server. Whoever operates the proxy, e.g. Cloudflare, NextDNS, etc., has control over the HTTPS traffic and _could_ have access to the contents

HN commenters and other online commenters have criticised Cloudlfare in the past because it decrypts ("terminates") TLS connections and _could_ thereby have access to the contents of customers' traffic

For any doubters, this access was confimed some years ago when a coding mistake by someone at CF in a scanner generated with ragel caused customers'_decrypted_ web traffic contained in memory on Cloudflare's proxies to spill out all over the web. Leaked data became publicly available and remained discoverable via web search for a while; the data had to be scrubbed from search engines and web archives which took several days at least

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

NextDNS purports to be a "DNS service" but proxying HTTPS opens a new can of worms

NB. This comment is not claiming that NextDNS or anyone else does or does not do anything, nor that anyone will or won't do anything. This comment is about _what becomes possible through control over DNS_. The possibilities it allows for control are why I do not use third party DNS service and prefer to control own DNS; having control can be very useful
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-18 04:27:12+00:00
>>> Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ...

>> This is demonstrably wrong.

> That doesn't mean we _understand_ them ...

The previous reply discussed the LLM portion of the original sentence fragment, whereas this post addresses the "deep model" branch.

This article[0] gives a high-level description of "deep learning" as it relates to LLM's. Additionally, this post[1] provides a succinct definition of "DNN's" thusly:

What Is a Deep Neural Network? A deep neural network is a type of artificial neural network (ANN) with multiple layers between its input and output layers. Each layer consists of multiple nodes that perform computations on input data. Another common name for a DNN is a deep net. The “deep” in deep nets refers to the presence of multiple hidden layers that enable the network to learn complex representations from input data. These hidden layers enable DNNs to solve complex ML tasks more “shallow” artificial networks cannot handle.

Additionally, there are other resources discussing how "deep learning" (a.k.a. "deep models") works here[2], here[3], and here[4].

Hopefully the above helps demystify this topic.

0 - https://mljourney.com/is-llm-machine-learning-or-deep-learni...

1 - https://medium.com/@zemim/deep-neural-network-dnn-explained-...

2 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/machine-learning/de...

3 - https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/deep-learning-demystified-t...

4 - https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/deep-learning
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-18 04:27:43+00:00
Yeah, that article is kind of my point; I don't see Rust making all the runtime performance and language-design tradeoffs that it talks about, just to speed up compiles and make easier the not-that-common other use cases for a language-specific stable ABI. (Swift has different tradeoffs because it mostly doesn't target foundational software, and because it specifically targets a niche that prioritizes code size.) Hence why I think a stable ABI would have to be opt-in.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 04:28:37+00:00
> How easy it is to parse doesn't matter.

How easy it is to parse does matter, because there’s a definite correlation between how easy it is to parse for the computer and for you. When there are bad corner cases, you either have to learn the rules, or keep on producing erroneous and often-content-destructive formatting.

> How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.

If you’re content with stock CommonMark, it is irrelevant to you.

If you want to go beyond that, you’re in for a world of pain and mangled content, content that you often won’t notice is mangled until much later, because there’s generally no meaningful way of sanity-checking stuff.

As soon as you interact with more than one Markdown engine—which is extremely likely to happen, your text editor is probably not using the parser your build tool uses, configured as it is configured—it matters a lot. If you have ever tried migrating from one engine to another on anything beyond the basics, you will have encountered problems because of this.
by kragen | 2025-08-18 04:29:09+00:00
Well, also, 120 years after the conquest, 100% of everyone who was alive before the conquest was dead. Transmission of complex systems of knowledge between generations generally requires organized training programs, which were labeled idolatrous, and the penalty for failing to report them to the village priest was to burn in Hell for eternity. Nevertheless, we have khipu that were made centuries later, and the article claims that in some remote areas the art did not die out until the 20th century.

I agree that knotting a khipu looks significantly slower than writing with reeds on clay tablets or with pens on papyrus, vellum, or paper. You can knit or crochet at around 5 Hz, but nålbinding, hand-sewing, and macramé are significantly slower, and the khipu looks like it would be more similar to those techniques. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFeYJ2uukrQ you can see Karin Byom making 7 nålbinding stitches in 30 seconds, about 250mHz, 20× slower than knitting or crochet. At that speed you could write about four digits per minute (250 millibits per second), compared to about 60 (4 bits per second) with west Arabic numerals and a pencil.

But there are Chinese and cuneiform characters with dozens of strokes; medieval scriptoria wrote fairly slowly, both because blackletter is fairly elaborate (especially Fraktur) and in order not to waste precious vellum; and a fair bit of the Egyptian hieroglyph corpus is literally carved into stone.

So, while slow writing systems are at a real disadvantage when it comes to producing large corpora, it's not clear that that factor alone dooms you to having a total surviving corpus that you could lift in one hand. And it certainly doesn't argue against widespread literacy, since a khipu once knotted can be read any number of times.

To be quantitative about it, the simplest wordwise probability model of English (assuming the probability that each word is independent of previous words) is about 10 bits per word, so even using the known inefficient numeric khipu encoding, you could write about 20-30 English words per hour in khipu just by assigning a number to each one. You could write down the 271 words of the Gettysburg Address in a day. This is not useful for a shopping list, but certainly for recording historical events, propaganda, contracts, proverbs, laws, or hymns.

Some of the postcolonial khipu epistles do encode spoken language, possibly inspired by Spanish writing with Latin letters, but I don't know anything about the encoding.
by vunderba | 2025-08-18 04:29:16+00:00
My personal litmus test that works fairly effectively with these AI generated stories is this - if someone asked you "What was the story about?" - could you reply with anything more substantial than the prompt that was given to generate the story to begin with?

Have a read through the 10 dragon stories where the prompt was "Meeting a dragon" and you'll see what I mean.

https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2023/09/so-is-ai-writin...
by Nullabillity | 2025-08-18 04:29:51+00:00
Yeah. For reference, this is a typical patchset for the project that motivated it.[0] Some of the patches are "routine" dependency upgrades, some of them are bugfix backports, some of them are original work that we were planning to upstream but hadn't got around to yet. Some are worth keeping when upgrading to a new upstream version, some aren't.

I agree that it's not ideal, but... there are always tradeoffs to manage.

[0]: https://github.com/stackabletech/docker-images/tree/e30798ac...
by shkkmo | 2025-08-18 04:29:55+00:00
> It's actually very funny to me that you are stating these definitions so authoritatively despite the terms not having any sort if rigor attached to either their definition or usage.

Huh? My entire point was that AI and AGI are loose, vague terms and if you want to be clear about what you are talkng about, you should use more specific terms.
by sivm | 2025-08-18 04:30:07+00:00
I’m going to forge ahead. I think this is another clue. I don’t know how he got so many in. Last night I found Tishri and Fenrir even. USS HILL sent a SOS RRR in a panic. It’s pretty crazy.

Edit- I think it might be K4. It is instructions for physical revealing k5.

Here is the intuition/clues (use your imagination) if you want to try too:

Edge to edge; Noon rim; Ignore flicker; Berlin clock beats

And remember the loadstone- that compass doesn’t point north
by lelandbatey | 2025-08-18 04:30:52+00:00
Applying ads to the real world makes it clear: blocking ads is always ok.

If you were given free pizza and a stack of ad flyers, do you have to read the ads? Do you have to even acknowledge them? Can you accept the free food while putting the flyers directly in the trash?

Obviously yes you would toss those ads in the garbage, because what fool would give away food and expect you to look at ads in exchange? So it is with ads online: their business model is not your responsibility and you can ignore stuff (even automatically) if you want, they're your eyes.
by nradov | 2025-08-18 04:31:09+00:00
Germany was able to get a free ride on US security guarantees for decades. Let's see what happens to their tax rates and social benefits now that they're finally being held accountable for complying with their NATO defense spending obligations.

While college tuition is generally cheaper in Germany, fewer students have the opportunity to attend. Most of them are steered to other tracks from as fairly early age. This model has some advantages but it limits opportunities for late bloomers.
by tguvot | 2025-08-18 04:31:12+00:00
Israel used to provide advanced medical care to gazans.

One day women that was treated for cancer (and iirc was healed) arrived to follow up checkup in suicide vest.

Gaza borders many kibutzim (kind of socialistic communal settlement) which are very left leaning, pro peace, 2 state solution, etc, etc. People from those kibutzim used to pick up sick gazans from border crossing and drive them to hospitals in Israel for treatment and back. On Oct7 those kibutzim were hardest hit with some of them I think loosing 50% of members.
by ViscountPenguin | 2025-08-18 04:31:59+00:00
It's a natural consequence of YouTube's practices unfortunately. If the majority of banned users are weird racists and the like, the majority of people looking for an alternative will be likewise.

The only other major market is weird tech nerds like us, but tbh, a lot of us would rather setup a peertube node then actually make any content for it.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-18 04:32:32+00:00
I don't even disagree with you there. Pretty much every human concept is made up by our own minds. The economy as a whole is an especially hilarious case since fiat money is backed by literally nothing since 1971.

However, I do draw a distinction between reasonable enforceable laws and schizophrenic unenforceable laws.

Most laws are pretty reasonable. The vast majority of people are peaceful. Relatively few people commit cold blooded murder. When one does happen, criminals are caught and imprisoned so that they are no longer part of society. It's a manageable problem.

Intellectual property is not like that. Infringement is as easy and normal as breathing. It happens every day at massive scales. It happens every time you download a nice photo from some website and send it to a friend. There are so many infringements taking place you cannot hope to ever punish them all. Often you cannot even catch perpetrators. The law is essentially unenforceable against the common man. There is no point.

In my country I've seen copyright infringement figures at over 80%. As in, 8 out every 10 people has infringed copyright at least once in their lifetimes. People talk about downloading music like it's nothing. Copy shops get set up literally next door to universities to help students copy entire books and course materials. Video game consoles are bought already modchipped straight from the stores. Every town has an informal market where copied media is sold cheaply, there's one less than 10 minutes away from me. Is this really a crime? Maybe it's actually a custom, already part of our culture.

Intellectual property is quite useful when used by corporations to attack other corporations. Companies are juicy targets for lawsuits. There are also less of them, their numbers are manageable. Leveraging intellectual property against normal folk though? That fight is unwinnable and I really wish they'd stop trying.
by derefr | 2025-08-18 04:33:25+00:00
True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.

I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.

I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.

My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")

The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.

Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.

Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.
by mcabbott | 2025-08-18 04:34:04+00:00
Covariant and contravariant indices would be the formal terms. I'm not really sure whether I've seen "upstairs" written down.

Sub/superscript... strike me as the typographical terms, not the meaning? Like $x_\mathrm{alice}$ is certainly a subscript, and footnote 2 is a superscript, but neither is an index.
by medhir | 2025-08-18 04:35:00+00:00
I have never understood why student loan debt is the only debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s so insane that we expect 18 year olds, with brains still very much developing, to be able to make such a life-altering choice. Even though I myself understood this dynamic and decided to go to a state school with max 5k a year in tuition, I’ve never faulted others in the same situation that made less than ideal financial choices.

It’s really tragic that the US chooses to economically hamper so many people for money that is fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Everyone deserves a chance at upward economic mobility, even if they made a bad choice to study something in college with bad job prospects at a high price tag.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-08-18 04:35:22+00:00
So think through what you've just said.

If you were able to do all of those things to prove your identity using your ID.. then any identity thief with a copy of your ID could use it to impersonate you in every one of those venues.

That means that somebody else can send your money wherever they wish.. create bank accounts to perform nefarious deeds that tie back to you.. book flights, and subscribe to services on your dime or on a stolen credit card behind your name so that after the chargebacks all debt collection activity aims at you. And finally convince the government to send your tax refunds to them.

In light of this what is absurd about being parsimonious with who and how we share copies of our ID, and why should virtually every website online be deputized into keeping copies of them to provide dog standard content services that might not always be suitable for all audiences?
by shmerl | 2025-08-18 04:36:00+00:00
For example wine-staging (ran by Wine developers themselves) hosts patches for Wine project and they revise / rebase them with each Wine version, which is often not a trivial task. I don't see how you can avoid that really. But Wine staging itself is a git repository that holds patches (and their history) if that helps, which indeed can stay there for years.

Same happens with patches that Debian applies on top of fixed versions of packages. They are stored in Debian's Salsa git.