MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-19 15:11:10+00:00
(bug in HN, have to have this for next block to format correctly)

--fast-dns-retry=[<initial retry delay in ms>[,<time to continue retries in ms>]] Under normal circumstances, dnsmasq relies on DNS clients to do retries; it does not generate timeouts itself. Setting this option instructs dnsmasq to generate its own retries starting after a delay which defaults to 1000ms. If the second parameter is given this controls how long the retries will continue for otherwise this defaults to 10000ms. Retries are repeated with exponential backoff. Using this option increases memory usage and network bandwidth. If not otherwise configured, this option is activated with the default parameters when --dnssec is set. --dnssec Validate DNS replies and cache DNSSEC data. When forwarding DNS queries, dnsmasq requests the DNSSEC records needed to validate the replies. The replies are validated and the result returned as the Authenticated Data bit in the DNS packet. In addition the DNSSEC records are stored in the cache, making validation by clients more efficient. Note that validation by clients is the most secure DNSSEC mode, but for clients unable to do validation, use of the AD bit set by dnsmasq is useful, provided that the network between the dnsmasq server and the client is trusted. Dnsmasq must be compiled with HAVE_DNSSEC enabled, and DNSSEC trust anchors provided, see --trust-anchor. Because the DNSSEC validation process uses the cache, it is not permitted to reduce the cache size below the default when DNSSEC is enabled. The nameservers upstream of dnsmasq must be DNSSEC-capable, ie capable of returning DNSSEC records with data. If they are not, then dnsmasq will not be able to determine the trusted status of answers and this means that DNS service will be entirely broken.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-08-19 15:11:16+00:00
VoiceInk (one time payment) and WisprFlow (subscription) are currently my fav dictation apps. I just looked at Whispering and have to say VoiceInk is far superior to Whispering in terms of Ux, and clarity of settings, so I think VoiceInk deserves at least as much attention. There are several things that make a huge difference things that make a huge difference in dictation apps, besides the obvious speed and accuracy:

- allow flexible recording toggle shortcuts - show a visual icon with waves etc showing recording - how the clipboard is handled during recording (does it copy to clipboard? does it clear it after text output?)

VoiceInk is nearly there in terms of good behavior on these dimensions, and I hope to ditch my Wispr Flow sub soon.
by gangstead | 2025-08-19 15:11:28+00:00
Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents?

For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.
Show HN: GiralNet – A Privacy Network for Your Team (Not the World)
by jgiraldo29 | 2025-08-19 15:12:04+00:00
Hello, for some time I've been developing this project now that I am happy that it finally can see the light. I love Tor, but I believe the biggest thing with Tor is that the nodes are strangers which in itself requires some sort of level in just that, complete strangers.

For this reason, I decided to build this private network inspired by the Onion router. Unlike other public networks, GiralNet is not for anonymous connections to strangers. It is built for small teams or groups who want privacy but also need a level of trust. It assumes that the people running the nodes in the network are known and verifiable. This provides a way for a group to create their own private and secure network, where the infrastructure is controlled and the people behind the nodes are accountable. The goal is to provide privacy without relying on a large, anonymous public network.

In terms of technical details, it is a SOCKS5 proxy that routes internet traffic through a series of other computers. It does this by wrapping your data in multiple layers of encryption, just like the onion router does it. Each computer in the path unwraps one layer to find the next destination, but never knows the full path. This makes it difficult for any single party to see both where the traffic came from and where it is going.

I will gladly answer any questions you might have, thank you.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-19 15:12:11+00:00
> Just in case anybody is under any false impressions: there is no grass roots movement pushing for this.

I’ve actually been surprised at how many Hacker News comments have been in support of the UK’s regulations. There were a lot of “What’s the big deal? We already check IDs for liquor. Why can’t we do it for porn?” comments on all of the previous threads.

The slippery slope was brought up a lot but dismissed. I think a lot of people believed there was an easy solution that wouldn’t inconvenience them or creep into other areas of their lives.
by aaomidi | 2025-08-19 15:12:43+00:00
When VPNs design to hide themselves, which they will do as this law spreads, this problem becomes a lot harder.

Countries like Iran and China have been trying to block VPNs for years, and all they are doing now is heuristics.

For example I can tunnel traffic over a TLS tunnel. How do you distinguish that with everything else?
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-19 15:13:26+00:00
Information I define as “the removal of uncertainty.” If it does not “remove uncertainty” it is not information (it may be something else, like data or noise.) therefore yes you are right information is dependent upon the beholder.

To solve this, I declare information as a vector.

A vector is meaningless without context.

A vector is its own dimensionality (size,speed,density,etc.) and value (magnitude).

This clears up some of your insightful wanderings. Other parts may be outside of information‘s responsibility.

Let us return to your apparently lesser footnote diety who is secretly supreme instigator all along.

Decay!

Even your smartest reading shall some day be the incomprehensible dust (or rust) or otherwise long since faded.

In a world governed by uncertainty, ignorance and confusion is the natural state of minds. It is the illuminant mind which wonders, restlessly tugging at loose stitch until the whole fabric unravels (for better or worse.)

All existential change comes by decay or interference (constructive or destructive.) that’s what this whole entropy thing is, and vectors transform potential into meaningful states (which themselves secretly decay when not being watched.)
by viega | 2025-08-19 15:13:36+00:00
I wrote the article; it was motivated by reading the book, which to my estimation is not well aimed for either academics or practitioners. That's a problem across a big chunk of academia right now, and I hear it not just from industry who would like to have people more prepared coming out of college, but from masters students who realize that they're not learning what they want to be good.

So in no way was it meant to be a strawman around a "hey, learn about the futex!" post (as evidenced by other complaints at the end of things lacking). The fact is, I was disappointed enough with the book, that I put aside another post I was writing for it.

But as for Phil, we did work together several years ago, and he reads my stuff. I didn't just start writing, and have never had problems finding an audience in the past, Phil or not.
by Espressosaurus | 2025-08-19 15:13:36+00:00
Yeah, they are both beautiful works in their own right, and as such “which is better” comes down to such minor differences of opinion I think it’s silly to try to rank them against each other. They are both devastatingly effective works of art in their respective mediums, and both Chiang and Villeneuve are geniuses.

Chiang’s exploration of ideas epitomizes the ideal to which I hold science fiction (as opposed to science fantasy, which I also enjoy as a guilty pleasure).
by card_zero | 2025-08-19 15:13:54+00:00
You made me check damninteresting.com, and I'm delighted to see that it's back again, with a contributed post about adenoids and a Bellows post about word games, and (groan) one of those "free daily word games" that many sites have now, presumably in an attempt to get people to donate regularly.

I know Alan Bellows wants to write, but the thing is, he wants to write for money, so that he can write and live. I want to read it, but the other thing is, I don't want to give him any money. I suppose I might do if I had like ten times as much of the stuff, but I don't. The whole situation is enigmatic.
by inkyoto | 2025-08-19 15:13:58+00:00
No. Official and legal records detest the in place changes, love a full history of changes, and also love to walk the entire history of changes back. You do not have to convince me, you can talk to the state auditors instead to get their perspective.

Consider two simple and common scenarios (there are more): citizenship certificates and the recognition of prior learning.

1. Citizenship – the person with the name of Joanna Doe in the birth certificate was issued with a citizenship certificate in the same name. As time goes by, Joanna Doe changes the legal name to Joanna Smith; the citizenship certificate is reissued with the new legal name. We do not want to truly update the existing record in the citizenship database and simply change Doe -> Smith as it will create a mismatch with the name in the birth certificate. If we use a ledger database, an update operation will create a new revision of the same record and all subsequent simple query operations will return the latest updated revision with the new name. The first revision, however, will still be retained in the table's cryptographically verifiable audit/history log.

Why should we care? Because Joanna Smith can accidentally throw their new citizenship certificate away and later they will want to renew their passport (or the driver's licence). The citizenship certificate may be restored[0] by presenting the birth certificate in the original name and the current or expired passport, but the passport is in the new name. From a random system's point of view, Joanna Doe and Joanna Smith are two distinct individuals with no apparent link between them. However, the ledger database can provide proof that it is the same person indeed because the unabridged history of name changes is available, it can be queried and relied upon.

2. Recognition of prior learning – a person has been awarded a degree at institution A. Credits from Institution A contributed to a degree at Institution B. The degree at B is revoked due to issues with source evidence (i.e. Institution A). The ledger database makes such ripple effects deterministic – a revocation event at B triggers rules that re-evaluate dependent awards and enrolments at partners, with a verifiable trail of who was notified and when. If Institution A later corrects its own records, Institution B and downstream bodies can attach a superseding record rather than overwrite, preserving full lineage. The entire drama unfolded will always be available.

2½. Recognition of prior learning (bonus) – an employer verified the degree on the hiring date. Months later it is revoked. The employer can present a ledger proof that, on the hiring date, the credential existed and was valid. It reduces dispute risk and supports fair-use decisions such as probation reviews rather than immediate termination.

All this stuff is very real and the right tech stack (i.e. the ledger DB) reduces the complexity tremendously.

[0] Different jurisdictions have different rules but the procedure is more or less similar amongst them.
by wmaxlees | 2025-08-19 15:14:38+00:00
Hi HN, author here.

I'm a software engineer documenting my journey of learning RL research from scratch. This post was supposed to be a straightforward story about switching my PPO agent from an MLP to a CNN.

The switch, combined with a standard PPO trick, led to a shocking result: my agent's score jumped from 15 to 84, crushing the baseline. I thought I had cracked it.

But after digging into the training dynamics, I discovered the incredible performance was the result of a subtle bug in my advantage calculation all along. Fixing the bug tanked the score right back down to mediocrity.

The post is the full detective story of that discovery, the "false victory," and the new mystery that it sets up: why was the bug so helpful? That's the question I'll be tackling next.

Happy to answer any questions about the JAX/Flax implementation or the debugging process!
by sharawi877 | 2025-08-19 15:14:43+00:00
I've been writing articles lately for Proxidize, and this one might be my favorite so far. I got inspired by PostHog, I just love their way of writing articles, so I literally copy/pasted the style to make it even more exciting for me.

I also wrote my first open-source project which is scary if I'm being honest, but there is a first time for everything I guess.

GitHub repo link:https://github.com/proxidize/reddit-scraper
by _waqas_ali_ | 2025-08-19 15:14:51+00:00
As a Sindhi speaker myself, amazing stuff. The output is so good. This unlocks the vastness of the internet for millions of people. I am imaging something like NotebookLM but for under-served languages or a hotline where people can call and talk/learn about anything. Do you guys have plans to create b2c products yourself?
by keyringlight | 2025-08-19 15:14:58+00:00
The issue that was noted at larger LANs I used to go to was that matches of DotA could lock in around 12 people for around 45m per game which would make getting participants for other games more difficult. There would be constantly running CS/UT servers where people would drop into to kill time, but trying to get a large game running or something like battlefield required advance planning
by jcims | 2025-08-19 15:15:10+00:00
I built a small two axis direct-drive mount (https://mjbots.com/ controllers are great) to track satellites and aircraft with an RF antenna. One of the things that stood out in the article for me was the yolo send to JLCPCB. It spoke volumes about your confidence in the CAD design, maybe one of these days I'll get there hahaha.

Great design and writeup btw, it looks as good if not better than most of the commercial designs out there. You might enjoy Bruce Van Deventer's vids on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@djcheckonetwo/videos (direct drive mount with 26 bit renishaw ring encoder might whet your appetite a bit)
by veidr | 2025-08-19 15:15:40+00:00
CITATION NEEDED — except not really, that's utter bollocks that doesn't warrant a counter.

But, you triggered me lol:

1.) The Chinese meaning of "atheist" may not mean what you think it means: a.) it means not following a major established religion, and b.) they have an Orwellian surveillance-state dictatorship government which very much opposes major established religions

2.) For many people, including in China, astrology is just something like buying a lottery ticket, or asking the Magic 8-Ball for advice — fun, but not something actually believed in[1].

3.) It's much more likely that 3% of atheists "believe in" astrology[2] — and the idea that a majority would is insane on its face

So yeah, nah.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/05/21/3-in-10-amer...

[2]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/11/42552/
by jhaile | 2025-08-19 15:16:02+00:00
To be fair I haven't tried Zen, but Arc still works well. I don't particularly need any new features - so as long as they continue to keep up with timely security patches and Chromium updates I'll probably keep using it. Also - as a developer I would prefer using a Chromium-based browser since it's the most common one used.

I tried Dia a few weeks back and was disappointed in its sidebar and profile features.
by prmph | 2025-08-19 15:16:15+00:00
I hear this denigration of CRUD apps all the time, but people forget that CRUD apps can be as complex or simple as they need to be. A CRUD app is identified as such by its purpose, not the sophistication of it.

Right now I'm wring a web app that basically manages data in a db, but guess the kinds of things I have to deal with. Here a a few (there are many much more), in no particular order:

- Caching and load balancing infrastructure.

- Crafting an ORM that handles caching, transactions, and, well, CRUD, but in a consistent, well-typed, and IO-provider-agnostic manner (IO providers could be: DBs like Postgres, S3-compatible object stores, Redis, Sqlite, Localstorage, Filesystems, etc. Yes, I need all those).

- Concurrent user access in manner that is performant and avoids conflicts.

- Db performance for huge datasets (so consideration of indexes, execution plans, performant queries, performant app architecture, etc, etc)

- Defining fluent types for defining the abstract API methods that form the core of the system

- Defining types to provide strong typing for routes that fulfill each abstract API method.

- Defining types to provide strongly-typed client wrappers for each abstract API method

- How to choose the best option for application- and API security (Cookies?, JWT?, API keys? Oauth?)

- Choosing the best UI framework for the requirements of the app. I actually had to write a custom react-like library for this.

- Media storage strategy (what variants of each media to generate on the server, how to generate good storage keys, etc.

- Writing tooling scripts that are sophisticated enough to help me type-check, build, text, and deploy the app just in the way I want

- Figuring out effective UI designs for CRUD pages, with sorting, filtering, paging, etc built in . This is far from simple. For just one example, naive paging is not performant, I need to use keyset pagination.

- Doing all the above with robust, maintainable, and performant code

- Writing effective specs and docs for all my decisions and design for the the above

- And many many more! I've been working on this "CRUD" app for years as a greenfield project that will be the flagship product of my startup.
by sfeng | 2025-08-19 15:16:17+00:00
One tiny nit on this amazing project / write up. He mentions that the traces have to be extra wide to support 24V. In truth though, the higher voltage means lower current, which means if anything the traces can be less wide. The size of the traces is determined by the current they carry, the voltage determines how much space must be between the traces (but it’s unlikely to be an issue at these voltages).
by troyvit | 2025-08-19 15:16:45+00:00
I'll answer for that person. If humans were naturally cannibalistic then I think they'd agree. For instance, if we were spiders it would seem pretty natural to eat each other. But the fact is that cannibalism, even among the biggest fans of CAFOs, is just not that much fun.

I'd ask the poster a similar question though. If a monkey or chimp was treated with respect and killed humanely, would they eat that?
by hedora | 2025-08-19 15:17:03+00:00
Those rules would only apply to VPN providers in the UK, so the whole mechanism would be pointless.

They could start whitelisting money / credit card transfers, I guess. However, reputable VPN providers already accept envelopes full of cash and crypto, so I guess the UK would need to start reading all international mail, and block crypto.

At that point, people could just use tor to bootstrap the VPN account + payments.

History says teenagers will figure this stuff out before adults (due to infinite free time and infinite bragging rights for knowing how to do it).
by dc396 | 2025-08-19 15:17:48+00:00
No. RFC 2181, section 11 states explicitly:

"Those [length] restrictions aside, any binary string whatever can be used as the label of any resource record.

Dnsmasq should (MUST in RFC 2119 language) forward requests -- it would be a bug not to. The upstream resolver shouldn't (MUST NOT in RFC 2119 language) silently drop them -- it would be a bug if they did.

Brute forcing transaction/port ID collisions to poison the cache is a long known flaw in the DNS protocol (it has been known since at least 1993) that led to the creation of DNSSEC.
by pxoe | 2025-08-19 15:18:00+00:00
Maybe you just don't understand the difference between containers and profiles, or what is it about profiles that's useful and more useful in some cases over containers. For one, it's impossible to have separate extensions with containers. That alone is already a deal breaker, and there are many more differences. Profiles are useful when you want to have things to be actually separate, not just pretending like they are while they're all cluttered in the same profile. It's also about more completely eliminating risk of having something where it doesn't belong.

It's kinda tiresome to see containers get peddled over and over as a "solution", when they're severely limited in what they offer compared to profiles. One feature set and clunky interface doesn't even get close to the use cases people have for profiles. It's not a solution.
by simonw | 2025-08-19 15:18:10+00:00
I've heard of a few SaaS apps that were vibe coded by non-programmers, some of which are generating revenue.

I've also seen incidents of those apps turning out to have security holes you can drive a truck through, and hiring professional help to move beyond their origins.

(I didn't keep notes of the companies and I don't want to specifically call any out, but they exist.)

I'm hoping this is a relatively short-lived trend. I think vibe coding tools for personal use and prototypes is to be celebrated, but vibe coding software that other people will depend on or even pay for is deeply irresponsible.
by fakedang | 2025-08-19 15:18:21+00:00
The USA invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which don't have the faintest connection to the US mainland in any form, either culturally or otherwise.

The US has also launched bombing runs in Syria and Libya, again both of which have the faintest connection to the average American's daily life, all in the pursuit of some boogieman War on Terror.

The US has engaged in military coups to overthrow democratic governments in nearly every Latin American country.

And to crown its Opus, the US has now begun building concentration camps (once again), both on its own soil and in foreign territory.

> They are sort of just pawns I guess? None of them will ever become self made. Look what happens to Chinese entrepreneurs who get a little too successful and forget the CCP. They go to a camp and then come out with a factory reset lmao! Russians fall out of windows weekly it seems.

Sure, while the US extends the favor to foreign nationals and kidnaps them to torture them at Guantanamo, often supplied to them willingly by their British vassals. There's a poignant recorded letter in the Guardian of a young child's letter to Tony Blair asking to return his father from Guantanamo.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-19 15:18:49+00:00
The path to winning elections is by appealing to voters who can be swayed while keeping the base on board.

The problem with Democrats winning elections (since 2016) has been the ideological purity tests their social-left demands from candidates, rendering them toxic to independents.

It'd be nice if internet SJWs grew up and realized that winning elections with "don't ask don't tell" is better than losing elections with overly socially progressive platforms.

It feels like a large chunk of the party would rather lose an election smugly than win it with compromise.

Republicans since 2014 have been in somewhat of the same mutually exclusive bind, which is why Trump emerged as the primary candidate. Turns out reconciling mutually exclusive promises is possible if you're willing to say things without intending to do them and bank on charisma and a cult of personality.

Tl;dr - Democrats need to cure their case of SJW Tourette's. When someone asks a question about trans rights, say "I support equality for all Americans, because that's what our Constitution promises" and leave it at that.