MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sharkweek | 2025-08-09 14:45:29+00:00
A much better example is the Toyota Tundra that made it to 1m miles with only a transmission replacement at the ~800k mile mark

https://www.motortrend.com/features/million-mile-tundra-the-...

Toyota gave the guy a new truck so they could study the one he had.

As a Toyota fan boy myself (still driving a 2000 4Runner into the ground), those 2000s builds were such a great era of engineering. That being said, I think they’ve lost a step over the last decade (don’t get my started on the new v4/v6 turbo blocks they’re building…).
by nasretdinov | 2025-08-09 14:46:08+00:00
So it's really the issue due a partial variable shadowing during assignment, not errgroup-specific. Got bitten by it multiple times unfortunately, but I don't think there's an easy lint or vet check that could prevent such errors from happening. Having said that, overwriting a variable during := assignment is typically only useful for errors, so potentially you might want to have a lint check that complains when you've overwritten something else. There's already a check that the value is unused so when re-assigning the error value you're less likely to miss anything
by onli | 2025-08-09 14:46:28+00:00
I will try to understand your position, and thanks for answering.

I appreciated the "avoiding breakage" sentiment included in the post (and commented accordingly below). I'm just really of the opinion that dependencies should not trigger me to do something like set `allow_duplicated_key: true` if it is not absolutely necessary, and I guess I do not see why it is absolutely necessary here. I saw the link to a security vulnerability, but why not let devs set `allow_duplicated_key: false` manually in contexts where it matters? Avoiding churn is more important - this is not a "the api will cause random code to be executed" situation, unlike the create_additions options situation you describe and possibly unlike the YAML situation. There I understand the need (even with YAML, there I'm just sad about the currently broken default code path).

Also, we saw with Yaml how there it wasn't viable to do such a change without breakage via the intermittent dependencies (and I was very happy you mentioned that API not being nice) and churn via the direct. The same is very likely to happen here, programs will break because their dependencies to not set the new option when those store JSON.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-09 14:46:35+00:00
With smaller models becoming more efficient and harder continually improving I think the sweet spot for local LLM computing will arrive in a couple years.

So many comments like to highlight that you can buy a Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM for $10K, but that's a huge amount of money to spend on something that still can't compete with a $2/hour rented cloud GPU server in terms of output speed. Even that will be lower quality and slower than the $20/month plan from the LLM provider of your choice.

The only reasons to go local are if you need it (privacy, contractual obligations, regulations) or if you're a hardcore hobbiest who values running it yourself over quality and speed of output.

> Framework (the modular laptop company) has announced a desktop that can be configured up to 128GB unified RAM, but it's still going to come in at around 2-2.5k depending on your config.

Framework is getting a lot of headlines for their brand recognition but there are a growing number of options with the same AMD Strix Halo part. Here's a random example I found from a Google search - https://www.gmktec.com/products/amd-ryzen%E2%84%A2-ai-max-39...

All of these are somewhat overpriced right now due to supply and demand. If the supply situation is alleviated they should come down in price.

They're great for what they are, but their memory bandwidth is still relatively limited. If the 128GB versions came down to $1K I might pick one up, but at the $2-3K price range I'd rather put that money toward upgrading my laptop to an M4 MacBook Pro with 128GB of RAM.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-08-09 14:46:51+00:00
Do you mean it could be faster to analyze sequences using models rather than scrolling through them on a laptop?

Yes, we could get some broad strokes of what's present by using analytical tools, and we do. A lot of our researchers use R and Python to write simple tools to find patterns and perform simple aggregations.

We're in the process of discovering how AI can assist us, and we've had plenty of success in creating models to aid with processing and detecting things like mussel and kelp beds in aerial imagery (drone, plane, and satellite), but I suspect in this case the data can't actually tell the full story to begin with so what we're actually looking for is more like clues, not answers. When answers are present, we tend to be simply presenting findings like which organisms were present and, to some extent, their apparent population density. This is really easy to do without AI. Some models might find interesting patterns, but it's hard to tell which ones or why, or how we'd train that ourselves. It's an interesting question.

I work on the genomics team so it's something I should be actively considering. The work is certainly more manual than it needs to be, so there's work to be done here for sure.
by maxhille | 2025-08-09 14:47:55+00:00
I mean there are different definitions on what to call an AGI. Most of the time people don't specify which one they use.

For me an AGI would mean truly at least human level as in "this clearly has a consciousness paired with knowledge", a.k.a. a person. In that case, what do the investors expect? Some sort of slave market of virtual people to exploit?
by neom | 2025-08-09 14:48:04+00:00
I'd never head of screwworm before, turns out it's not a worm, this page is pretty decent: https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...

"A screwworm infestation is caused by larvae of the fly Cochliomyia hominivorax. These larvae can infest wounds of any warm-blooded animal, including human beings. The screwworm fly is about twice the size of a regular house fly and can be distinguished by its greenish-blue color and its large reddish-orange eyes.

Infestations can occur in any open wound, including cuts, castration wounds, navels of newborn animals, and tick bites. The wounds often contain a dark, foul-smelling discharge. Screwworm larvae distinguish themselves from other species by feeding only on the living flesh, never dead tissue. Once a wound is infested, the screwworm can eventually kill the animal or human, literally eating it alive." - Sounds great.
by matt_s | 2025-08-09 14:48:07+00:00
One part of maintainability is cost. And a simpler mechanical engine without proprietary ECUs is going to be cheaper to maintain, provided parts are available.

If someone encounters issues with an ECU and it needs replacement at $1k-2k they might just consider the costs and that being a down payment on a new vehicle vs. repairing. Labor costs more than parts for complicated electrical/computer/engine problems. Electrical issues in modern vehicles don't appear to be easy to troubleshoot, sometimes require proprietary tools. A simpler mechanical engine could be DIY repaired and running, check out the "low-buck garage" youtube channel and the $2 Jeep series as an example.

I'm not advocating something like going back to computer-less, inefficient, stinky, loud cars, just pointing out that when we add computers to things, it makes them less maintainable to the average person.
by surajrmal | 2025-08-09 14:48:25+00:00
I can't take zig as seriously as rust due to lack of data race safety. There are just too many bugs that can happen when you have threads, share state between those threads and manually manage memory. There are so many bugs I've written because I did this wrong for many years but didn't realize until I wrote rust. I don't trust myself or anyone to get this right.
by v5v3 | 2025-08-09 14:48:37+00:00
To be fair, if you turn on thinking mode on Llms and see the output their is some thinking/reasoning.

A simple example:

Prompt:Make it yellow

Think: the user wants something yellow but hasn't said what it is. Previously the user talked about creating a Button, so it must be the button but I should clarify by asking

Response: is it the button that you want yellow?
by LoganDark | 2025-08-09 14:49:26+00:00
> I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies.

Oh absolutely not. I've seen so many autistic people literally just nolifing and also collaborating on huge arts on wplace. It is absolutely not just script kiddies.

> 3 billion requests / 2 million users is an average of 1,500 req/user. A normal user might make 10-20 requests when loading a map, so these are extremely high, scripted use cases.

I don't know about that either. Users don't just load a map, they look all around the place to search for and see a bunch of the art others have made. I don't know how many requests is typical for "exploring a map for hours on end" but I imagine a lot of people are doing just that.

I wouldn't completely discount automation but these usage patterns seem by far not impossible. Especially since wplace didn't expect sudden popularity so they may not have optimized their traffic patterns as much as they could have.
by priceofmemory | 2025-08-09 14:49:35+00:00
Sure. Here is the fanfiction book I've been using LLMs to help me write. Helps a lot with improving prose and identifying plot holes. It's much better then a rubber duck for talking out how to improve a chapter and write plausible story arcs. It's not great at word smithing, but I find it errs on the side of too many similies and metaphors, so I just delete some of them as I copy the suggestions over into my draft.

https://github.com/frypatch/The-Price-of-Remembering
by gitremote | 2025-08-09 14:49:50+00:00
When an end user asks ChatGPT a question, the chatbot application sends the system prompt, user prompt, and context as input tokens to an inference API, and the LLM generates output tokens for the inference API response.

GPT API inference cost (for developers) is per token (sum of input tokens, cached input tokens, and output tokens per 1M used).

https://openai.com/api/pricing/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...

(Inference cost is charged per token even for free models like Meta LLaMa and DeepSeek-R1 on Amazon Bedrock. https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/ )

ChatGPT Pro subscription pricing (the chatbot for end users) is $200/month

https://openai.com/chatgpt/pricing/

"insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!

people use it much more than we expected."

- Sam Altman, January 6, 2025

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813

Again, this means that the average ChatGPT Pro end user's chattiness cost OpenAI too much inference (too many input and output tokens sent and received, respectively, for inference) per month than would be balanced out by OpenAI receiving $200/month in revenue from the average Pro user.

The analogy is like Netflix losing money on their subscriptions because their users watch too much streaming, so they ban account sharing, causing many users to cancel their subscriptions, but this actually helps them become profitable, because the extra users using their service too much generated more costs than revenue.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-09 14:50:06+00:00
(Blue dot in hill country TX here.)

Yep. I hear that.

<saturday-soap-box>

The strictly rational selfish ones are pandemics (virus evolution), antibiotic resistance (bacterial evolution), prion diseases (mad cow), anthropogenic climate change, and air, water, and soil pollution. And that's not even getting to animal cruelty that could never chip away at the hedonism addiction cognitive dissonance and rationalizations.

Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Clint Eastwood, Mark Cuban, GZA, Paul McCartney, ... half of Hollywood.

</saturday-soap-box>
by honorious | 2025-08-09 14:51:04+00:00
This demo shows an Agent Development Kit (ADK) implementation that leverages the CaMeL framework for enhanced security and controlled data flow in LLM agents. CaMeL (Defeating Prompt Injections by Design) protects the model against prompt injection attacks by explicitly separating control and data flows in the query given to the agent. Additionally, CaMeL enables fine-grained access control; in other words, it is possible to define precise rules that are deterministically enforced over data flows between tool calls.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-09 14:51:12+00:00
> The amount of friction to get privacy today is astounding

I don't understand this.

It's easy to get a local LLM running with a couple commands in the terminal. There are multiple local LLM runners to choose from.

This blog post introduces some additional tools for sandboxed code execution and browser automation, but you don't need those to get started with local LLMs.

There are multiple local options. This one is easy to start with: https://ollama.com/
by jjani | 2025-08-09 14:51:18+00:00
This was nothing but "temporary", it's still in place; the last time we ran the evals is 2 weeks ago and it's the exact same. It can't be a "capacity glitch" either, as it actually outputs those as proper tokens.

It's possible that it was an internal system prompt change despite the claims of "there is no system prompt on the API", but this is in effect the same as changing the model.

> There IS evidence that would satisfy me, but I'd need to see it.

Describe what this evidence would look like. It sure feels like an appeal to authority - if I'd be someone with a "name" I'm sure you'd believe it.

If you'd had had the same set of evals set up since then, you wouldn't have questioned this at all. You don't.

> I don't think you're making it up, but without a lot more details I can't be convinced that your methodology was robust enough to prove what you say it shows.

Go and poke holes at it then, go on. I've clearly explained the methodology.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-09 14:52:18+00:00
>Nice idea, interesting project, next time please contact me before.

It's impossible to predict that one's project may go viral.

>As a single user, you broke the service for everyone.

Or you did by not having a high enough fd limit. Blaming sites when using it too much when you advertise there is no limit is not cool. It's not like wplace themselves were maliciously hammering the API.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-09 14:53:19+00:00
Is this your app? https://www.kwizap.com/

For something similar, we used Moodle. But it's a lot of work to configure and host it, and sometimes it has too many features. I think a quiz only site may be useful for teachers.

Is it possible to try it without creating an account?

Perhaps in the free plan add private quizzes that only can be replied 15 times, enough to try but too small for a class :evil-smile:

Patio11 used to sell a bingo card creator to teachers, so you may find some idea in his site: https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

Probably:

* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/12/13/learning-from-a-specifi...

* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/11/24/christmas-bingo-boards/

* https://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/14/holiday-promotion/
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-09 14:53:55+00:00
Why is it "used to be"? I've heard about the program before and thought it was incredible. What happened to it?

Edit: Brief research tells me the screwworms broke though to Mexico in November 2024 after cases started increasing north of the Darian Gap throughout 2023 (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/news/program-update/new-world-scr...). It does seem like the funding now is happening through USDA rather than USAID (https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/...) and there likely was a funding gap. As much as I like to blame the current administration for defunding USAID the breakthrough happened earlier.
by eggbrain | 2025-08-09 14:55:22+00:00
Limiting by referrer seems strange — if you know a normal user makes 10-20 requests (let’s assume per minute), can’t you just rate limit requests to 100 requests per minute per IP (5x the average load) and still block the majority of these cases?

Or, if it’s just a few bad actors, block based on JA4/JA3 fingerprint?
by jcgrillo | 2025-08-09 14:55:33+00:00
I had a 1984 W123 300TD Turbodiesel I bought with 356k miles on the odometer (which was broken, total mileage unknown). I drove it for over 100k more miles before I sold it. It had no blowby and no perceptible oil consumption between changes. The OM617 with MW pump was a fantastic engine. The Garrett turbo had something to be desired though so I replaced it with a much more efficient Holset HX-30 which worked great with the pump maxed out. I estimated from 0-60 times it was putting out around 150HP, up from 120HP stock. The 722.3 transmission didn't give me too much trouble either but I did rebuild the valve body with a shift kit to make it shift better. The one major issue I ran into was the rear hydraulic self leveling suspension. The hydraulic struts were NLA so I pored over a bunch of parts manuals and eventually found a Lesjofors spring that was the right height and spring rate--I believe from a later model S600--which worked perfectly with Bilstein HDs from a W123 sedan. Should never have sold that car.

I currently own a W210 E300 Turbodiesel. I bought it with 49.5k miles, it currently has 120k. Overall it's been a decent car, the OM606/722.6 drivetrain is great. The rest of it is pretty miserable though. I would like someday to swap this drivetrain into a W124 wagon, with a standalone transmission controller and the injection pump from an OM603 to make the engine fully mechanical.

In the meantime, I'm working on rebuilding a 2.65 rear diff from an SL class car to swap in. I have a TCU from another car that had this final drive ratio so hopefully it'll work. The stock 3.07 ratio is no good for US highways. In 5th gear at 2250rpm (bsfc minimum) the speed is about 100kph (62mph). With the 2.65 rear it'll be more like 77mph which is where I usually set my cruise control. Should get a lot better fuel economy and less noise.
ESP32 Bus Pirate 0.5 – A hardware hacking tool that speaks every protocol
by geo-tp | 2025-08-09 14:56:16+00:00
ESP32 Bus Pirate is an open-source firmware that turns your device into a multi-protocol hacker's tool, inspired by the legendary Bus Pirate.

It supports sniffing, sending, scripting, and interacting with various digital protocols (I2C, UART, 1-Wire, SPI, etc.) via a serial terminal or web-based CLI.

Modes for:

- HiZ (default) - I2C (scan, glitch, slave mode, dump) - SPI (flash, sdcard, slave mode) - UART / Half-Duplex UART (bridge, read, write) - 1-WIRE (ibutton, temp sensor) - 2WIRE (smartcard) / 3WIRE (eeprom) - DIO (Digital I/O, read, pullup, set) - Infrared (device-b-gone, send and receive) - USB (HID, mouse, keyboard, gamepad, storage) - Bluetooth (BLE HID, scan, spoofing, sniffing) - Wi-Fi (scan, AP, connect, sniff, deauth) - JTAG (scan pinout, SWD) - LED control (animations, set LEDs) - I2S - CAN

https://github.com/geo-tp/ESP32-Bus-Pirate
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-08-09 14:56:31+00:00
Prototype in Python with PLY (https://github.com/dabeaz/ply) or you could try Raku (https://raku.org/) which has nice functionality for building grammars.

After you know what you want to build, you could convert it to C, C++, or Rust to make it fast.
by Philpax | 2025-08-09 14:56:44+00:00
It has to compile them; you can see the compiled binaries in your `target` directory. Rust doesn't have an interpreter for the full language, only for the `const` subset, so it can't interpret them.

There have been some proposals to compile the proc-macros to WASM and share those alongside the code in crates.io, but nothing substantial has come of it.
by grej | 2025-08-09 14:57:14+00:00
The US successfully eradicated screwworms here in 1966 with a brilliant integrated sterile insect technique - I think the very first use of it (and had previously funded helping other countries control it also). But if we had another outbreak spread, I doubt there's any shred of competence left in this current gutted federal government to do anything like that again. Maybe they can have the new ICE folks try to deport the screwworm flies.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-09 14:57:30+00:00
You left out the next lines, which add some important context:

> Then we tried wrapping a NextJS app inside Electron. It took us longer than we'd like to admit. As of this writing, it looks like there's just no (clean) way to do it.

> So, we gave up on the Mac app.

They weren't writing a fully native app. They started with a NextJS web app and then tried to put it inside Electron, a cross-platform toolkit.

All the training data in the world about native app development wouldn't have helped here. They were using a recent JS framework and trying to put it in a relatively recent cross-platform tool. The two parts weren't made to work together so training data likely doesn't exist, other than maybe some small amount of code or issues on GitHub discussing problems with the approach.
by hylaride | 2025-08-09 14:58:03+00:00
Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but these things can’t even browse the modern web (processors can’t handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn’t use encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had to give up on sparc32.

They will eventually just take up space.
by ItsMonkk | 2025-08-09 14:58:25+00:00
The abstract states that there are 2.7% less fast food jobs, not 2.7% less jobs. There might be 2.7% less fast food restaurants as a result of this change, but in their place will be other businesses that employ people of higher than minimum wage. Those businesses might hire the best fast food workers while the average fast food worker continues to be employed doing fast food. As a result, there may be no people who have now become unemployed as a result of this change, and only increases in wages. The data is inconclusive.

Regardless, instead of arguing over which commercial property takes which spot and trying to engineer the perfect fit with the limitations we are dealing with, we should be increasing the amount of places that are zoned for commerce. This will bring increased demand for labor, which will increase wages.
by jdiff | 2025-08-09 15:00:09+00:00
Interesting that the video being used as a showcase is dropping so many frames. Is QuickShell particularly heavy, the system recording particularly anemic, or something else? For the first half of the video I didn't realize QuickShell supported transitions at all and thought it only had hard cuts between different states. It looks like a very interesting project though and a worthy time sink, especially with those transitions being supported.
by m4r71n | 2025-08-09 15:00:19+00:00
Alternate day fasting normally means you eat up to 500 calories on your fasting day, but then eat more than usual on normal days. So on average if you eat 500 one day and 2500 another, that is no different than eating a restricted diet of 1500 every day. The finding here is that the former results in slightly more weight loss than the latter. That restrictions in calorie intake will result in weight loss is a given.
by pbronez | 2025-08-09 15:00:45+00:00
Jeff Geerling just did a video with a cluster of 4 Framework Desktop main boards. He put a decent amount of work into Exo and concluded it’s a VC Rugpull… abandoned as soon as it won some attention.

He also explored several other open source AI scale out libraries, and reported that they’re generally way less mature than tooling for traditional scientific cluster computing.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-clustered-four-fram...
by bobajeff | 2025-08-09 15:01:04+00:00
I've seen a few new languages come along that were inspired by zig's comptime/metaprogramming in the same language concept.

Zig I think has potential but it hasn't stabilized enough yet for broad adoption. That means it'll be awhile before it's built an ecosystem (libraries, engines etc.) that is useful to developers that don't care about language design.