MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by komali2 | 2025-08-15 02:10:49+00:00
> when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it

I strongly disagree.

> No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.

I believe we have enough evidence now to indicate that it is in fact normal.

Americans believe their constitution is written about this - aggregation of power inevitably leading to tyranny, thus such aggregations must be prevented. The contradiction is believing a bureaucratized aggregation of power (the United States government or individual state governments) would function as an effective regulation. We have 250 years of evidence now that it does not. 250 years, and a significant portion of the time a large portion of the population was enslaved. Half the time, more than half the population couldn't even vote. In living memory, portions of the population were marched into concentration camps. Actually, that's happening again. 250 years and the largest per capita prison population.

The experiment was successful - now we know these systems don't work.

Time to trust the American instinct's true origins, in an enlightenment triggered by Western confrontation with indigenous American ideology, best described as "anarchism." Most values Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding can be traced back to this root of American history, when colonists were intermingling with indigenous Americans.
by tptacek | 2025-08-15 02:11:40+00:00
So, we've surfaced a disagreement, because I don't think you need something like taint tracking. I think the security boundary between an LLM context that takes untrusted data (from, e.g., tickets) and a sensitive context (that can, e.g., make database queries) is essentially no different than the boundary between the GET/POST args in a web app and a SQL query.

It's not a trivial boundary, but it's one we have a very good handle on.
by drewbeck | 2025-08-15 02:11:50+00:00
It depends what you want LLMs for, or what you think they should be for.

Imo you’re correct that they’re good enough if you scope your expectations appropriately. The problem is that the LLMs themselves don’t have any concept of their own limitations, leading to a kind of expectation creep. “Hey the bot was pretty good at helping me troubleshoot my fridge, lemme ask it for the names of the first 12 presidents I’m sure it’ll get that right.”

I think expectations and failure states for humans are far far easier to understand and suss out than for LLMs, and this is one of the robots’ biggest problems.
by pornel | 2025-08-15 02:12:14+00:00
This is a generic smart pointer. It had to be designed and verified manually, but that line of code has been written once 8 years ago, and nobody had to remember to write this FFI glue or even call this method since. It makes the public API automatically safe for all uses of all weak refs of all GTK types.

The Zig version seems to be a fix for one crash in a destructor of a particular window type. It doesn't look like a systemic solution preventing weak refs crashes in general.
by unscaled | 2025-08-15 02:12:55+00:00
Perhaps the biggest issue with the 737 MAX was lack of documentation. Boeing consciously chose to completely omit several new features (most notoriously MCAS) from the pilot manuals in order to make it seems like nothing important was changed that would require retraining 737 NG pilots on a simulator.

In a sense, this is far worse than what most tech companies do since it is a life-and-death issue and Boeing has made a very conscious effort to hide details here, rather than just being lazy.
by kazinator | 2025-08-15 02:13:03+00:00
> We really shouldn't be taking chemicals used on animals for veteran purposes and use them on humans too.

While I totally agree in principle, the specific substance in question (methylene blue) is used on humans already (or should I add was used, at the time of the 1933 study), and for a related emergency purpose: fixing hemoglobin that is poisoned in a certain way, giving rise to a condition called methemoglobinemia.

> And now this whole methylene blue thing, RFK takes methylene blue.

I have no idea about that; I don't follow tabloid stuff.

Methylene blue isn't a now thing; it's been known for a hundred years or more.

> there is no way on earth it has a medicinal purpose

You might be in for a surprise when you do a 15 second web search on it.

RFK playing around with methylene blue doesn't mean anything. If he happens to ascribing to it properties it doesn't have and using it for situations for which it has not been proven, he's engaging in dangerous quackery.

People kill themselves with fentanyl, yet it's an important drug, and on the World Health's Organization list of Essential Medicines: https://list.essentialmeds.org/ (scroll down to the F section).

Oh, look what else is in this list of essential medicines! Methylthioninium chloride. A.k.a. methylene blue.

Yet here you are, claiming that there is no way it has a medicinal purpose?! But you're sure you are smarter than that RFK.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-08-15 02:13:14+00:00
> I think other people need the rich’s money.

There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference and even worse nobody will be rich once you try take from them. That experiment has literally been tried dozens and dozens of times with 100% failure rate. Economies are organic organisms and your type of ideas as cyanide.

Please educate yourself and stop believing in fairy tales. Socialism is also extremely unethical and even evil from religious perspectives.

If you need a quick starter guide you can read

https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-th...

to get some basics.

I’d be curious what educational system you went through that failed to teach the dark evil and catastrophic consequences of your 100% marginal tax rate type ideas.
by lyall | 2025-08-15 02:13:24+00:00
When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing.

Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them.

It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.
by const_cast | 2025-08-15 02:14:39+00:00
You can "just use" KDE too. The default are actually less insane than gnome, it's easier to use.

The idea that more functionality makes software less usable makes no sense to me. No, it's more usable.

Its like when people argue that iOS not allowing anything other than safari is a good thing.

Okay... how? Because if you like safari, nothing changes for you. You just keep using it. You wouldn't even be able to tell.

Similarly, if you like KDE you can just... use it. You don't actually have to change anything. There's no gun to your head. If you're the type of person who just takes software and uses it, then great - you don't need Gnome for that. KDE is actually better at that, IMO.
by rgovostes | 2025-08-15 02:15:58+00:00
I've spent a fair amount of time on K4, and my conclusion is that it's simply a poor puzzle. At this point 24 of 97 characters have been revealed, and yet there's seemingly still not enough information pointing to how the known plaintext corresponds to the ciphertext. Over the decades everything reasonable has been tried and eliminated, which means the solution is likely to be unreasonable.
by tzs | 2025-08-15 02:16:19+00:00
There was an amusing story in the July 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine called "The Merchant of Stratford" about what it would be like for people who were visited by time travelers from the future. The Internet Archive has that issue [1].

Here's a summary from memory (which probably has some errors since I read the story in 1979).

It's about the first time traveler. They decided the first trip will be to visit Shakespeare.

Shakespeare has no problems accepting that he's being visited by a time traveler, and asks what gifts the traveler brings.

The traveler is a bit confused, so Shakespeare explains that the early ones all bring gifts. The traveler has brought some gifts, including a nicely bound volume of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare looks at it, comments on the nice binding, says something about maybe he can sell it, then decides probably not, and tosses it on a pile of other such volumes brought by other time travelers.

The first time traveler is now getting pretty confused, and says something like "but I'm the first time traveler!", to which Shakespeare answer "but not the first to arrive". This is something often overlooked in time travel stories--just because you are the first to leave for a given destination doesn't mean you are the first to arrive.

Shakespeare mentions that he's frequently bothered by time travelers, but at least doesn't have it as bad as Jesus--that guy can barely do anything without a time traveler showing up. Shakespeare explains he knows because a time traveler thought it would be interesting to take Shakespeare to meet Jesus once. All the great figures of history are frequently visited.

Somewhere in there Shakespeare provides some drink and tries to calm down the inexperienced time traveler, who is freaking out over all this. Shakespeare is an old hand at dealing with newbie time traveler freak outs.

Then a bunch of other time travelers arrive, but not to see Shakespeare. They are reporters from the first time traveler's future, there to interview him about his historic visit to Shakespeare.

[1] https://archive.org/details/Asimovs_v03n07_1979-07/page/n123...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-15 02:17:19+00:00
> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now.

I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished.

> It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it.

It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations!

In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.
by dodos | 2025-08-15 02:19:09+00:00
The one thing I noticed when I was focusing on learning to write is that it helped me a lot with differentiating between similar characters when reading. I forget which ones now, but there are many characters that differ by a single radical and have similar meanings, knowing how to write each one helped me quite a bit there, but overall I rarely write anything other than my name and address now that I live in Japan.
by bobthepanda | 2025-08-15 02:19:45+00:00
I mean, we saw this when traffic disappeared during COVID and red light running shot up significantly. https://info.oregon.aaa.com/why-did-crashes-spike-during-cov...

Car detection is certainly not a standard feature of stoplights in the US, and they represent an ongoing expense since you have to maintain the detection loops, pay an outside vendor for software to maintain and modify stoplights, etc. A roundabout is more or less installed and done.
by freehorse | 2025-08-15 02:20:13+00:00
Running this on your mac takes less of the effort of writing this comment (assuming you have homebrew installed)

1. open terminal.app

2. run:

brew install llama.cpp llama-cli -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-270m-GGUF -c 0 -fa -p "hello"
by timr | 2025-08-15 02:20:19+00:00
Being able to read but not write Kanji is so common that it's a meme amongst Japanese people -- to the point where it's a game. For example, here you can watch some Japanese television people play a game where they compete to write words in 10 seconds or less:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw

I (and every other learner) have the same problem. It's not special, and has nothing to do with aphantasia.
by rao-v | 2025-08-15 02:21:26+00:00
Not at Google (anymore), but Gemma3n is a radically different (and very cool) architecture. The MatFormer approach essentially lets you efficiently change how many parameters of the model you use while inferencing. The 2B model they released is just the sub model embedded in the original 4B model. You can also fiddle with the model and pull a 2.5 or 3B version pu also!

This is a more traditional LLM architecture (like the original Gemma 3 4B but smaller) and trained on an insane (for the size) number of tokens.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-15 02:21:35+00:00
I prefer physical media. However, it can sometimes be a chore to start the movie! Each disc is different. Some discs use non-standard methods to access the home menu. Some require that you at least skip past all the previews at the beginning. The worst discs require several minutes of fiddling in addition to finding and inserting the disc before you can watch it. Compare this with double-clicking an mkv and having it just...start.
by energy123 | 2025-08-15 02:21:38+00:00
Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-15 02:22:12+00:00
I guess CO kills you because it sticks to a protein (Hemoglobin), this is a protein that it binds even tighter to.

What I find hilarious though is that my RSS reader loves to show me articles about ways of turning the harmful gas CO2 into the useful gas CO, back when I was a kid it was the other way around!
by nelox | 2025-08-15 02:22:39+00:00
Even worst case sources not claiming anywhere near 10:1.

As of early–mid August 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports around 61,600 total deaths in Gaza since the war began, without distinguishing between civilians and militants. The Israeli military’s most recent on-record statement (January 2025) claims it has killed about 20,000 Hamas operatives. Subtracting that claim from the total suggests roughly 41,600 civilians have died, an estimated civilian-to-militant ratio of about 2 to 1, though if lower militant-death estimates from independent analysts (10,000–15,000) are used, the ratio could be closer to 3–4 to 1. Both sides’ figures are contested, and humanitarian agencies such as the UN caution that these numbers are unverified and incomplete due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data in the conflict.

Sources: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/8/7/israel-hama... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/31/gaza-war-isr... https://ochaopt.org/updates/humanitarian-snapshot-casualties...
by eru | 2025-08-15 02:23:11+00:00
> We had a teacher years ago who said something that remains true until today: "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

That's more of an aspiration than a statement of fact.

Eg I'd happily have organised a crowdfunding to give Vladimir Putin a few dozen billion dollars to bribe him away from starting a war. And if you look at Russia's finances that's effectively what happened: he (and even more his oligarchs) predictably lost untold billions in revenue and profit for this war.

Also, migration from poor to rich countries increases workers' pay so much, that you could charge them a hefty sum for the privilege and they would still benefit from coming. However voters by and large don't like it, even if you were to distribute the proceeds amongst them (as a "citizen's dividend" or whatever).

They have non-monetary reasons.

See https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d... for an interesting collection of historical cases drawn from such diverse sources as Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa, Malaysia, Nazi Germany.
by tmnvix | 2025-08-15 02:24:13+00:00
> Counterterrorism systems generate far more leads than they act on, and those leads are filtered by human review and corroborating intelligence.

From Wikipedia on Lavender:

> The Guardian quoted one source: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time."
by tough | 2025-08-15 02:24:20+00:00
if anything i would do differently, i'd try things only machines can reliably do.

unless the llm and the design for it is necessarily adversarial, not even going into red teaming or jailbreaks.

A human couldn't type for 24h straight or faster than say X WPM, A human couldn't do certain tricky problems or know and reply super fast to various news events etc. Search/training date seems important factor too to tie in.

but yeah overall if the time is infinite you can come up with some new way to find out, kinda becomes a cat and mouse games then like software security nowadays
by miggy | 2025-08-15 02:24:35+00:00
Author here. Thanks for sharing these thoughts. You’re right that DSR, ASN-based routing, SRV records, and other lower-layer approaches are important in certain setups.

This post is focused primarily on Layer 7 load balancing, connection and request routing based on application-level information, so it doesn’t go into Layer 3/4 techniques like DSR or network-level optimizations. Those are certainly worth covering in a broader series that spans the full stack.
by lutusp | 2025-08-15 02:24:39+00:00
A key turning point in Woz's life was when he crashed his Beechcraft Bonanza, fully loaded with friends and luggage, from a runway that was too short for the aircraft load and air temperature (high temperatures require longer takeoff rolls). Woz also wasn't rated for the aircraft, but I'm not sure that really made much difference, compared to the allegedly skipped weight & balance calculation, which if performed would likely have predicted the outcome.

This accident is said to have changed Woz's outlook on life, but when I knew him years earlier he already seemed very focused on worthwhile things, like excellent hardware designs and little interest in accumulating money, compared for example to Steve Jobs.

When I heard that Woz quit Apple to become a schoolteacher in a small California town, I though to myself there aren't words of praise sufficient to describe that choice. Still think so.
by amy_petrik | 2025-08-15 02:24:46+00:00
>Globalization is fundamentally enabled by the US Navy and US military supremacy guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.

>This has not been the historical Norm. It's actually historical anomaly caused by the power vacuum of world war II, and secondarily by the fact that the Cold war was between the US and maritime power and Russia, who are effectively landlocked.

>This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end.

Oh here friend, I think you forget to add a citation to all that, here's your citation so people know where the idea come from (not you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zeihan
by mosmn | 2025-08-15 02:24:55+00:00
I built Vezz me, a browser extension that lets you interact with any webpage using AI. The motivation came from how often I found myself copying and pasting text into ChatGPT or translation tools while reading, which disrupted my workflow. I wanted a way to get explanations, translations, or summaries directly on the page without losing context.

Vezz me works by letting you highlight text, press a shortcut, and instantly receive AI-powered responses. It functions on articles, PDFs, research papers, or basically any text you can select in a browser. The goal is to make learning and understanding content faster, whether for language learning, research, or professional reading. By keeping the AI in the same context as the content, it minimizes cognitive switching and helps you stay focused.

I built this personally and have tested it in real-world scenarios, and it’s ready for others to try. I’d love to hear feedback on how it could fit into different workflows, any technical improvements, or other use cases people find valuable. This is an early-stage project, and discussion and constructive criticism from the community would be very helpful.
by xdfgh1112 | 2025-08-15 02:26:13+00:00
I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.
by noirchen | 2025-08-15 02:27:02+00:00
Banning books is not something new, but I think Florida has some 'unique' criteria when banning certain books. One example I know is Jackson County, FL. once banned 1984 for being "pro-communist". In most places of the world, 1984 is considered anti-totalitarian, and anti-communist in quite a few countries (not China, where people can buy the book without any hassle). I totally get it, but Jackson County seems to be the only place that sees the book to be procommuist.
by sahilly | 2025-08-15 02:27:02+00:00
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by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-15 02:27:10+00:00
Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically.

They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.

But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.
by runjake | 2025-08-15 02:27:23+00:00
Merlin ran 43folders.com[1]. That domain name was a reference to GTD's tickler files[2].

Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.

1. http://www.43folders.com/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifehacker#History

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani
by leopoldj | 2025-08-15 02:27:32+00:00
google/gemma-3-4b-it is one of the smallest multimodal models I know. Works well in a 16GB GPU. Works slowly in a 8GB GPU. It can even be fine tuned [1], which where the real power comes from.

1. https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/core/huggingface_vision_fin...