MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nemo44x | 2025-08-29 01:57:18+00:00
Fully aware. At least in a lab. Regardless we know it’s an inverse square law thing and to even get to any sort of “runaway” or even conditions in this article would take such an enormous gain in carbon release (not considering what’s falling back) that it’s not even possible. It’s fantastical.

If it was linear I’d be concerned. But it’s not. So yeah let’s solve other more realistic problems.
by rebane2001 | 2025-08-29 01:57:27+00:00
i have js enabled for webapps such as discord and bluesky - having js disabled by default for sites i haven't visited is very good for limiting attack surface

for sites such as facebook, i don't really use them that often, so i only run js on them when i feel like consenting to it

yes, i use programs/apps, but attack surface and threat models aren't binary, so it's still better to make things more secure
by mannyv | 2025-08-29 01:57:32+00:00
Ugh, the syntax for CSS is just so crappy.

I know like 10-15 different languages, and CSS is by far the hardest to read and understand. It's easier to understand x86 assembly than CSS. CSS is basically pre-tokenized input that drives a renderer, but they sort of went halfway and didn't really make it real tokens or really human-writable.

I'd say that it should take the place of ASN.1 in the RFCs as an example of "what not to do."
by perching_aix | 2025-08-29 01:58:08+00:00
Yes. I consider these to be trivial attributes of what I wrote.

It was basically all part of the point: I don't appreciate the position taken in the blogpost in the OP, as it is willfully dishonest (its author not only admits, but even flaunts this).

This is why I remarked that I'm following in its spirit. All the points you list out are issues I also have in general with discourse like the blogpost, and with derivative discourse spawned by it. I was expecting people to react badly, specifically in order to demonstrate why. Even felt a bit bad about italicizing artwork, and felt it was a bit on the nose in hindsight. Wouldn't quite call it a flamebait, but in a sense I guess it was one.

In the end though, I got some reasonable discussion out of it, a bit to my surprise. Still kind of processing whether this was an exception to my conjectured rule, or how else I should wrestle with it. I ended up restoring a bit of "faith in humanity" for myself, rather than confirming my resignations.

This isn't to say I don't believe or didn't mean what I said though, to be clear. I just presented it in a way I consider malicious (the way the blogpost is written). You seem to consider so too and have reacted now in kind - although it doesn't read like along this same idea. But then maybe I'm just falling for my own trap at this point.
by beeflet | 2025-08-29 01:58:10+00:00
I would be more willing to sacrifice a person at random than myself.

I also didn't say that the ecosystem necessarily had to change instantly. It could even be two sexed organisms of a completely novel species that the ecosystem doesn't rely on.

And is it nessisarially true that people would be commiting suicide if there was a major ecological catastrophe like that? Life goes on, people have it within them the will to find a way to survive. I think it would just look like blade runner 2077 where people are surviving off of bugs and tofu.

Most people in america don't seem to complain about the artificial food now (impossible burgers, HFCS, really most processed food comes to mind).
by incr_me | 2025-08-29 01:59:30+00:00
At some point relatively early in the Soviet revolution, recurring famine was abolished. Famine occurred about once a decade for the entirety of documented history. Then it stopped. The interesting thing isn't how famine occurred in the early 30s (or the 40s to a much lesser extent), it's how it was absolutely prevented from occurring since. Industrialization of agriculture, collectivization, and centralized grain distribution was the solution. You have to admit that it happened. It was the same with the Chinese revolution. My point is that this all happened before "opening up", and that it was part of the logic of socialism.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-08-29 01:59:47+00:00
Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,

> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
by kstrauser | 2025-08-29 02:00:10+00:00
That was exquisitely well put. Nicely done.

I don't envy project managers who are responsible for tracking all our engineering shenanigans and trying to communicate trends to upper management. They have a hard, thankless job that probably needs to be done. But the tooling they so often inflict upon teams (I'm looking at you, Jira), is soul-deadening. Bug trackers are great. As soon as they involve a workflow with statuses more complex than backlog/to-do/doing/review/done, too much of the devs' job seems to involve keeping the task manager happy instead of building software.

I don't know where the happy medium is. I won't claim I know a better way. But I do know I've worked in shops that optimized for getting work done, and I've worked for shops that optimized for tracking how much work is getting done, and the former outdelivers the latter every single time.
by xethos | 2025-08-29 02:01:03+00:00
> I would like to see some other company take a real swing at this product space but with a less strict approach around the hardcore open-everything ideals

That... kind of was what happened. Purism released the Librem 5, and people were shocked they pushed so hard to get the FSF's "Respects Your Freedom" certification.

The Pinephone (and Pro) used a less Free modem, resulting in much lower power draw, but the UX was still, well... Alpha-quality is putting it gently
by robocat | 2025-08-29 02:01:04+00:00
AirBnB usability is terrible. Unfortunately that's where the listings are, so gotta go through the pain. However it doesn't do what I want, and it does a bunch of shit that I don't want (another dddamn notification asking if I want to complete a booking I didn't complete and cancelled out of - and I was only trying to understand their flow).

No easy way to track bookings for a trip - which you would think was essential functionality.

No way to save a search for later (has your last search but the functionality is severely broken).

I'm in New Zealand, and many of our government services are actually reasonably user friendly. I can call our email our tax service and get an answer: our government has worked out that they're asking for money so it's better to make that easy (and not treat you like dirt). Small countries can get usability right, in part because they can make systemic choices that flow through into usability (e.g. capturing the data needed for automating tax returns, e.g. simplifying the tax code so that tax returns are simpler).

The US can't make the UX better because Intuit keep fighting against that.

I hope that AirBnB usability isn't being held up as a golden standard because it is still awful.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-29 02:01:24+00:00
My CS undergrad was in the engineering college and so I had a mandatory engineering seminar that was basically "don't get people killed with your work." We covered Challenger, Hyatt Regency, and some other classic failures. I've mostly avoided working on life-critical software so it's not an immediate concern, but that sense of responsibility still stuck with me.
by genewitch | 2025-08-29 02:02:28+00:00
so uh, sglang recommends $330,000 worth of GPUs (minimum) per ebay prices.

vLLM i'm not sure about, i can't really tell what it does from docs.vllm.ai site. So i'm not sure you conveyed what, at least, i thought you were trying to; which is that llama.cpp isn't good enough for "home" use. Like, with a 3090 or 4000 series consumer GPU.

If you want to donate some L40S to the cause, i'll send you my P.O. box info
by cherrycherry98 | 2025-08-29 02:02:47+00:00
Agreed, as an OO scripting language it's lovely, especially compared to Perl where the OO features never meshed quite right. Going back 10 years ago it had a number of things that were novel compared to other languages: literals for common data structures, context managers ("with" statement), first class functions, comprehensions, generators.

On the other hand duck typing is largely a joke. Letting functions take anything as an argument and then just assuming it's a duck with the methods you want is no way to write a robust system. Performance wise you're boxed into a corner. The slow runtime will have you writing native code in another language, complicating your project. The GIL will have you jumping through hoops to work around.

As an offline data exploration and research tool limited to an individual or a small team, or for writing small utilities, I totally get it. For anything mission critical I'd much rather be in something like Java or C# where the typing situation is stronger, the performance is going to be much better, I have better access to threads if I need them, the reasons for dropping into native code are fewer, and the cross platform support works more seamlessly without additional layers like Docker.
by tw_wankette | 2025-08-29 02:02:49+00:00
I have a Lexus LX, one of the most expensive Lexus vehicles ever made. I love it. It was made in Japan.

Tesla panel gaps and quality are fine. They had some early issues, but the damn things are basically body panels hung off of almost entirely cast chunks of metal. There is not a lot of room for wiggle. If anything, they're so we'll integrated that they're hard to repair after a crash.
by godelski | 2025-08-29 02:02:50+00:00
It's possible but also difficult to jam radio. That's part of why programs like Radio Free Asia[0,1] exist. Even if you can't broadcast from inside a territory you can broadcast from outside. It can be jammed but it is a tough cat and mouse game and jamming isn't precise. So when you jam there are causalities. Not to mention that jamming can be quite expensive.

I'm not saying that makes the problem easy, but I'll say that jamming isn't a very strong defense.

Though the bigger issue here is probably bandwith. It's hard to be both long range and data dense. There's probably easier ways to distribute this. Hell, both Koreas are known to transport different things via balloons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

[1] It is also why projects like Tor and Signal get funding from RFA. Maybe the US doesn't want encrypted services here, but if anything, it's for the same reason they do want encrypted services in other countries.
by a_vanderbilt | 2025-08-29 02:03:09+00:00
Given the advancements of EVs, the death of the muscle car was inevitable. They are almost universally faster, more performant, more efficient, and more "cool" in their designs. Do gear heads dislike them? Sure, but they aren't going to be the market forever. As energy costs rise, natural market forces will shift the demands of the buyer.
by labanimalster | 2025-08-29 02:04:12+00:00
The paper has a critical statistical flaw buried in the methods: when their gut RNA-seq data showed no significant changes after proper FDR correction for multiple testing, they simply abandoned the correction and used P≤0.01 instead. This is textbook p-hacking.

While the multi-organ approach is interesting, this reads more like a fishing expedition that found patterns in noise rather than robust biological findings.
Show HN: Metapodcast.net to make podcast exploration effortless
by lamecoder | 2025-08-29 02:04:33+00:00
With advanced search capabilities (semantic search, RAG) MetaPodcast's goal is to make podcast listening experience into an interactive journey of knowledge and discovery. MetaPodcast is building an ecosystem that not only aggregates podcasts but also extracts, analyzes and presents valuable insights to users.
by fluoridation | 2025-08-29 02:04:49+00:00
So the user generates the ID for each site he visits? What prevents them from generating arbitrary IDs?

The only way I can imagine this working is:

1. You go to the government and request to have a digital ID generated.

2. The government generates a random number.

3. The government issues a request to an NGO to generate a new cryptographic object based on the random number, and receives back a retrieval number.

4. The government gives you the retrieval number, which you can use to get your digital ID from the NGO.

This way, the government only has the mapping between your identity and a random number, and the NGO only has the mapping between the random number and the generated object, with no possibility to deanonymize it because you don't present any ID to get it. Obviously, there must be no information exchange between the government and the NGO.
by keepamovin | 2025-08-29 02:04:56+00:00
Do you still have access to GitHub?

If so you can run BrowserBox in a GitHub action runner exposed via IP or ngrok tunnel. That will give you a browser in a free region. Easy set up via workflow.

You’ll need a ngrok API key and a BrowserBox key. Hit us up: sales@dosaygo.com for a short term key at a discount if it works for you.

We will offer keys for free to any journalists in censored regions.
by chidg | 2025-08-29 02:05:08+00:00
Hi, not well educated on the details of VPNs and network security so this may be a basic question, but - VPNs are used regularly by corporates to enable secure intranet access to people offsite, etc - surely completely blocking VPNs or detecting and punishing VPN users is severely detrimental to business and not something countries would want to do carte blanche? How does this work?
by qianli_cs | 2025-08-29 02:06:56+00:00
I've been building an integration [1] with Pydantic AI and the experience has been great. Questions usually get answered within a few hours, and the team is super responsive and supportive for external contributors. The public API is easy to extend for new functionality (in my case, durable agents).

Its agent model feels similar to OpenAI's: flexible and dynamic without needing to predefine a DAG. Execution is automatically traced and can be exported to Logfire, which makes observability pretty smooth too. Looking forward to their upcoming V1 release.

Shameless plug: I've been working on a DBOS [2] integration into Pydantic-AI as a lightweight durable agent solution.

[1] https://github.com/pydantic/pydantic-ai/pull/2638

[2] https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-29 02:07:40+00:00
> You said you were "advised to adjust" your account. Again, I apologize if I come across as ignorant, but what kind of adjustments?

A few months ago, a teller offered to move my savings account to a higher interest version. I just had to maintain a minimum balance. A similar thing happened when I had my first summer job before college: A teller offered me a higher-interest money market account, it was just limited to something like 4 withdrawals a month.

> Do you have an examples of any of those categories?

I'm not an expert in startup finance, but I'll try my best.

The mistake that Mitchell made was kind of like keeping all your liquid assets in a checking account. Imagine if, instead of investing in a 401k (or similar,) retail investments, CDs, savings accounts, ect; you just put your entire life savings in a single checking account. Not only would you sacrifice a massive amount of interest, you would probably lose FDIC protection as your account grew, you'd be at risk of someone forging checks, and you'd be at risk of debit card fraud.

Startups often talk about their "runway." This is how long the startup can pay their employees, rent, and other bills; if they have no income. Don't quote me, but this is usually something like (roughly) 2-5 years.

Now, keeping the "runway" money in a single account is kind of, to put it bluntly, dumb. (It's like if you kept all your liquid assets in a single checking account.) Most of it should go to low-risk investments, like CDs and other high-interest savings accounts. I'm sure Silicon Valley Bank has a very straightforward way (for startups) to do this, that Chase doesn't have.

> What would I want from a bank account as a tech startup, versus a non-tech startup, versus a restaurant, that the bank wouldn't already give me when I sign up for a normal business account?

Remember the term "runway." Restaurants are typically profitable from day one, or become profitable quickly. They spend roughly as much as they take in. Startups often run at a loss for many years before they become profitable.

Likewise, a restaurant might have to pay back a loan that it used to buy equipment, renovate, or purchase the business. Startups hold onto their investment as "runway" instead of paying back a loan.

I'm going to assume that Silicon Valley Bank has products built around the fact that a startup has a large sum of money that it spends very slowly, versus a restaurant that needs loans and spends money as quickly as it comes in.
by kijin | 2025-08-29 02:08:26+00:00
Which countries you need to avoid depends on your threat model. For example, there is need to avoid the USA if all you're trying to do is bypass the Chinese firewall. There might even be a legitimate use case for pretending to have a UK IP address.

Since OP is in Southeast Asia, a VPS in JP or SG will probably hit a decent balance between latency and censorship avoidance.
by quacked | 2025-08-29 02:08:36+00:00
This isn't a failure of PowerPoint. I work for NASA and we still use it all the time, and I'll assure anyone that the communication errors are rife regardless of what medium we're working in. The issue is differences in the way that in-the-weeds engineers and managers interpret technical information, which is alluded to in the article but the author still focuses on the bullets and the PowerPoint, as if rewriting similar facts in a technical paper would change everything.

My own colleagues fall victim to this all the time (luckily I do not work in any capacity where someone's life is directly on the line as a result of my work.) Recently, a colleague won an award for helping managers make a decision about a mission parameter, but he was confused because they chose a parameter value he didn't like. His problem is that, like many engineers, he thought that providing the technical context he discovered that led him to his conclusion was as effective as presenting his conclusion. It never is; if you want to be heard by managers, and really understood even by your colleagues, you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you.

I've seen this over and over again, and I'm starting to think it's a personality trait. Engineers are gossiping among themselves, saying "X will never work". They get to the meeting with the managers and present "30 different analyses showing X is marginally less effective than Y and Z" instead of just throwing up a slide that says "X IS STUPID AND WE SHOULDN'T DO IT." Luckily for me, I'm not a very good engineer, so when I'm along for the ride I generally translate well into Managerese.
by in_cahoots | 2025-08-29 02:10:20+00:00
The other part doesn't change anything at all. Here you go:

Q1: I looked at only one of a pair of two randomly selected children and it was a girl. What is the probability there are two girls?

Q2: I looked at both of two randomly selected children and at least one of the pair of children is a girl. What is the probability there are two girls?
by deanmoriarty | 2025-08-29 02:10:42+00:00
You’ll get downvoted but in my experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, this is true.

A mid-size US tech company I know well went fully remote after a lot of insistence from the workforce, prior to the pandemic they were fully in office.

Soon enough they started hiring remotely from EU, and now the vast majority of their technical folks are from there. The only US workers remaining are mostly GTM/sales. I personally heard the founder saying “why should we pay US comp when we can get extremely good talent in EU for less than half the cost”. EU workers, on average, also tend to not switch job as frequently, so that’s a further advantage for the company.

Once you adapt to remote-only, you can scoop some amazing talent in Poland/Ukraine/Serbia/etc for $50k a year.
by lukev | 2025-08-29 02:10:55+00:00
Things are moving too fast to meaningfully talk about unit economics here.

My consumer-level MacBook Pro can run inference locally on models that would have been state-of-the-art anywhere just a little over a year ago.

Yet, hosted inference is definitely useful and also can benefit from economies of scale.

Also: model training is expensive and the economic reasons for doing so are complex (otherwise why release open weights?)

This is an high dimensional space, and unit economics are predicated on reducing to a few meaningful dimensions.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-29 02:11:11+00:00
> We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

Only two parties (of practical importance), each with its power highly centralized (one perhaps more than the other), isn't actually very democratically friendly in terms of choice. Or policy idea evolution/recombination. And from a "democracy" PR perspective, it's not going so well either.

A healthy democracy, where ideas and candidates have more sources and competition, would be much more likely to be development friendly/capable/consistent.
by tptacek | 2025-08-29 02:11:30+00:00
No, I don't think this is accurate. You have to look at both the cost and the benefit. If you're an AI scraper, it's literally just "what does the marginal next token of training data cost me" --- the answer is: the same as the marginal next token of content costs a reader.

Tavis Ormandy went into more detail on the math here, but it's not great!
by tptacek | 2025-08-29 02:12:52+00:00
No? These kinds of analyses all seem to rely on the notion that the LLM-caller needs to accept whatever output the LLM provides. In practice, they discard all the outputs that don't compile, and then a further subset of the ones that don't --- those outputs that aren't instantly clear to the caller.

My intuition for the problem here is that people are fixated on the nondeterminism of the LLM itself, which is of limited importance to the actual problem domain of code generation. The LLM might spit out ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics! It's true! The LLM is completely nondeterministic. But nothing like that is ever going to get merged into `main`.

It's fine if you want to go on about how bad "vibe coding" is, with LLM-callers that don't bother to read LLM output, because they're not competent. But here we're assuming an otherwise competent developer. You can say the vibe coder is the more important phenomenon, but the viber doesn't implicate the halting problem.