MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-25 00:04:13+00:00
Just Friday I was dealing with a request from purchasing asking if a laptop with an ultra-low-power 15W TDP CPU and an iGPU with "8GB DDR4 graphics memory (shared) was a suitable replacement for one with a 75W CPU (But also a Core i9) and NVidia RTX4000 mobile 130W GPU in one of our lead engineer's CAD workstations.

No, those are not the same. There's a reason one's the size of a pizza box and costs $5k and the other's the size of an iPad and costs $700.

And yes, I much prefer to build tower workstations with proper thermals and full-sized GPUs, that's the main machine at their desk, but sometimes they need a device they can take with them.
by immibis | 2025-08-25 00:04:53+00:00
I think that freedom includes, for example, the right not to be shot dead. When someone is using speech to cause people to be shot dead then we have to weigh which freedom is more important and I happen to think that not being shot is more important. If there not also your opinion, fine, you can go to America where speech is considered more important.

You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-25 00:06:39+00:00
Tell me you don't know the first thing about engineering without telling me...

This is the engineering process. If you put five engineers of any discipline in a room, you will get five different answers. Every contractor and architect has their own ideas about how things should be done.

Furthermore, we do build houses this way, even in the modern age with building codes. The builder is going to do whatever they can get away with and this is a universal truth. The only reason bridges are held to such high standards is because of the monetary cost of a collapse.

The "norms" are not what you think they are. They're tradition, they're "we've always done it this way". What you're talking about are laws written for public safety. Those laws only exist because we tried and failed to do things a certain way and the cost in money or lives was untenable.

> "I recognize a good solution when I see it" is just not good enough for a serious engineering discipline.

You're conflating engineering with science. A scientist will rigorously test and validate, but a huge part of engineering is just recognizing a good solution. Of course there's a lot of testing and validation in engineering as well, but not with the kind of rigor you're implying.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 00:06:45+00:00
> Nobody joined a federal law enforcement agency expecting the president to utilize them for political goals. And for sure nobody joining the national guard was expecting that.

I don't buy this. These folks literally swear an oath. National Guard troops are literally flag bearers. Those US flag patches on their uniforms mean that they don't get to decide that an order that is otherwise lawful is "political" in nature and therefore invalid. If they don't want to do their jobs, as ordered, they should resign. These are not private employees, they are public servants.
by pythonaut_16 | 2025-08-25 00:06:55+00:00
"Even if it never reaches orbit reliably"

How is that a greater achievement than Falcon 9 and reusable boosters, especially Falcon Heavy? Like sure if Starship lives up to its goals it will be a greater achievement. But how would an ambitious project that fails its most fundamental task (reaching orbit reliably) be a greater achievement than one that actually does meet its goals and was (and is) still incredibly revoluationary?
by coldpie | 2025-08-25 00:08:18+00:00
I understand that perspective, but I can't agree with it. There are many important and meaningful jobs out there that those people could be doing, which don't involve giving financial & political power to one of the worst people alive today. Choosing to work for him after the many, many, many red lines Elon Musk has crossed taints all of the work those people are doing.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-25 00:08:58+00:00
There is no reason. An index is the proper solution for dealing with <1K tasks per project, conservatively. (On modern SSD's you'd probably still be plenty fast for <100K tasks.)

In fact, the query would return the result straight from counting the project_id index entries, never even needing to scan the table itself (as the author acknowledges).

If you're really dealing with many, many thousands of tasks per project, then materialized views are going to be just as slow to update as to view. They're not "magic". The standard performant solution would be to keep a num_tasks field that was always incremented or decremented in a transaction together with inserting or deleting a task row. That will actually be lightning fast.

Materialized views aren't even supported in many common relational databases. They're a very particular solution that has very particular tradeoffs. Unfortunately, this article doesn't go into the tradeoffs at all, and picks a bad example where they're not even an obviously good solution in the first place.
by djoldman | 2025-08-25 00:09:52+00:00
It's relatively straightforward to immediately suspend test takers for a semester and expel them on a second infraction.

Administrations won't allow it because they just don't care enough. It's a pain dealing with complaining parents and students.

In any case, cheating has existed since forever. There is nothing much new about cheating in in-class exams now with AI than before without.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-25 00:10:50+00:00
> attention is the most valuable currency

"Grass-fed body mass is the most valuable currency", said the rancher to the fenced-in herd of beef-cows.

Nah, that's what someone with power says in order to distract you from realizing you don't actually have nearly as much. Attention has never been a good substitute for power, or thousands of years of human civilization would be very very different.

There's a fine line between stoicism and self-defeating tactics.
by itishappy | 2025-08-25 00:11:53+00:00
Only because they haven't honestly tried (for reuse). We've seen Superheavy caught successfully with engines that could probably be reused, and we've seen Starships lightly splashdown with engines that could potentially be reused if they weren't filled with saltwater. I'd agree that they're way behind schedule and that recent launches have been disappointing but they've demonstrated their components. I believe reliability will come in time, the question is how much time.
by avidiax | 2025-08-25 00:11:58+00:00
> able to be retrieved by yourself in defence

You are suggesting a level of due process that is wildly optimistic for most companies. If you are an IC, such blame games are entirely resolved behind closed doors by various managers and maybe PMs. Your manager may or may not ask you for supporting documentation, and may or may not be able to present it before the "retrospective" is concluded.
by imoverclocked | 2025-08-25 00:13:16+00:00
To be fair, the same people benefiting from large government subsidies to develop private space travel are the same one(s) that actively gutted social programs and entire government agencies that provide value to the general population.

NASA is cool and undergoing massive defunding. Education is already under-funded and now under attack. Science is being actively squashed and replaced with religion yet somehow, you think space travel will become more likely?
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-25 00:13:22+00:00
There is no sense in which we're destined for the stars.

We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.

So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.

And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.
by MartinMcGirk | 2025-08-25 00:13:45+00:00
I’ll take the other side of that argument. Without human space flight inspiring the public by pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve, you would never get the public on board to get the political buy-in to send unmanned craft to anywhere.

If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
by orwin | 2025-08-25 00:13:49+00:00
Pray that before 2026, you won't have had any DOJ approved FBI raids to Trump political enemies.

How I guess it will happen: first target 'close ennemies': same party, small public recognition, but opposite views on specific policies you want to denounce. No charge filed, just good old intimidation: raid the home, take the files an computer, then say "sorry we didn't find anything" after a few months.

My mother hosted political refugees from Russia and Kazakhstan, I've heard a lot of story, and that shit seems to always starts the same way.
by metalman | 2025-08-25 00:14:06+00:00
it is as extreme as I make it out to be in many places in eygypt, links from your link

city of 400000, where it does not rain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asyut#Climate

ancient heart of eygypt, modern city of 250000 where the rain is a sort of academic thing that can be proven scientificly, but will never get the ground wet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor#Climate
by doug_durham | 2025-08-25 00:14:46+00:00
I wonder though. One of the superpowers of LLMs is code reading. I say the tools are better and reading than writing. It is very easy to get comprehensive documentation for any code base and get understanding by asking questions. At that point does it matter that there is a living developer who understands the code? If an arbitrary person with knowledge of the technology stack can get up to speed quickly is it important to have the original developers around any more?
by refulgentis | 2025-08-25 00:18:42+00:00
I am amenable to this argument (am GP), however I do think this is unique.

AI is transformative here, in toto, in the total effect on cheating, because its the first time you can feasibly "transfer" the question in with a couple muscle-memory taps. I'm no expert, but I assume there's a substantive difference between IDing someone doing 200 thumb taps for ~40 word question versus 2.

(part I was missing personally was that they can easily have a second phone. same principle as my little bathroom-break-cheatsheet in 2005 - can't find what's undeclared, they're going to be averse to patting kids down)
by foobarian | 2025-08-25 00:20:15+00:00
You know what burns me about it? Like it or not, he did set the hard-driving culture of that and other companies he runs. And what's even worse, that kind of culture gets results. I think at the end of the day I just have to quietly respect it, and all the folks putting in the long hours, and be thankful that there exist companies out there that don't demand this where we can still earn a decent living.
by AngryData | 2025-08-25 00:20:32+00:00
Reminds me when I installed a drain field for a guy that had to have trees in the woods cleared and dug up for space and everything pumped 100 feet up a hill to it due to the terrain. Just as I was finishing up he asked when he could park his 40 foot boat on top of it and was outraged when I said he can't/shouldn't do that, he then declined the offer to have us clear more area before we loaded up all the equipment. All I could imagine as I drove away was the river of shit flowing back down the hill to his house in a few years.
by bmitch3020 | 2025-08-25 00:21:07+00:00
Blog author (and OCI maintainer) here. The request to get a bearer token sends the password or PAT using the basic auth header, base64 encoded, but otherwise clear-text. That's the request the www-authenticate header is triggering. Once the token is received, the registry uses that to verify access, and that eventually expires. But the attacker isn't getting the token, they are requesting the credentials that would be used to acquire a bearer auth token.
by bigiain | 2025-08-25 00:21:08+00:00
I'm not sure how many people would get any use out of a burner phone that they need to be 50 miles away from home top use?

One of my hobbies is Recreational Paranoia. I used to have (probably still do in a drawer here somewhere) a 3G WiFi hotspot, with an Arduino and GPS module that powered down the battery within a few km of home (actually, within a few km of a public library that's a few km from home, so plotting all the power up & down locations would centre on the library not my house). I could then leave home with that in my backpack and instead of my phone take a wifi only device - I mostly used an iPod Touch but also sometimes Android tablets. I wouldn't get actual phone calls sir SMS that way, but those are both rare for me, most of my social comms are via Signal which worked just fine.

I figure wifi cellular hotspots are "not easily identified as a burner phone" and that intermittent use of them is the most common case. It would still have been able to be tracked as being a thing that turned on and off in my surrounding suburbs, and I'm sure I slipped up last least a few times and had it with me while I also had my phone with me - but like I said this was for my hobby, not running an international drug cartel or doing journalism critical of Saudi Royal houses...
by phil21 | 2025-08-25 00:21:15+00:00
Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.

Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.

A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.

Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.

At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.

When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
by scosman | 2025-08-25 00:23:05+00:00
Notarization isn’t called for the vast majority of builds on the vast majority of build systems.

Your local dev builds don’t call it or require it.

It’s only needed for release builds, where you want it notorized (required on iOS, highly recommended for MacOS). I make a Mac app and I call the notarization service once or twice a month.
by alwa | 2025-08-25 00:23:39+00:00
In gp’s defense—I interpreted their formulation to suggest vaccine skeptics applied effort to an heroic degree/amount, not that the effort was of heroic virtue. That is, that those people applied ridiculously high levels of effort to searching for an effect, and still did not find an effect.

As distinct from the retort that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”: It can be, if you’ve tried hard enough to gather the evidence and come up short—which is what these guys have done.
by joaomacp | 2025-08-25 00:23:51+00:00
[After just using `count()`]

> Uh oh, someone is tapping you on the shoulder and saying this is too slow because it has to do a complete index scan of the tasks for the project, every time you load the page

Just ask them if that's actually the bottleneck and go for a walk outside, before sweating over anything else discussed in this post.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-25 00:25:08+00:00
I have no technical knowledge about these, and being cryptocurrency related there will be lots of exasperated huffs, but there are a couple of alternative mobile network related projects: World Mobile and Helium.

World Mobile claims 99% coverage of the US, although I think it uses existing networks where there's no native coverage.

They're "interesting", but only early days, and I don't know how close they come to what you describe for privacy and opposition to data aggregation. Large-geographic-area comms coverage isn't something that there's ever going to be a lot of options for.
by avidiax | 2025-08-25 00:26:23+00:00
Probably better to just request an unreviewed but detailed justification, and then monitor spend and police the outliers after the fact (or when requesting above an invisible threshold, e.g. any fully-specced Apple products).

The outliers will likely be two kinds:

1) People with poor judgement or just an outright fraudulent or entitled attitude. These people should be watched for performance issues and managed out as needed. And their hardware reclaimed.

2) People that genuinely make use of high end hardware, and likely have a paper trail of trying to use lower-end hardware and showing that it is inefficient.

This doesn't stop the people that overspend slightly so that they are not outliers, but those people are probably not doing substantial damage.
by AngryData | 2025-08-25 00:26:41+00:00
While there are some interior pipe lining solutions, they are just kind of a short term bandaid that will cost more in the long run and has its own complications, the only real answer is to bury brand new pipe. And that can get expensive if a lot of stuff has been built on top and around it which is why most municipalities just live with even major leaks and kick the can down the road until it breaches the surface and starts flooding areas. It is probably cheaper to replace them sooner rather than later in the long run, but no politician cares about how well a city's finances will be decades after they are gone.
by mc3301 | 2025-08-25 00:27:29+00:00
Front derailleur: On higher-end bicycles, it is becoming a rarity with single narrow-wide tooth front rings. To make up for this loss of gear, rear cassettes have gotten wide and wider reaches (bigger big cogs and smaller small cogs.)

Most places I've been call the seat a "saddle."

I love the hand drawn style so much, by the way.
by sema4hacker | 2025-08-25 00:27:38+00:00
Can someone tell me how to do the opposite? Given a collection of points on a sphere, how does one calculate the probability those points are randomly distributed? I vaguely recall a (1970's?) paper by John E. Westfall that used "nearest neighbor analysis" to determine if the craterlets on the floor of the Moon's Plato crater were randomly distributed, but I don't recall the method. Not sure if that method would generalize to a sphere.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-25 00:28:30+00:00
My guess is that MarkMonitor is mainly used for their brand-relevant domains (microsoft, office 365, github (main site), etc), as opposed to one that a small subset of a small subset of their users of one service will use - I would imagine that microsoft likely owns hundreds of domain names and doesn't pay MarkMonitor to monitor every single one
by throw0101c | 2025-08-25 00:28:36+00:00
It was observed at the time that it passed:

> The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ ⓘ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two women have names.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-25 00:30:22+00:00
You don't give him enough credit. No one else was lunatic enough to back spaceX and build it into a genuinely innovative and successful company like he has. Of course he had a leg up but i see in him a genuine drive to succeed. He thinks he can do things better then anyone else, and in some ways that's true and he gets frustrated when things don't go his way.

You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.

On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.
by alphazard | 2025-08-25 00:31:53+00:00
I don't think that there is any mathematical training needed to gain insight from running repeated simulations.

The only intuition you need is that you can become better at the game by practicing. This is a good (if optimistic) belief to have as a default. Then it's just a matter of playing over and over again and keeping score. It doesn't even have to occur to you that the strategy can be automated, you can play yourself. Just doing this you could build intuition for the best strategy the same way that most people can learn to play poker or dice.

You can say that the brain or learning process or whatever is obeying mathematical laws, or has learned a mathematical fact, but that's not the same thing as doing math or thinking mathematically.
by smelendez | 2025-08-25 00:32:10+00:00
Probably someone will build and sell a dirt cheap laptop with nothing on it except a basic word processor for this purpose.

It’s still a hard problem though. If the students have the laptops outside of the testing site, they can load cheating materials on them, or use them to smuggle questions and answers out if the test is used in multiple class sections. You realistically will not lock down a laptop students can take home sufficiently that some people won’t tamper with it.

Otherwise you have to have enough laptops to get each student a wiped and working machine for every test, even with lots of tests going on. And students need to be able to plug them in unless the batteries are rigorously tested and charged, but not every classroom has enough outlets. And you need to shuttle the laptops around campus.

Then you need a way to get the student work off the laptops. You probably want the student to bring the laptop up when done and plug in a USB printer. Anything else, like removable media, and you have to worry about data loss or corruption, including deliberate manipulation by students not doing well on the exam, and students claiming what got graded wasn’t what they meant to hand in. And you still have to worry about students finding a way to deliberately brick their laptops and the inevitable paper jams and other hardware failures, especially an issue when students need to leave on time to get to another class.

So you need systems that are cheap but reliable, tamper-resistant but easy to diagnose and maintain, robust against accidental data loss but easy to reliably erase, able to export data and install security updates without letting students surreptitiously input data, and heavily locked down while easy to use for students with a wide variety of backgrounds, training, and physical abilities.