MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlenski | 2025-08-18 06:21:43+00:00
Yeah, the article completely lost me at this point.

A somewhat-interesting, though simplistic, discussion of congestion control in TCP.

And then… "but don't worry, QUIC is magic, and it doesn't need any of this.”

No. No it's not. QUIC is not magic and it basically changes nothing in terms of congestion control.
by N2yhWNXQN3k9 | 2025-08-18 06:22:12+00:00
The link also contains information of the history of the current understanding? And is a direct summary of current understanding? I guess that contains your constraints for an interesting article (as it includes historical and current references that cover said history). So, what am I missing?

Also, I didn't edit the main premise of the comment, as it still contains the phrase "Pretty well understood today", unedited, but whatever.

EDIT: I have now removed that phrase as my comment was flagged. I mean, "fuck off" to whoever did that. My original comment had "Pretty well understood today" with the wikpedia link.

Stupid shit, imo

Community here continually becomes less "don't be a dick" from 2009 and more "fuck you, toe the line"
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 06:22:20+00:00
Actually I think you’re missing the point. “Parsing” is not something that computers alone do; humans do it. You see text and understand it to be text, you see <img> and understand it to be an HTML tag (and hopefully know whether your engine will pass it through, or leave it as text, or strip it), you see **double asterisks** and understand it to be bold or strong emphasis.

If you only care about reading it raw, you don’t bother with Markdown. Some of what you write will be the same as Markdown, but not all—for example, no one would use its ridiculous link or image syntax.

The reason you write with Markdown syntax is because you want to be able to format it (even if you will normally consume it in plain text yourself). And once you’re using Markdown syntax, you need to know the rules, to a greater or lesser extent. You must be able to parse Markdown syntax mentally. If you don’t know the rules well enough, your mental parse will be incorrect, and you’ll produce errors. Errors that won’t be detected by your computer. That’s the hazard with Markdown compared to C++: your mental parser is buggy and incomplete, but with C++ the computer will generally catch your errors while with Markdown it will never catch your errors.
by nl | 2025-08-18 06:22:37+00:00
> We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.

> The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.

This seems.... good?

Put it like this - would you prefer public employee's retirement scheme did Nnot hold shares in it?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-18 06:22:55+00:00
The variable length vectors are probably one of those ideas that sound good on paper but don’t work that well in practice. The issue is that you actually do need to know the vector register size in order to properly design and optimize your data structures.

Most advanced uses of e.g. AVX-512 are not just doing simple loop-unrolling style parallelism. They are doing non-trivial slicing and dicing of heterogeneous data structures in parallel. There are idioms that allow you to e.g. process unrelated predicates in parallel using vector instructions, effectively MIMD instead of SIMD. It enables use of vector instructions more pervasively than I think people expect but it also means you really need to know where the register boundaries are with respect to your data structures.

History has generally shown that when it comes to optimization, explicitness is king.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-18 06:24:15+00:00
Because it's fiction and the Author is God.

In Star Trek, the computer is framed as an appliance. It's the ship's operating system. The characters treat it like a highly advanced Alexa. They issue commands ("Tea, Earl Grey, hot"), ask for information, and expect a transactional response. No one ever asks the computer, "How are you feeling today?" because the narrative has established it doesn't have feelings. It's a tool, and we, the audience, accept this premise.

In contrast, the entire point of Data's character is to question the line between machine and person. The episode you mentioned is a courtroom drama specifically designed to force the characters (and the audience) to see him as a sentient being with rights. His "positronic brain" is the magical Asimovian hand-waving that signals to the audience: "This one is different. Pay attention."

'The Author' could have easily positioned the computer or the holodeck in a similar manner and people would agree it was sentient. Or Star Wars droids could easily be given more of this kind of weight than they are currently given.

It's one thing to read a fictional story about a fictional technology and assume the position and framing the God is pushing you to, it's another thing entirely to have the technology in your hands and play around with it.
by TheDong | 2025-08-18 06:24:35+00:00
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.

A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.

We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
by tygra | 2025-08-18 06:25:07+00:00
Nice.

What software do you use to run LLMs locally?

I tried Ollama but found requests a bit slow since it doesn't seem to fully utilize my resources. LM Studio has been better for me. It uses the upstream GGML implementation, which feels more optimized. My problem with LM Studio is that they've added so many options and features lately that it takes a lot of configuration.

What's your favorite open model for writing and coding these days?
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-18 06:25:57+00:00
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA.

Nope. I'm in PG&E territory. Electricity is too expensive and natural gas is too cheap. Even compared to my not-high-efficiency gas powered furnace a heat pump is more expensive to run. At best electricity is about $0.40/kWh and natural gas is $2.45/therm.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-18 06:26:16+00:00
> It likely overrides DNS resolution to CDN/POPs in countries which don't require age checking,

I don't understand what this means:

1. It resolves DNS requests - got it.

2. The resolution sends back an address to a CDN - okay, not sure that I got it

3. The resolved address is in a country which doesn't require age checking - Totally don't get it: how will this help?
by defrost | 2025-08-18 06:26:31+00:00
Somehow I doubt walking out to your breaker box and throwing the main switch is illegal.

I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...

Where there might be a problem is refusing to pay any connection charge for the X-monthly bill that now shows 0 units consumed.

Sounds like they'd need to throw the breaker and cancel any existing contract.
by safety1st | 2025-08-18 06:26:56+00:00
I don't think that using ChatGPT as a therapeutic aid is the root problem here. I think it is the tendency to anthropomorphize AI. I use ChatGPT to help me work through emotional issues, but I'm simultaneously aware that it's actually code controlled by a soulless corporation which decidedly does not have my best interests in mind. It can be a research assistant or tell me things I wasn't aware of before. But why would I use the incarnation of corporate evil to affirm me? Why would I even want that? I want the good guys to affirm me. Not a robot puppeted by the bad guys.

Anyone who hasn't taken a look at r/MyBoyfriendIsAI should. This is Black Mirror stuff and these people are absolutely delusional. This is a variant on the crazy cat lady phenomenon, but it's far worse, because cats are actually pretty cool. OpenAI, Meta and Google are not cool and cute. They're some of the biggest criminals in our society pretending to be cool and cute. These companies are being dragged through court as we speak for breaking the law and harming their users. What do you think they have planned for you?

As primates we're wired to anthropomorphize anything that demonstrates human-like characteristics, and then develop affection for it. That's all this is. A lot of people who don't understand the basics of human psychology, are going to be preyed on by these corporations. The good news is that we've already been through all of this in the last decade with social media. That was the warmup act by these corporations when they realized they could get people to connect with parasocial technology, upend their lives, and convert themselves into advertising inventory for the sake of it. The LLM masquerading as a human is their piece de resistance. A far more potent weapon in their hands than the doomscroll ever was. At least we know. At least we can be ready.

The absolute key to all of it is understanding you're in a relationship with e.g. the known criminal Meta Corporation, not with your chatbot. All pretensions then fall away.
by zgs | 2025-08-18 06:27:48+00:00
I used decNumber in the WP 34S project (https://sourceforge.net/projects/wp34s/) and more recently in the C47 project (https://47calc.com).

You are correct in that the decNumber library doesn't support trig operations. Arithmetic, log, exp and square root plus rounding and some conversion functions.

My experience is that decNumber is generally slow. Logarithms are especially slow. Intel's decimal library is much faster & as you noted, it uses binary operations to start it's algorithms.
by tomhow | 2025-08-18 06:28:04+00:00
You submitted this with the URL toolverse.com, which links to a domain name secondary market sale page for that domain. I've repointed it to https://www.toolsverse.tools/ - the URL that's in your copy above.

Sites like this aren't great content for HN – i.e., directories, product/service indexes; unless there's something technically novel or insightful about them, they're not the kind of thing the HN audience is looking for.
by 127 | 2025-08-18 06:29:03+00:00
Rust tooling, ecosystem and crates are much, much more mature. Many Nim libraries are unfinished, unsupported or abandoned. The language itself is pretty great, but you have to write most of the stuff from scratch.

In Nim it's very fast and ergonomic to write a MVP, but in Rust you have to think of the problem first.

I guess it's a double-sided edge: Rust is much worse for explorative programming compared to Nim, but that also forces people to build proper abstractions from the start. Which seems to directly feed into the quality of produced libraries.

Just a hunch, not something I've thought through.
by charles_f | 2025-08-18 06:29:54+00:00
God do I hate teams and systems with cute names. It's all cute and fun until you're the one from another team who needs to integrate with you and decode what Pikachu and Tyrion are responsible for, and discover that Fassbender is just a nickname for a Postgresdb maintained by the "It's over 9000" team. AuthService, CacheService, Db and EntrypointTeam are perfectly fine names. I don't care that namespaces are still aligned with 4 names ago, as long as I can somewhat infer what things do based on their names
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-18 06:30:22+00:00
what is this tom foolery. I am so amazed by it, this also seems to be a WYSIWYG but though it doesn't support markdown exactly per se but it has way more features than overtype (no offense to overtype which is also a really really cool project)

My mind is utterly blown with what you can do with 912 bytes.

I imagine that I can create a really simple blog post that can load under 14 kb so that it can be sent in a (single request?) while still having comment feature with this one while also being super fast..

So good that words can't explain lol
by bunnyfoofoo | 2025-08-18 06:31:10+00:00
https://help.nextdns.io/search?v=p&q=refund

Congratulations to them, I suppose. They've temporarily returned after stealing money from me. Their service stopped working after renewing my annual subscription and when I went to try and find support, I got silence.

If you're one of the lucky few who's never had issues with NextDNS, I'm happy for you.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-18 06:31:43+00:00
I’m sure lots of people will think this, so I’ll say it—

Box-drawing characters (U+2500–U+257F) are not ASCII (U+0000–U+007F).

There, got it out of my system. :-)

(I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)
by stbev | 2025-08-18 06:31:54+00:00
This is really interesting, although I still can't get my head around the fact that core.async.flow topologies are immutable. I feel like most problems can't be solved with fixed topologies.

I guess one could in theory swap flows the same way values are swapped, but I wonder if this is the way this library is supposed to be used. I also wonder what happens to non-empty channel buffers in this case.

I am curious to hear other opinions.
by camillomiller | 2025-08-18 06:32:33+00:00
Luckily they are not the top comments, but there were some of the nastiest I’ve seen allowed on here. Some users went as far as creating throwaway accounts to post nasty comments. It never ever happened to me on HN, and it’s a Reddit-level toxicity that I’ve never seen displayed here. Clearly my post struck a nerve.
by camel-cdr | 2025-08-18 06:33:48+00:00
> The variable length vectors are probably one of those ideas that sound good on paper but don’t work that well in practice

I don't understand this take, you can still querry the vector length and have specialized implementations if needed.

But the vast majority of cases can be written in a VLA way, even most advanced ones imo.

E.g. here are a few things that I know to work well in a VLA style: simdutf (upstream), simdjson (I have a POC), sorting (I would still specialize, but you can have a fast generic fallback), jpeg decoding, heapify, ...
by random3 | 2025-08-18 06:34:42+00:00
You’re thinking a patch is text, but should think of it as a logical change. Unless the logic becomes part of upstream the patch is not tied to a specific point in “time”. There’s a cost to it, as you have to constantly rebase. This is the case with any non-vanilla distribution (e.g. Linux), although it’s also at a package level so you do this both for each package as well across every package. For well written code there’s reasonably low coupling so it’s less work to maintain.
by stroebs | 2025-08-18 06:35:50+00:00
Pretty accurate having worked for startups and $ENTERPRISE alike.

I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind.

Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.
by majkinetor | 2025-08-18 06:36:06+00:00
This looks great, I hope we will have releases for Windows soon. It really does going to my nerves to install MS Office on new machine, and recently I stopped doing that and use Office 365 free version to view and edit docs instead, which is way worst regarding efficiency and privacy, but at least I don't have it on my machine. Its a shame there is no stripped down version of Word that lets me just view docx files and do most basic editing and commenting, that can be installed with winget in seconds. I use markdown for everything, but in enterprise environment when I send markdown to people they convert it to Word and return it back...

BTW, 8 seconds to start Word? What kind of computer are you using? Word is not performance beast but its not that slow either.
by jongjong | 2025-08-18 06:37:23+00:00
>> ... culture shock trying to reconcile the scale of the monetary waste ... Your entire retirement fund spunked in two weeks on a project that was doomed to fail from the offset.

I can very much relate to this point. I once worked for a company which spent more each month than I could save in my entire career... And they basically did absolutely nothing with it... The same company offered me a 2% raise while saying that I was their top engineer and that me threatening to quit was akin to "holding a knife at the company's throat". I followed through on the threat, the company is still fine, still spending over $1 million per month, still achieving nothing... Meanwhile, I've been desperate to do my own startup ever since, built stuff that would put their puny systems to shame... and yet I never managed to earn above $1000 per month from my own projects.

>> Generational wealth being funnelled directly to Bezos's mega-yacht via AWS

My wife made a similar joke when she saw my recent AWS bill though it was about our contribution to Bezos' wife's massive diamond ring. My wife then said "We can't even afford to do my fillers" to which I responded "Meanwhile, she can afford so much fillers, there's barely any space left for her meat."

Then my wife laughed and said "You're funny, that's why I married you."

Just kidding, she laughed and said "You loser, when are you going to shut your mouth and start earning money?"
by tygra | 2025-08-18 06:38:13+00:00
Anonymization is a good idea.

Just last week I wanted to do some financial analysis with ChatGPT (GPT-5), but I wasn't comfortable uploading the CSV with all my transaction data. Instead, I used Qwen3 running locally on my MacBook to anonymize the data first, and then uploaded the sanitized version to ChatGPT.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-18 06:38:51+00:00
> I think SIL's definition is, while robust, not the usual definition because English can be regarded as agglutinative in this definition. This is particularly visible from the statement that most European languages are somewhat fusional, which is okay under their definitions but not the usual way we think of English.

Well, in the first place, I don't put much stock in the idea that "the usual way we think of" a language is a good way to determine the characteristics of that language. A good example here would be Finnish, which has a large number of particles that appear to be independent of the words they modify, but which are traditionally referred to as "case markers" by analogy to European languages that have case. Finnish is said to have an extraordinarily large number of cases, but that is because each Finnish preposition is called a "case".

In the second place, you can clearly see fusion in the English verb be. You can see it less clearly in other places - wikipedia's page on analytic languages calls out the third-person singular present verb ending for simultaneously encoding all three of those contrasts.

But I would say you're right in spirit that those are vestigial elements of the language. English verb structure looks very agglutinative to me; the biggest objection (which SIL's definition doesn't mention) would be that auxiliary verbs still inflect.

In particular, this:

> Words in agglutinative languages can be, but [do] not necessarily have to be, analyzed as a main morpheme ("word") with dependent morphemes attached ("affixes").

is actually the standard view of English verbs (except that the auxiliary verbs are not thought of as affixes), still taught in school, but contradicted by syntax classes that say that a dependent element shouldn't control the form of the element from which it depends. And then uncontradicted by practicing linguists who feel that we might as well follow the obvious semantic dependence.

Another objection, which I find more persuasive than "agglutinative particles shouldn't inflect", is that the meaning of a particular English word form isn't necessarily very tightly determined by the form. So in he is painting a picture, the -ing element we see on painting is fundamentally there to agree with the continuous aspect marker is, and it has other meanings in other contexts. In he likes painting pictures, the same element is there to derive a noun from the verb.

And another objection might be that the languages we call agglutinative commonly incorporate subject and object into the interior of the verb, surrounded by other affixes, which isn't done in English unless you want to count phrasal verbs. ;D

I am undisturbed by the ambiguity; you might note that I led with the observation that agglutinative languages aren't well-defined in the first place.

None of this helps to explain why there might be a conflict between Markdown and agglutination, though.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-18 06:39:19+00:00
This is a really good project, kudos!

What I am wondering is if I can modify the project enough so that lets say when I do # test, then it can automatically modify it to be enlarged instead of just colored/ basically i think that this is how reddit comments work..

Image support would be really preferred too, but honestly, this is seriously so cool that I can iamgine using this right now, but someone here mentioned spell/pell https://github.com/sylvainpolletvillard/spell and https://github.com/jaredreich/pell and so they are in the size of 1kb-2kb, even bytes and this is 40kb iirc, so why is there such a big size difference and how are those guys being so small.

Once again, amazing project, my mind is truly blown by how simple it is, I will try to integrate this or spell or just anything whenever I can!
by huhkerrf | 2025-08-18 06:39:43+00:00
I'm really surprised to see this pop up considering how the NextDNS team seems to have disappeared otherwise. Out of date offerings like you mentioned, coupled with 0 customer support when things break (and things break a lot). New features like this are fine only if the base service works. I can guess that this feature also is going to break soon, and I don't have high hopes for it getting fixed.

I moved over to ControlD about a year ago and I've been very happy. Nothing has broken, and they seem to be active about their service.
by bobnarizes | 2025-08-18 06:40:22+00:00
Thanks for pointing this out mdaniel & woadwarrior01 — reducing the footprint is definitely on my radar and something I’m actively working on. I actually started with CoreML but switched to ONNX after running into some issues.

That said, it’s kind of amazing that we can run models of ~90 MB this efficiently on our devices today — the performance has been really encouraging. Appreciate the feedback!
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-18 06:40:46+00:00
I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...

Who said anything about prosecution or charge? A building inspector will happily red tag your residence and the sheriffs will happily escort you out. Easy peasy.

In California it's going to vary city by city but there are typically interconnect requirements for single family homes and ADUs. You're welcome to go full sovereign citizen and the city or county is welcome to deem your house uninhabitable and use force to evict you.
by whstl | 2025-08-18 06:42:07+00:00
Agreed. Another point IME is that the problematic requirements are also often non-essential, such as using a certain in-house framework made by some director, or building the whole project inside some abomination, like the workflow system of the Enterprise Content Documentation system.

This is how I’ve seen two-month projects becoming multi-year multi-team behemoths.
by nake89 | 2025-08-18 06:42:28+00:00
Using it as a precommit hook in OSS projects makes it so that people can write code however they want. But it ends up in the repo following the guidelines of the repo. Minimizing unnecessary back-and-forth with PRs. Extremely useful in my opinion.

Even though prettier has defaults, but they can be modified to quite some extent to suit your projects needs: https://prettier.io/docs/options