MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwanem | 2025-08-09 23:41:57+00:00
Yes. If the main Apache config was set up to allow it to read a dotfile, and if configured not to ignore the options you wanted to use, that is what the dotfile did. That's why, if you wanted an option easily portable across hosting providers, you used the meta tag instead. Which is my point, and my only point, and not really up for debate by some pettifogging rando with nothing better to fill a Saturday night.
by jameskilton | 2025-08-09 23:42:09+00:00
The last decade has seen an increase push in what Google started calling "Zero Trust"[0] and dropping VPNs entirely. The issue being that once someone got into a VPN it was much, much harder to prevent them from accessing important data.

So everything "internal" is now also external and required to have its own layer of permissions and the like, making it much harder for, e.g. the article, to use one exploit to access another service.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-zero-trust
Show HN: PromptMap – map .NET solutions into AI-friendly context
by chrisdkeith | 2025-08-09 23:42:21+00:00
What it is: “PromptMap is a .NET CLI that scans a .sln or directory and prints a structured map (namespaces/types/members) designed to paste into ChatGPT for better help.”

Why I built it: “When I'm pasting code files into ChatGPT and wanted a quick way to give full project context first.”

How to try: “dotnet tool install … (or dotnet run), example output in README.”

Tech bits: “Roslyn for analysis, async/cancellation, tests + golden snapshot.”

Looking for any feedback, also just to share.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-09 23:42:40+00:00
What's with all the retro hardware stuff going on?

I owned a couple of Sparc 1s back when Sparc 10s were cool and they were ancient, then! I'm talking like 1996? I don't even remember now. I had scrounged up a bunch of cast off Sparc hardware because I was obsessed with UNIX at the time and UNIX machines were hard to get near unless you worked at a big company or a university. Linux was in its infancy but was already making fast inroads to the UNIX market, particularly SCO, which was pretty much already out of business by then (kept alive for lawsuit purposes). HP-UX was huge, along with Solaris, which the Sparc 1 could run with a little effort (as opposed to SunOS, which was already pretty much obsolete).

Anyways, I had the Sparc box going for quite awhile and a friend at the time who worked in the campus switch room hatched a plan where we would hide it under the drop floor and make it into a DNS-less (IP only) pirate Ftp site, complete with a, um, ok, STOLEN, 1GB SCSI drive, which at the time, was a fairly expensive item. We operated the pirate ftp site for a couple of years. I don't know what happened to that box because I subsequently moved many states away and I think my friend just kind of lost interest and turned it off, probably scrapped it in the end. Linux killed off all the desktop UNIX platforms shortly thereafter. I doubt anyone could get away with adding some random node to a university network these days due to all the monitoring, but back then nobody gave a damn. It was truly an amazing time of discovery and quasi-illegal (and totally illegal) behavior.
by BeauNer | 2025-08-09 23:43:26+00:00
It is the end of an era, folks. You see, AOL has announced that its dial-up Internet service will officially shut down on September 30, 2025. The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake.

While this move will probably surprise no one, it still marks the closing of a chapter in online history. Dial-up Internet was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.

According to AOL, the decision came after a routine evaluation of its products and services. The company says this will not affect any other benefits in existing AOL plans. Customers can continue to access the rest of their plan features through the AOL dashboard.

For anyone still using AOL dial-up in 2025, this change means finding an alternative Internet connection. That might be a challenge in rural areas where broadband options remain limited. It also raises the question of how many people are still paying for a service that has long been considered obsolete in the broadband era.

If you have questions or want to manage your account, AOL has set up customer support lines for both the U.S. (1-888-265-5555) and Canada (1-888-265-4357).

Honestly, I am more surprised that AOL dial-up still exists in 2025 than I am about it shutting down. For me, this one hits a little closer to home, because AOL was my very first ISP back in the 1990s. I can still remember the sound of the modem connecting and the thrill of hearing “You’ve got mail.” It was slow, clunky, and sometimes dropped the connection for no reason, but it was my first real taste of the Internet… and I’ll never forget it.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-08-09 23:44:35+00:00
Depends on the aquifer. The assumption you're making is "natural precipitation recharges aquifers" and that assumption is not always true.

Sometimes it's true, but it takes 10,000 years so if you mean "recharges while our current civilization exists" then it's effectively false. This is the case for the Ogallala aquifer which supplies 27% of the irrigated land in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

Sometimes it's just completely false because the groundwater exists as a sealed bubble of water put there during the last ice age. That glass of water you just drank? Congratulations! It's 25,000 years old, and we know this through isotopic analysis. Your drinking water was mined and once it's gone it's gone forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_water

Sometimes recharge can happen but only via snowmelt at high altitudes (and of course Tucson doesn't get much snow).

Sometimes it's completely true. The Edwards aquifer in Texas gets recharged every time it rains.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Aquifer

So it's complicated. Generally speaking, deeper groundwater sources take longer to recharge if they recharge at all. I don't know the particular groundwater situation around Tucson.

> why are we building projects that need tons of power and water in the Sonoran desert instead of next to the Great Lakes

Evaporative cooling is effective and cheap where humidity is low. It doesn't work well where humidity is high.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-09 23:45:06+00:00
Was talking to an archeologist recently when touring a site of a big late bronze age settlement near Brno. There was a burial ground next to the fortified settlement on the hill as well, largely undisturbed for thousands of years, under regular fields used for agriculture.

But deep plowing in the 50s and 60s, incorrect plowing gradients in the steep terrain resulted in 30-40 centimeters of fertile land lost to erosion in less than a century.

And not just that, the ancient graves were lost woth it, all the pottery and remains churned to nothing.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-08-09 23:45:11+00:00
Yeah in my view, the primary value of undergrad in college, is the social connections you make and the status it grants you. If this was not the primary value of college what else can it be. What should it ought be. It certainly is not knowledge nor can it be knowledge. You learn far more in a single year on the job than in your four year college degree (and I say this as an engineer). In fact I think a STEM degree is mostly superfluous except for the connections you make in college which is very important.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-09 23:45:21+00:00
CUDA isn't really used for new code. Its used for legacy codebases.

In the LLM world, you really only see CUDA being used with Triton and/or PyTorch consumers that haven't moved onto better pastures (mainly because they only know Python and aren't actually programmers).

That said, AMD can run most CUDA code through ROCm, and AMD officially supports Triton and PyTorch, so even the academics have a way out of Nvidia hell.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-09 23:45:46+00:00
Wtf, seriously. I was just asking. Sorry if that resulted in me pissing in your cheerios. Just because a question was asked doesn’t mean it was challenging your knowledge. I was just asking to clarify based on personal experience. If you don’t have time for questions or feel personally slighted that someone would have the gall to question the written word of the almighty throwanem, then posting on the internet is probably something you stop doing
by arduanika | 2025-08-09 23:46:44+00:00
If you open your mind up too far, your brain will fall out.

LLMs are not intelligence. There's not some groovy sense in which we and they are both intelligent, just thinking on a different wavelength. Machines do not think.

We are inundated with this anthropomorphic chatter about them, and need to constantly deprogram ourselves.
by throwanem | 2025-08-09 23:47:57+00:00
It isn't a question of "challenging [my] knowledge," it's a question of you acting like kind of a jerk. I realize you don't see yourself as the one starting an argument here, and I have observed your manners likewise lacking on many occasions on this website before. Your opinion of the matter is not well qualified. You're being an ass. Knock it off.

I realize you're probably not accustomed to being called on your lousy behavior. I doubt you will need to become so. But just for once, here we are. You don't bother to find out what you're talking about before you speak and then you want your hand held on points that were already clarified, had you but bothered to catch up. I don't tolerate that in candidates, I won't tolerate it in colleagues, and I see no very pressing reason to tolerate it here.
by jclarkcom | 2025-08-09 23:49:07+00:00
Very cool. We are launching a sensor that mounts on the inside of your window and measure the sky color for a small cone of the sky and transmits this to our skylight and window fixtures inside (see innerscene.com) so they can replicate exactly the same thing indoors. You could potentially use a computer monitor to do this, but it generally doesn't provide great light due to using RGBs instead of wide-spectrum sources.

One issue with the current code is it doesn’t model clouds, haze, or smoke so the rendered sky can differ from what you see outside (numerous HN comments notice this). You can partially correct for this by using semi-realtime satellite imaging but hard to get super accurate which is what pushed us to develop our own sensor. There are various CCT sensors on the market already but they only measure directional+diffuse+reflected light which is typically ~7500k but the sky color goes up to 40,000k.

Here is a plot showing the color of the sky as it changes during the day from real sensor readings. Each one is 30s apart, so it change change quickly. https://www.innerscene.com/built_pages/cs_specsheet/cct/cct_...

A bit more info as well: https://www.innerscene.com/SpecHelp/CircadianSky/cct/cct.htm...
by vidarh | 2025-08-09 23:49:34+00:00
> or it would require you to believe computers can think.

Unless you can show us that humans can calculate functions outside the Turing computable, it is logical to conclude that computers can be made to think due to Turing equivalence and the Church Turing thesis.

Given we have zero evidence to suggest we can exceed the Turing computable, to suggest we can is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

A single example of a function that exceeds the Turing computable that humans can compute, will do.

Until you come up with that example, I'll asume computer can be made to think.
by tzs | 2025-08-09 23:50:13+00:00
What about schools where standardized tests are insufficient?

At Caltech and MIT for example they have way more people with very high SAT score than they have openings for. Most admitted students at both have math scores of 790 or 800, and reading/writing averages around 750.

The SAT is not reproducible enough to say that someone who scored say a 790 is better than someone who scored a 780. If both retook the test they would likely get different scores and would have a good chance of finishing in a different order.

Same for other standardized test.

The result then is that after you filter by standardized tests you still end up with a more people than you can admit that have high tests scores that give you no information about who would do well and who would not.

There are plenty of people who can get those high scores but would not be able to handle the class work at Caltech, and from what I've heard the same applies to MIT. To figure out who can actually handle the work they have to look beyond standardized tests.
by windowshopping | 2025-08-09 23:50:22+00:00
What a terrible analogy. Illusions don't fool our intelligence, they fool our senses, and we use our intelligence to override our senses and see it for what it for it actually is - which is exactly why we find them interesting and have a word for them. Because they create a conflict between our intelligence and our senses.

The machine's senses aren't being fooled. The machine doesn't have senses. Nor does it have intelligence. It isn't a mind. Trying to act like it's a mind and do 1:1 comparisons with biological minds is a fool's errand. It processes and produces text. This is not tantamount to biological intelligence.
by w10-1 | 2025-08-09 23:50:47+00:00
Connections matter most in the oncoming era of dwindling opportunities (because each one is more valuable and leverages more resources). Legacy enables alumni to meet each other.

The question is whether universities can still play a role in establishing groundwork values for how people are treated. If they're not participating in public education initiatives, they have no incentive, and efficiency+competition will squish that out.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-09 23:51:07+00:00
This was pretty much compounded in the communist era - it was the state doing the environmental destruction & it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.

So if you wanted to point out we are all gonna get poisoned to death and worse, you would not only be saying the state is wrong (impossible!) but that attacking its most its most important endeavors (reactionary provocateur, shoot on sight!!).

Like, in the capitalist countries you could at least say all the mercury in the fish is causing spike in birth defects without ending up in gulag.
by arduanika | 2025-08-09 23:51:08+00:00
Sure. Language is squishy, and psychometrics is hard. Nevertheless...

"Intelligence" refers to a basket of different capabilities. Some of them are borderline cases that are hard to define. The stuff that GPT-5 failed to do here is not.

Things like knowing what a question means, knowing what you know and don't, counting a single digit number of items, or replying with humility if you get stuck -- these are fairly central examples of what a very, very basic intelligence should entail.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-09 23:51:29+00:00
The National Socialists were socialists so that undermines not reinforces your point:

- they implemented communist policies like mass nationalization schemes with some of the resulting "companies" being amongst the largest organizations in the world

- they wanted to fully nationalize the entire economy after the war

- they passed large amounts of left wing legislation

- they, obviously, called themselves socialists constantly. Hitler said "I am a fanatical socialist".

- they openly hated capitalism. A big part of their hate for Jews was that they associated Judaism with international capital. Same reason Marx was an anti-semite.
by dijit | 2025-08-09 23:51:39+00:00
I wish this trend of “security through obscurity” should mean that all info should just be exposed would die, its silly and lacks basis in reality.

Even within infosec, certain types of information disclosure are considered security problems. Leaking signed up user information or even inodes on the drives can lead to PCI-DSS failures.

Why is broadcasting your records treated differently? Because people would find the information eventually if they scanned the whole internet? Even then they might not due to SNI; so this is actually giving critical information necessary for an attack to attackers.
by mkl | 2025-08-09 23:52:19+00:00
> (just to make sure: you need to add a unique "id" attribute for each "input", and then make a <label> tag for each label referencing that id in the "for")

Nesting the <input> inside the <label> is simpler. Then you don't need the id and for attributes. I think it avoids an unclickable space between them too.
by pyman | 2025-08-09 23:52:56+00:00
Do you think the way he reviews PRs sets a bad example for engineers who've just graduated and look up to him? I mean, there are different ways to reject a PR, even if the code is garbage.

Or maybe he was upset because he expected a lot more from someone who works at Google and has been working on RISC-V since 2019?

I don't know Linus, so I'm not sure what to make of this.
by MarkSweep | 2025-08-09 23:53:19+00:00
There are defiantly better and worse ways to use WPF. Personally I dislike it when data binding is done in XAML, because there is no compile time error if you rename a property on the C# side.

When I wrote a WPF app at my last job, I write a micro MVVM framework. Basically just an implement ion of INotifyPropertyChanged on the model side and some extension methods to bind the properties to UI elements. It was as strongly typed as possible in WPF.
by champtar | 2025-08-09 23:54:44+00:00
Hopefully the last breaking change.

enoX should always stay stable, as it's the BIOS (in some ACPI table) telling that this device/port has this ID.

ensX means the NIC in PCIe slot X, but in your PCIe tree you can have PCIe bridges, so technically you could have multiple NIC in the same slot (what the BIOS declare as a slot), so there was a lot of breaking NIC naming changes over the years in systemd to figure out the right heuristics that are safe, enabling/disabling slot naming if there is a PCIe bridge, but just in some cases.

Also for historical reasons the PCIe slot number was read indirectly leading to some conflicts in some cases (this was fixed in systemd 257)
by cute_boi | 2025-08-09 23:54:51+00:00
Chatgpt 5 also don't argue back.

> How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry

Ans: The word "blueberry" contains the letter b three times:

>It is two times, so please correct yourself.

Ans:You're correct — I misspoke earlier. The word "blueberry" has the letter b exactly two times: - blueberry - blueberry

> How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry

Ans: In the word "blueberry", the letter b appears 2 times:
by k310 | 2025-08-09 23:55:46+00:00
Just disable it if a site breaks. I haven't seen one, and I am all over the internet.

Browsers have drop down menus or icons in the tool bar that make it easy. Even my bank gripes about not allowing popups, but if I forget to disable extensions, it works fine.

I treat exceptions as exceptions, and not as the rule.

Enjoy the web like it was before dot com!
by milesvp | 2025-08-09 23:56:08+00:00
I’ve seen some interesting research suggesting that higher minimum wages lead to lower turnover, which can lead to some very real cost savings. I had an interesting epiphany while watching a business lecture about calculating costs associated with hiring, that there are very real points in the minimum wage curve (which should be laffer shaped) where raising the minimum wage has the potential to both increase labor participation and decrease total labor costs.

I now like to joke that minimum wage laws are subsidies for businesses too dumb to factor in hiring and turnover costs.
by Aachen | 2025-08-09 23:57:18+00:00
Oh nice, I missed that bit, thank you! Saw the mention of Gadgetbridge but didn't know that meant it's usable offline. I've only ever used it for upgrading Pinetime firmware iirc

That makes this a seriously good option, I was looking for this a while ago but didn't find anything besides Pinetime, so I ordered a Pinetime and found out the heartbeat sensor is about as accurate on my wrist as tarot cards (I know it works for a few people, but most seemed to have the same issue). Everything else I could find back then was cloud-based or didn't do health tracking (or, n=1, didn't support Android)
by xenotux | 2025-08-09 23:57:26+00:00
OpenAI codenamed one of their models "Project Strawberry" and IIRC, Sam Altman himself was taking a victory lap that it can count the number of "r"s in "strawberry".

Which I think goes to show that it's hard to distinguish between LLMs getting genuinely better at a class of problems versus just being fine-tuned for a particular benchmark that's making rounds.
by lossolo | 2025-08-09 23:57:28+00:00
> Is Go in mostly safer than C++? Maybe

Maybe? You forgot /s there? Asking if Go is mostly safer than C++ is like asking if child proof caps are mostly safer than mason jars for medicine.

> https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html

Can you show RCE using this? Because, to this day, no one has been able to show me a reasonable program that someone would write and that would result in RCE from "Go memory unsafety" presented in this article. Meanwhile, I can show you thousands of examples and CVEs of how you can easily get RCE using C++.

> Can you prove Rust code is safe? Well there is the simple way - no unsafe. But what about unsafe blocks? Yes, you can prove it for them as well. If the unsafe code block is it will note safety invariants and why are they preserved by unsafe block. Can this be practically done? Depends on the crate, but with enough effort, yes.

You can’t prove Rust code "safe" in the absolute. Safety guarantees apply to safe Rust under the language’s (still evolving) rules, and even then the compiler/backend must uphold them. We still hit unsoundness[1] and miscompiles in safe code (equal pointers comparing unequal... [2]), and the official unsafe code guidelines are not a finalized spec. So documenting invariants in unsafe helps a lot, but it’s not a formal proof, especially across crates and compiler versions.

1. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/107975

2. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/labels/I-unsound

On the safety spectrum: C/C++ -> Zig -> Go -> Rust
by objcts | 2025-08-09 23:58:05+00:00
i recently started writing music, service, and product reviews as a way for me to sharpen my critiquing and writing skills.

here is one i wrote for my robot lawnmower: https://mfelix.org/reviews/mammotion-luba2/

maybe these will help folks, maybe they won’t. i don’t really care. it’s fun to write.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-09 23:58:42+00:00
> Gradual transition probably doesn’t.

My country's current president had the exact same idea: install socialism in Brazil slowly to get people used to it so they don't launch a counter-revolution.

We are currently a dictatorship of the judiciary and very much en route to become a Venezuela tier country.

People work nearly half a year just to pay taxes and I'm not even accounting for inflation.

The future already seems hopeless and bleak and he hasn't even fully won yet.

> If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking

"Careful" is the understatement of the century. Many a socialist has tried, only to discover they are on the wrong end of the Laffer curve.

Nobody really enjoys being utterly crushed by taxes in order to pay for the welfare of people they couldn't care less about.

Taxes are tolerated because people believe they will indirectly benefit from it. Taxpayers expect taxes to be converted into useful infrastructure and services for everyone, themselves included.

Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive. Quite literally. Very often they find a way to exclude you based on your means. If you're rich or even middle class, it's not for you.