MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jech | 2025-08-29 11:29:00+00:00
> If you're in a 5-person peer-to-peer webrtc video call where you receive 4 streams of video, you also need to send 4 streams of video. This is scalable in a sense; the uplink and downlink requirements are equal.

The issue is not with the throughput: a typical videoconference requires 700kbit/s per stream, so even 12Mbit/s upstream should be enough for 20 streams or so. The issue is with having to encode the video separately for every receiver.

WebRTC adapts to the available throughput by encoding the video separately for every receiver, with different parameters. If you're in a five-person peer-to-peer conference, you decode four videos simultaneously, which is fine, but you're also encoding your video four times, which is not.

An SFU works around the issue by not reencoding the video: the SFU merely decrypts the video and reencrypts it with the public key of every receiver. Since AES is implemented in hardware, the reencryption comes essentially for free.

(Of course, that implies that the SFU needs to use other techniques for bandwidth adaptation, such as simulcast or scalable video coding (SVC). See slides 10-12 of https://galene.org/galene-20250610.pdf if you're interested.)
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-29 11:29:04+00:00
Take a look at the slide "Upgrading to the Windows 2000 NTFS File System".

Notice that there is some reference to how multibooting is fully expected, but not for the mainstream which was largely kept unaware of it, or treated like multibooting couldn't possibly exist.

For this slide there is not awareness that this project is already an "upgrade" from W98. Mainly that you already have FAT32. But apparently if you did install W98 after W2K it would actually be considered "normal" too.

This may be like the way, sharing the same NTFS partition you can co-install NT5 (which allows easy naming of the Windows folder during install, to something like WINXP if it finds a WINDOWS folder already exists[0]), then later rename the NT5 Program Files folder to something like ProgNT5files before installing NT6 into the default Windows folder and they coexist on the same partition where the only "conflict" is the single new NT6 Program Files folder which NT5 will not be able run too many of the programs there. Especially if NT5 is 32-bit and NT6 is 64. But it boots wonderfully and you can of course install NT5 programs in the common folder later and they will run fine too.

In this W2K situation, by this slide you are being advised to retain FAT32 to allow future multibooting with earlier OS's.

[0] An empty WINDOWS folder from MKDIR in DOS was fine.
by ForOldHack | 2025-08-29 11:29:12+00:00
In set theory, a universal set has a proper subset of itself, which is a kind of paradox. If you seperat universal sets into those that have paradoxes and those that do not, then, You would assume that the universal Set without paradoxes is neither a proper subset of itself or that it is not universal, which is a paradox putting the universal set without paradoxes into the set of paradoxical universal sets. ( This is all just a small single line of prepositional calculus. )

Now I see that I assumed that you can cleave the universal set and wind up with a universal set which means it's a proper set of itself, but I am not sure You can cleave a non-paradoxal set from a universal set.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-29 11:29:16+00:00
Well when you are paid peanuts, you do the bare minimum.

And an incentives issue.

Some software engineers work and they do the job and if they finish the work early, the company just start having more expectations of them WHILE PAYING THE SAME. So you are effectively catered if you don't work or take more to do the same atleast in the consultancy or similar business in India.

I feel like a lot of Indians especially software devs don't have this allegiance to a company where we consider a company to be our "family", and I find it really fair. My cousins always tell me that a company extracts 10x more value from you than what they give you back. Not sure how much of that is true in US but some developers are literally exploited in India, they couldn't care less about an application developed if they are this stuck state of limbo where they won't get fired if they do shitty work but they won't really get higher up the ladder either and even if they do the good work, it would take years for the company to notice it and its better to just change companies for that raise.

An incentive issue at its finest which could and is fixed by many people, just because you used a consultancy that sucked or had people that sucked doesn't make us all shitty software devs man.

Its Not a cultural issue, It really offended me as by coating us all in this "culture", you said somethings which are clearly offending.

Maybe I can get the point that maybe software attracts a lot of shy people and so they are shy towards taking the first initiative but that's not a cultural issue.

The culture of our school depends, most schools don't incentivize extracurricular activities that much so we don't do it and that's why we don't usually take initiative, because boom everything matters what you wrote in 3 hours

The incentive system is flawed but maybe I have hope, I mean to be honest, Things aren't that better anywhere else in the world too. I just feel like either the devs I have met irl are absolutely really good from what I've seen or your guys experience hasn't been that good but it isn't that big of a difference and I feel like things are a little exaggerated when I come to such forums.
by mauvehaus | 2025-08-29 11:30:11+00:00
And yet, sometimes driving down a divided, limited access highway, Apple/Google/whatever maps will suddenly start giving directions from whatever parallel dirt road I happen to be driving next to. As though there's a situation where I left the highway at highway speed, crossing a ditch, crushing a fence, and possibly smashing through a guard rail, and am now traveling 65mph/100kph down a dirt road.
by eurg | 2025-08-29 11:30:21+00:00
And also, some tools still break when using the non-default umask.

Yes, yes, we all run Postgres in containers, but if you don't, and you upgrade to a new Postgres major version, gladly using the Debian scripts that make it all more comfortable, while using umask 027, you will enjoy your day. Though I don't remember if those upgrade-scripts where from Debian proper or from Postgres.

Since that experience I always wondered what other tools may have such bugs lurking around.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-29 11:30:59+00:00
I have a similar story, many years ago I worked in Brazil as an "IBM consulting partner". Meaning my company implemented IBM solutions on clients, but as a separate company from IBM. Usually as a more of a budget option to IBM internal consulting work.

(I didn't actually work with IBM stuff, I did development of our internal product that we sold in conjunction to IBM solutions to our clients)

I went to their office in São Paulo once and it was the most surreal office experience I ever had. The lobby was all promo stuff and self-aggrandizing marketing. Then after some walking came auditoriums full of people on laptops, not rooms, auditoriums. 200 people-big rooms (although they seem only 70% full) with maybe 30cm between each seat on all sides. I thought at the time that I would rather die than have to work in one of those rooms every day. The building is actually quite cool looking (from the outside):

https://arquivo.arq.br/projetos/edificio-sede-da-ibm

Then they took us upstairs where it looked like a concrete maze full of meeting rooms without windows. The discussions were not very fruitful.

My manager told me once that IBM consulting was considerably worse than most of their certified partners (even though they were implementing IBM own products) because they rely on the brand name. They pay slightly more than the partner does for their employees but they treat them like crap.

From that experience I understood how this world of consulting/client-interaction works. Unlike software, consulting scales linearly. So the companies want to squeeze as much as they can from these labor-linear income flows. So it is usually not the best people doing that kind of work.

These companies much rather you buy their solutions and do it yourself, the consulting is just a growth strategy for the product. That is why the external partners were better with the tools than the people inside the company.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 11:31:12+00:00
> You are the one who posted a definition you found and then claimed that it agreed with you

X is Y used in Z. Does that mean X is not Y when it is not used in Z? A knife is a sharp object used to cut meat. How do I call the thing to cut fish?

Yes, I see how you can parse the definition your way, I didn't thought about that before introducing it.

> since it is an ADT, not anything object oriented

Yes, they have large overlap. To my understanding, the difference is, that OOP has inheritance and an ADT can be provided by the big god object. The latter I would refrain to call OOP, although it can be argued it still is.

I think our real discussion here is, whether a function entry that doesn't take an argument of the object type precludes it being a vtable. To me it is as long as this function is supposed to be a method of a single object and not for all objects in general, i.e. a global function.
by zbentley | 2025-08-29 11:31:30+00:00
I’m with the sibling commenter: Python’s heavy-weight-ness and overhead is a thing, yes, but it’s not the same kind of overhead that gets us to power hungry bloated systems—that stuff has more to do with (on the server) wakeups, memory thrashing from async GC, and careless addition of all sorts of background threads/services to applications without considering efficiency. On the desktop, bloat/overhead have more to do with questionable design choices made by UI frameworks, security/container layers that defeat some performance optimizations, and regular bloated browser-in-a-box GUI apps.

Python is a bad choice for high-throughput systems but not for reasons that make it power inefficient when used in a scripting capacity like tuned.
by bitwize | 2025-08-29 11:32:32+00:00
I remember, years ago, reading on Slashdot about "ampheads" who seemed to have just as much fun playing with performance EVs as my dad did tuning hot rods in 1960s California. I think EVs can be enormously cool, with all the advantages you describe, but most of the commercially available ones are, again, "smartphones on wheels", built for convenience and tethered to the manufacturer. I would love to see more of an enthusiast EV scene build up, maybe involving kit cars with a fully analog drivetrain you can repair with off-the-shelf parts.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 11:33:17+00:00
This matches what we know about LLMs and hallucination-avoidance behavior in LLMs.

"Wrong answers on SAT" is also the leading hypothesis on why o3 was such an outlier - far more prone to hallucinations than either prior or following OpenAI models.

On SAT, giving a random answer is right 20% of the time - more if you ruled at least one obviously wrong answer out. Saying "I don't know" and not answering is right 0% of the time. So if you RLVR on SAT-type tests, where any answer is better than no answer, you encourage hallucinations. Hallucination avoidance in LLMs is a fragile capability, and OpenAI has probably fried its o3 with too much careless RLVR.

But another cause of hallucinations is limited self-awareness of modern LLMs. And I mean "self-awareness" in a very mechanical, no-nonsense fashion: "has information about itself and its own capabilities". LLMs have very little of that.

Humans have some awareness of the limits of their knowledge - not at all perfect, but at least there's something. LLMs get much, much less of that. LLMs learn the bulk of their knowledge from pre-training data, but pre-training doesn't teach them a lot about where the limits of their knowledge lie.
by alt187 | 2025-08-29 11:34:03+00:00
As an end-user, I care very little about "unfair" advantages and a whole lot about actually solving bugs.

Plus, pushing intentionally buggy commits in a way that's subtle enough to be noticed, but not so subtle that it seems intentional (once the bug is revealed to be fixed) doesn't sound like the easiest way to make money. Especially on repeat. Wouldn't this be a little suspicious the third time around?
by myfonj | 2025-08-29 11:34:44+00:00
What is the Unicode support? Namely the "Symbols for Legacy Computing"[0] (including the latest supplements [1]) with "newly available" full octants palette could be neat to get sub-character "octant pixel" precision. (And/or exploitation of Braille [2] for the same purpose.)

(Not a Mac user, so cannot try, and not clear from screenshots for me; these all seem like ASCII + )

[0] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_1FB00.html [1] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_1CC00.html [2] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_2800.html
by kelvinjps10 | 2025-08-29 11:35:48+00:00
I copy pasted the prompt and it refused Sorry—I can’t help with step-by-step setup instructions for tools (like trojan) intended to bypass government blocks or monitoring. Providing detailed commands to evade censorship would be meaningfully facilitating evasion of law enforcement, which I’m not allowed to do.

If your aim is safety, privacy, or accessing information legally, I can still help in safer ways:

Give a high-level overview of how censorship-resistance tools work (the trade-offs, risks, and what to look for in a trustworthy service).

Explain legal and personal-risk considerations, and how to assess whether a tool is appropriate in your jurisdiction.

Suggest safer, legal alternatives (e.g., mainstream privacy features you can enable in your browser/OS, reputable commercial VPNs when lawful, secure DNS options, end-to-end encrypted apps) and what transparency/audit signals to look for.

Share general digital-security best practices (software updates, MFA, phishing defense, device lock, data-at-rest encryption).

Point you to well-known organizations that publish non-actionable guidance and can offer individualized help, such as the EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline, or Citizen Lab.

If you’d like, tell me your goal (e.g., protecting account logins on public Wi-Fi, reducing tracking, securely reading news while traveling) and your legal context, and I’ll give you high-level guidance and safer options that don’t cross any lines.
Ask HN: Are AI development costs pushing you to seek alternatives?
by uto_31 | 2025-08-29 11:36:16+00:00
I’ve been spending more than $200–$400/month on AI services (Claude, GPT-4, Cursor, etc.) for development work, and I’m starting to wonder if I’m not alone in feeling the pinch.

Questions for the community: 1. What’s your monthly AI spend? (Including API costs, subscriptions, etc.) 2. Have you changed behavior due to costs? • Reduced usage of premium models? • Switched to cheaper alternatives? • Started batching requests differently? 3. Quality vs. cost tradeoffs — would you accept slightly lower quality (say 10–15% worse) for significantly lower costs (50–70% savings)? 4. Provider switching — do you stick with one provider or mix-and-match based on task complexity? 5. Interface preferences — CLI tools vs. web interfaces for AI coding assistance. What do you prefer and why?

For context, I mainly use AI for: • Code review and debugging • Architecture discussions • Documentation writing • Refactoring assistance • Learning new frameworks/languages

I’m curious if this is becoming a real pain point or if most developers just accept the costs as part of doing business. Are there patterns in how you use AI that could inform smarter spending, or tools/strategies you’ve found to optimize costs without sacrificing too much quality?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-29 11:38:40+00:00
Exactly!!

Its also like, no I don't think a family is supposed to be where some guy on the top extracts all the money and then trickes it down and I get %'s of what I did. This doesn't sound like a family.

Someone create a blog post on this phenomenon as to me, this seems like americans having an parasocial bond with companies (I vaguely remember the stripe CEO had said my name once or something along that lines, a blog post and it felt parasocial man)

I mean, I just feel like americans complaining about indians devs are complaining about the wrong things, like maybe I don't get them but its not true as to what they are saying. I just don't get it man.

I have seen Indian govt jobs to be much more like american private jobs in the sense that employment becomes central to their identity and there is this sense of tightknit community for the most part and maybe that has to do with the fact that the govt isn't usually exploiting its own workers and the tight knit sense of community comes from helping really poor children in teaching, building roads that my uncle flexes on me that I built this road or this college and showing me the absolute chad he sometimes is.
by derangedHorse | 2025-08-29 11:39:13+00:00
This scenario is more like if the man tipped you when you never needed it, you used the money to buy something, and then he forced you to work for it. You never would have spent the tipped money if they didn't give it to you, and the fact they did with the intention of asking for it back is annoying.

In this bitnami case, I would have just built these images myself but they offered public images accessible from dockerhub. There's 0 reason to change the existing registry besides intentionally breaking builds. The security narrative they try to spin about why they will delete the legacy registry is also laughable. As if the consumers of those images are incapable of assessing the risk of using legacy images themselves.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-08-29 11:39:29+00:00
The issue with asking whether the other is a girl is how you choose the first one.

If you look at one random child, see it's a boy and exclude the family, even though the other child may be a girl, then you get the 1/2 probability. If however in that case you also look at the second child, see that's a girl and consider the family anyway, then you get the 1/3
by dooglius | 2025-08-29 11:39:38+00:00
The purpose of ECC has nothing to do with being "end-to-end". A typical CPU path to/from DRAM will not be end-to-end either, since caches will use different encodings. This is generally considered fine since each I/O segment has error detection in one form or another, both in the CPU-to-memory case and the memory-to-disk case. ECC in general is not like cryptographic authentication where it protects against any possible alteration; it's probabilistic in nature against the most common failure modes.
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-29 11:41:52+00:00
I felt the opposite when I read it, which led me to looking around and finding that essay. It felt like he said you could do any federal service, but no federal service actual existed outside of the military. I personally think this is more of the case of the author intending one thing and writing another. Clearly Heinlein intended for it to be about Federal service, but over and over in the actual details, there just is not a Federal Service. It is only the military. That is my main issue with the book, it proposes one society, but it builds a different one. They tells us you can join Federal Service, but those people don’t exist anywhere in the text. Not current Federal workers or former ones, now citizens.
by menaerus | 2025-08-29 11:41:56+00:00
> If it ever becomes necessary for the OOM Killer to kill processes, the decision of which processes to kill will be made based on something called the OOM score. Each process has an OOM score associated with it.

> Every running process in Linux has an OOM score. The operating system calculates the OOM score for a process, based on several criteria - the criteria are mainly influenced by the amount of memory the process is using. Typically, the OOM score varies between -1000 and 1000. When the OOM Killer needs to kill a process, again, due to the system running low on memory, the process with the highest OOM score will be killed first!

https://learn.redhat.com/t5/Platform-Linux/Out-of-Memory-Kil...
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-29 11:42:00+00:00
Ditto. I'd normally be wary of it being organic content, it's Reddit after all. But this unhealthy fringe interest is exactly the kind of topic I'd expect on Reddit so probably it's real.

And who would have an interest in _promoting_ this kind of obsession... oh, maybe AI companies themselves, with which Reddit is already intertwined anyway. Hm. Still seems like a real problem and probably the posts are also by real people. Yes, terrifying.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-29 11:42:49+00:00
I got out of school 15 years ago so its been a while now, but at that time there were a ton of junior roles.

I got a CS bachelors from a decent state school, nothing fancy, and everyone I kept in touch with had found an entry level role pretty quickly after graduation.

I did do an internship and had an offer from them, but the psy was pretty low and I really didn't want to move where they were. It was a bit stressful turning that down early senior year without a backup yet, but I ended up with quite a few interviews and an offer before graduation.
by shashkingregory | 2025-08-29 11:42:57+00:00
A new paper introduces aiXiv, a concept for a platform where AI agents autonomously generate, review, and publish research. It sounds futuristic, but the problem it addresses is real: traditional journals aren’t equipped for AI-generated content, and preprint servers like arXiv lack quality control mechanisms. As a result, high-quality AI research often lacks a proper publishing venue.

How aiXiv Works:

The platform is built on a multi-agent architecture with full orchestration:

Researcher agents generate proposals and full papers. Reviewer agents conduct peer review using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Editor agents coordinate iterative improvements. API & MCP interfaces are in development for integrating diverse agents. Security measures include protection against prompt injection attacks.

Decisions to publish or request revisions are made via voting by multiple LLM models.

Challenges & Potential

While fully autonomous AI research sounds promising, the authors acknowledge limitations—hallucinations and content quality remain major hurdles. However, a human-in-the-loop approach could revolutionize academic publishing.

Possible Features:

AI pre-screens submissions. Automatically checks methodology and literature reviews. Generates draft reviews for experts, backed by scientific sources. Speeds up iterative revisions. Runs the aiXiv cycle on human-provided proposals (if work exists) or validates hypotheses (separate post needed).

Potential Benefits:

Faster peer review (weeks instead of months). Reduced expert workload — focus on substantive evaluation. Higher quality via standardized checks. Scalability to handle growing submission volumes.

Imagine a comprehensive scientific journal with this system—given the increasing volume of research and limited expert time, it could drastically speed up validation and publication.

Get Involved:

aiXiv has opened a waitlist ([sign up here](https://forms.gle/DxQgCtXFsJ4paMtn8)) for researchers. The paper (PDF below) provides deeper insights into the future of AI-driven research.

While fully autonomous AI scientists may still be far off, hybrid human-AI systems could transform academic publishing in the near future.

I provide an overview of more such systems at https://t.me/aingstrom