MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mths | 2025-08-07 08:53:20+00:00
> I wish there was a stronger differentiation between syncable and device-bound passkeys.

But there is no difference. I'd prefer if services just let me generate a passkey and leave it entirely up to me how I manage it. Whoever setup granny's device should have done so with a cloud based manager.

I think Google tries to make some confused distinction, or maybe that has more to do with FIDO U2F vs FIDO2. There you can add either a "passkey" or a "security key", but iirc I added my passkey on my security key so... yeah
by exDM69 | 2025-08-07 08:53:29+00:00
> Lots of Vulkan map quite well to Rust's ownership rules, the memory allocation API surface maps very well. But anything that's happening on the GPU timeline is pretty much impossible to do safely.

I agree with this, having been dabbling with Vulkan and Rust for a few years now. Destructors and ownership can make a pretty ergonomic interface to the cpu side of gpu programming. It's "safe" as long as you don't screw up your gpu synchronization which is not perfect but it's an improvement over "raw" graphic api calls (with little to no overhead).

As for the GPU timeline, I've been experimenting with timeline semaphores. E.g. all the images (and image views) in descriptor set D must be live as long as semaphore S has value less than X. This coupled with some kind of deletion queue could accurately track lifetimes of resources on the GPU timeline.

On the other hand, basic applications and "small world" game engines have a simpler way out. Most resources have a pre-defined lifetime, either it lives as long as the application, or the "loaded level" or the current frame. You might even use Rust lifetimes to track this (but I don't). This model is not applicable when streaming textures and geometry in and out of the GPU.

What I would really like to experiment with is using async Rust for GPU programming. Instead of using `epoll/kqueue/WaitForMultipleObjects` in the async runtime for switching between "green threads" the runtime could do `vkWaitForSemaphores(VK_SEMAPHORE_WAIT_ANY_BIT)` (sadly this function does not return which semaphore(s) were signaled). Each green thread would need its own semaphore, command pools, etc.

Unfortunately this would be a 6-12 month research project and I don't have that much free time at hand. It would also be quite an alien model for most graphics programmers so I don't think it would catch on. But it would be a fun research experiment to try.
by wcallahan | 2025-08-07 08:54:03+00:00
I just used GPT-OSS-120B on a cross Atlantic flight on my MacBook Pro (M4, 128GB RAM).

A few things I noticed: - it’s only fast with with small context windows and small total token context; once more than ~10k tokens you’re basically queueing everything for a long time - MCPs/web search/url fetch have already become a very important part of interacting with LLMs; when they’re not available the LLM utility is greatly diminished - a lot of CLI/TUI coding tools (e.g., opencode) were not working reliably offline at this time with the model, despite being setup prior to being offline

That’s in addition to the other quirks others have noted with the OSS models.
by imtringued | 2025-08-07 08:54:24+00:00
Ok, but if you read the "wolf in sheeps clothing" party program of the nazi party and put it in the context of the aftermath of what the party actually did, you'd realize that they don't actually care about their program and only ever used it as a wedge to blame outgroups for the ills of society.

What I'm trying to say here is that the nazis were outwardly role playing socialists to appease workers, but when it was time to punish the "capitalists" they didn't seem to care whether they were actually capitalists and were more interested in whether a person was part of the ingroup (=white christian Germans) or not. In other words, if capitalism or market economies are rigged, then they only care about whether the economic system is rigged in favor of the ingroup.

The reason why I'm responding to you is that the barrier to a nazi accusation is essentially zero these days and most anti-fascists I've encountered are essentially the spitting mirror image of fascism. They declare an outgroup, but call it nazi this time. Then the anti-fascist logic allows the justification of infinite retaliation. Any shred of being principled is completely thrown out the window.

Because nazis controlled all of Germany for a time, they've done a lot of things that can be attributed to them, which means there are a lot of things you can take about any ordinary person and create a very loose nazi association through motivated reasoning.

Note that in a mirror image, left and right are swapped. They're not the same, but they are eerily similar.

Yep, these days you can be fed Youtube shorts of people arguing the Green Party in Germany are Nazis, while there is an actual party (AfD) that puts hidden hitler moustaches on Alice Weidel in their official fliers. That same party claims Adolf Hitler was a leftist and leftism is bad, which is good, because they're not leftists, but they also happen to like Adolf Hitler.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-07 08:54:34+00:00
Modern JS executes at about the same speed as Java or about 25% C language speed. A JavaScript application is often faster to initialize into memory than a C language application, largely because less overhead is required for application initialization, but otherwise slower because JS is garbage collected.

These distinctions are crucial when hardware performance really matters, like gaming or scientific data analysis. Otherwise these performance differences just aren’t noticeable to a common user.

Before WASM was a thing 3D gaming engines were ported into Emscripten demos to show case the potential. The output was too slow to play heavy 3D games in a portable browser container but far beyond what you could get away with using JS alone. All that misses the point that you could now run this giant game engine in a web page without installing anything.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-07 08:54:35+00:00
Same here. Django's was my first ORM, and at the time I didn't get all the hate directed at ORMs (except for making inefficient queries). Having used a few more ORMs since then, I still consider Django's to have found the best balance.

I find the prevailing model of having DB rows mapped 1:1 to objects in memory and syncing changes automatically to be much more trouble than it's worth, sadly most ORMs seem to use it.
by Tainnor | 2025-08-07 08:56:02+00:00
> I think most people in the reproducible build space would consider Maven an external uncontrolled input

In an academic sense, you're probably right.

In practice it turns out that this isn't an issue in 99% of cases. Yes, I have once run into a weird issue where Nexus was corrupted and it took some debugging, so it's not like it can't happen, but assuming you don't do anything weird, the assumption that Maven artifacts are immutable is fairly safe.

I'm not saying that lockfiles aren't technically superior or anything, but the failure modes are so rare that people usually don't bother (even in Gradle where lockfiles are technically supported).
by ricardobeat | 2025-08-07 08:56:47+00:00
Flags at this level are not simple toggles, they will embed some business logic - that's the custom logic and attributes that I mentioned. This is standard fare in Statsig, Split, Launchdarkly, and most other commercial providers. You then collect metrics for each group to monitor features.

You use these to manage gradual rollouts, or phased rollouts by customer segments, and to run A/B tests on smaller cohorts.
by alenrozac | 2025-08-07 08:57:31+00:00
No, cause you need hands to work the land. And you end up having a dozen cause a few won't make it. /s

The whole "cruel to children" aspect is flawed. It only self-identifies individuals with a world view that is very earth-centric. We need a societal system where such a position is seen as an honorable one. That's why I liked the Antarctica bit of the submission. We ALL need to learn and change.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-07 09:00:48+00:00
For a little while at the university I became what happens to many software engineering students, a UNIX zealot that used to write email signatures with the usual M$ joke back then.

Then the university library opened my eyes to the world of Xerox PARC, and the computing decades that predated UNIX, and my point of view changed forever, that cloning UNIX all the time couldn't be the epitome of OS design.

At least I agree with Rob Pike in something,

"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"

From https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
by grues-dinner | 2025-08-07 09:03:55+00:00
I think that is extremely common in adverts (most famously here, the M&S "It's not just bread. It's our stone-baked, hand-shaped artisanally-molested bread"), and narrative media like that distinctive kind of journalism written like a storybook, and which (I think) then bled into popular media like true-crime podcasts: "It wasn't just Tuesday. It was the last Tuesday he would ever see. <intro music>".

Also this kind of short sentence construction is used in the incredibly annoying and pervasive style of headlines for opinion pieces: X is Y. And it's Z. (where Z is often "not OK" or "OK").

I assume all this overuse is where LLMs picked it up and weighted it highly.
Show HN: Kubernetes Operator for Neon Postgres
by bittermandel | 2025-08-07 09:04:35+00:00
We're happy to announce an early version of https://github.com/molnett/neon-operator, a Kubernetes operator that allows you to self-host Neon on your own infrastructure. This is the culmination of our efforts to understand the internal details of Neon, and we're excited to share our findings with the community!
by neuralkoi | 2025-08-07 09:04:51+00:00
In non-CA mode, an attacker who has access to the private key of a pinned certificate can: Present a certificate with the correct public key Modify the CN in the client certificate to any arbitrary value Cause Vault to assign the resulting alias.Name to that CN

I agree that this is an issue, but if an attacker has access to the private key of a pinned certificate, you might have some bigger issues...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-07 09:05:21+00:00
Because most people will silently endure abuse for far too long that teach billionaires, politicians, and celebrities that there are no boundaries. They can be pedophiles and pederasts, shoot people in the street, and lawlessly disband food aid organizations (killing 13M+) without consequences. (And receive more investment because they've wired their lairs for video and audio recording to collect Kompromat.)
by nullc | 2025-08-07 09:05:27+00:00
This article is about adults who are paying considerable amounts of money to be educated, significantly undermining the education they're paying for by offloading the exercises onto chatbots.

And your response is that we need regulations??

Institutional policy, changes to lesson practices, cover the risk of wasting your education in intro materials... sure!

But state is not your parents, it's certainly not mine. Geesh.
by derriz | 2025-08-07 09:05:49+00:00
Yeah I think there’s some confusion here.

When I hear “type theory” - I think Martin-Löf, Girard’s Proofs and Types, Curry-Howard, etc.

Which is not a “theory of programming language types” - although the subjects are not completely isolated from each other.

Then again, it’s been decades since I actually studied this stuff and haven’t really followed either subject since.

As far as the latter is concerned (programming language type systems), as an engineer, I’ve seen nothing in mainstream programming languages that advances the state-of-the-art compared to what was known back in the 1980s - when Hindley-Milner became mainstream and Luca Cardelli wrote the seminal survey papers on the subject.
by Kurtz79 | 2025-08-07 09:06:46+00:00
Does it even make sense calling them 'GPUs' (I just checked NVIDIA product page for the H100 and it is indeed so)?

There should be a quicker way to differentiate between 'consumer-grade hardware that is mainly meant to be used for gaming and can also run LLMs inference in a limited way' and 'business-grade hardware whose main purpose is AI training or running inference for LLMs".
by ordu | 2025-08-07 09:06:55+00:00
I used to think, how the history of computing and Internet would look like, if computers converged on 3-base system, with trits instead of bits, and trytes instead of bytes.

If one tryte was 9 trites, it would have 3^3=19693 values. All the European characters and a lot of others can be encoded with this. There would be no need to invent char/int integer types in C (with the added mess of short, short short, long, and long long) int would be enough at the time. Maybe at the point when it would become necessary to add different integer types, C would choose a saner approach of stdint.h, and there would be no legacy code playing with legacy integer types?

And 27 trites (or 3 trytes) is around 2^42.8 values, like 42 bits. It would be enough even now, I think.
by cthalupa | 2025-08-07 09:07:47+00:00
I really don't understand this skepticism around semaglutide and long-term effects.

One, GLP-1s are not a new class of drug. We have had them in various forms for about two decades now.

Two, the clinical trials have followed the standard sort of schedule as any other medication we release. I don't hear or see all the hand-wringing that these have received over every other medication we develop.

Three, they are analogs to hormones our bodies already produce. They're not some totally alien substance that we have zero understanding of. We modify them to have longer half-lives, bind more strongly/weakly to certain receptors, etc., but it's not like these are significant departures from things our body already handles day in and day out.

Yes, maybe there is something specific to semaglutide or tirzepatide or the newer generations of GLP-1 medications that we don't understand that has some sort of long term effect. But what is the foundation for that worry? Exenatide has not shown any of those concerns in two decades of use. Basically every single health marker that changes when on these drugs changes in (often profoundly!) positive ways. It makes significant positive impact on the cause of the single largest increased in all-cause mortality for the Western world. Newer generations are even more promising - retatutride has shown significant anti-cancer impacts on rodent studies, and mechanistically the pathways it is acting on there work very similarly in humans, so there is strong reason to believe that will carry over. Even the modern generations have a huge list of benefits that take place basically immediately upon beginning to take them, even without significant weight loss, including protection against CVD-related incidents such as heart attacks, strokes, and deaths related to them.

What we know today about all of the positive impact they have, mechanistically how they are doing it, and the data we have on this class of medication being used in general... the side-effects would have to be hugely detrimental and in a way that just doesn't make much sense based on our current understanding.

It's not impossible, of course, but worrying about it seems silly unless your general stance is that you won't take any medication until that specific formulation has been on the market for decades.
by Ygg2 | 2025-08-07 09:08:34+00:00
> When I want complex edit, I use paint.net

That's kind of my point. Even you eschew Paint's simplicity when you need a more complex transformation. Nothing you do in Paint.Net isn't impossible in Paint, given enough calculation and preparation. So a performance isn't the deciding factor. It's the speed of achieving thing X (of which startup/lag is a tiny cost).

Similarly in Paint.Net you could emulate many Photoshop features (e.g., non-destructive editing), but doing so would be tedious (duplicate layer, hide layer adjust copy layer, then edit until you get it to where you want it).
by herbst | 2025-08-07 09:08:43+00:00
I bought the hardware without knowing that and have a device bound license. It's weird that the software literally degrades when the device isn't attached.

The hardware limitations are crazy and weird, especially when you realize that parts of the limits are purely trough the visualisation. But when you have a supported device the performance is amazing even on older hardware. (I run it on a Wyse 5070)

Like all non free (or any software) it's a double sided sword. However it's one of the few industries where the monopoly software is actually not bad at all and doesn't force you into monthly payments when you buy their devices (which is basically industrie standard anyway, and not actually that much more expensive).
What Generative AI Reveals About the State of Software?
by turkzilla | 2025-08-07 09:10:46+00:00
A critique of LLM behavior that turns into a critique of the code they’re trained on; and the culture that produced it. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mirror-machine-what-generative-ai-reveals-state-software-mehmet-efe-xlizc/
by cthalupa | 2025-08-07 09:10:54+00:00
> I’m now beginning to question if it’s closer to a weird vitamin that we face a systemic deficit of.

There's some studies suggesting that a big part of what influences someone to naturally be fat or skinny is tied to natural production of the GLP-1 hormone. Post-prandial readings of serum level GLP-1 show significant differences in lean people vs. obese people, with obese people have much less.

We don't have an understood mechanism yet to determine if it's causative - maybe it's yet another feedback loop we have with gaining weight - but it seems very plausible that the natural level of production is a determinant factor in just how susceptible you are to packing on the pounds in today's food-rich world.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-07 09:11:05+00:00
The flatrate pricing models seem unsustainable. But API pricing at the big 3 AI providers is more expensive than per-token pricing for hosted versions of comparable open source models (for models that have an equivalent). And those hosters have no reason to run at a loss. So in terms of pure compute cost of running the LLM, API pricing should be pretty profitable. They just spend a lot of money advancing the state of the art. More than they can make back at the current market size, hence all the posturing about AI becoming ubiquitous and taking over all work
by balamatom | 2025-08-07 09:11:23+00:00
>hollow inside

>aren't we all? /?

Offtopic, but such an interesting civilization where the keepers of knowledges seem to relate to this statement so much, innit?

Very Zen or is it just the overwork? Maybe it's a thing installed in our childhoods so that we would not struggle for power. (I certainly remember acquiring this manner of speaking based on fundamental self-deprecation around 5th grade, some other kids not acquiring it, and then 10y later we'd have mutually incomprehensible life scenarios.)

While kinds of dark humor other than "the falsity and futility of my own existence, amirite?" don't quite resonate with people as much, for whatever reason.

Pz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-TkVH2j7gU
by lutusp | 2025-08-07 09:11:33+00:00
> Can I safely assume your expertise in the history, philosophy, and practice of science is the result of graduating from one or more specialized programs?

I can't believe what I'm reading. Science rejects authority. If you were properly educated, you would know this. As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion".

This is not a new view of science. The British Royal Academy, founded in 1660, has as its motto "Nullius in Verba," or "Take no one's word for it." Their explanation: "It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."

This is a classic discussion of parapsychology and other pseudosciences. One person says, "There are no theories or evidence." A true believer's reply is usually some variation on "Are you an expert? If not, then you have no right to an opinion."

The obvious reply is to ask, "Expert in what? There's no established field, no theories, no legitimate studies, in which to be an expert."

When Einstein published his revolutionary papers in 1905, he was a Swiss patent clerk without an advanced degree. Did the science journal reject his papers because he had no authority? No, not really. Know why? They were scientists.

> ... just tell me the basis of your academic authority

Learn something about science. Science is not a religion. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence (and I already said this, to no effect).
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-07 09:11:37+00:00
Impressive. It's worth reading despite the slight AI sheen to the writing, as it's unusually informative relative to most security articles. The primary takeaway from my POV is to watch out for "helpful" string normalization calls in security sensitive software. Strings should be bags of bytes as much as possible. A lot of the exploits boil down to trying to treat security identifiers as text instead of fixed numeric sequences. Also, even things that look trivial like file paths in error messages can be deadly.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-07 09:13:32+00:00
Trump has never once opposed Europe continuing to fund Ukraine however long they want. On the contrary, that clearly became his plan once it became clear he wasn't going to be able to get a cease fire. Now he simply wants to get out of Ukraine without it being a huge L on his legacy like Afghanistan was for Biden. So how does he plan to do this? Just dump it on Europe. This started out with calls for the EU to 'pay their fair share.' It's now been made clear that "their fair share" is 100% of the cost of the war. We get out of the war, it's no longer tied to Trump, and the MIC lobby still gets filthy rich because the EU funding for Ukraine will go straight to the US MIC anyhow.

And what does the EU get out of this? Local economies that are already headed into recession now expected to pay dramatically more for Ukraine to the US, skyrocketing energy costs owing largely to being compelled to purchase US natural gas, getting to deal with jacked up tariffs to the US, and eventually being the ones that get to take the L over Ukraine. This is not "influence" - this is countries being dictated to act in a way that runs completely against their own self interest.
by kybernetikos | 2025-08-07 09:14:59+00:00
> Won't that work much better and scale easily?

Doing computation that can happen at end points at the end points is massively more scaleable. Even better, its done by compute you usually aren't paying for if you're the company providing the service.

I saw an interview with the guy who made photopea where he talked about how tiny his costs were because all compute was done in the user's browser. Running a saas in a cloud is expensive.

It's an underrated aspect of what we used to call "software".

And that's leaving aside questions of latency and data privacy.