MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-22 15:30:52+00:00
The restriction on how much money banks can print has only some 200 years. A while before that, banks invented unlimited money printing, and a while before that banks were completely reinvented as regulated entities because money was coming and going without control...

I don't know how the ancient civilizations handled non-metalic money, I know that on the Middle age it was a famous kingdom killer because most kings couldn't refrain from creating infinite money.
by phba | 2025-08-22 15:30:57+00:00
"Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue." (https://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt)

This phase has been going on for decades now. It's a shame, really.
by uberduper | 2025-08-22 15:31:16+00:00
Different company, Telegen Display Labs.

LCDs were a thing (tho they were not great back then) and Plasma was the new hotness ( literally, they required external cooling units). The market for a thin, flat "CRT" like display was in extreme hot or cold environments, aviation, marine, stuff like that.

I heard they actually built one, but I never saw it. I was gone as soon as my paycheck bounced. This place was actual crazy. All sorts of bizarre shenanigans.
by lproven | 2025-08-22 15:31:22+00:00
> an American fire hydrant or school bus

So much this. The first time one asked me to click on "crosswalks", I genuinely had to think for a while as I struggled to remember WTF a "crosswalk" was in AmEng. I am a native English speaker, writer, editor and professionally qualified teacher, but my form of English does not have the word "crosswalk" or any word that is a synonym for it. (It has phrases instead.)

Our schoolbuses are ordinary buses with a special number on the front. They are no specific colour.

There are other examples which aren't coming immediately to mind, but it is vexing when the designer of a CAPTCHA isn't testing if I am human but if I am American.
by firefax | 2025-08-22 15:31:22+00:00
Does using your laptop to feed a signal to a monitor meet your needs? You can find large monitors that are indistinguishable in terms of screen quality from a modern television.

It can be annoying, but just running an HDMI cable from your device to the TV can be a simple solution.

You could use a laptop with no network connection and load it up with videos, or or just run your various streaming services in their own Firefox container[1].

You can add a TV tuner later on if you decide you need to access basic cable. (I got one back in 2016 to watch the debates).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[2] TV tuner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_tuner_card
by arp242 | 2025-08-22 15:31:22+00:00
You really think this is a full comprehensive list of everyone that was banned, or that it's a highly cherry-picked list of examples? At the time people pointed out it missed many prominent left-wing bans that were excluded, but I can't be bothered to search for that now.

And maybe some more left-wing accounts should have been banned too; I don't know. I never claimed anything about this. I said that Quillette published an article that considered the American Nazi Party and similar far-right explicit Nazis and KKK members as "conservatives" that were being banned.

It's really not that hard to say "yeah, the American Nazi party probably should have been banned, it was a mistake to include that on that data-driven approach, as was the inclusion of David Duke and Richard Spencer".
by actionfromafar | 2025-08-22 15:31:41+00:00
The color has always faded - well, not always. The gold standard for movie archiving is to store the movies color separated on three reels, one for red, green and blue, but not use color film, but a special black and white. There's no fading at all on these.

Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-22 15:32:12+00:00
There were never 900k users interested in each commit. Never was, never will be. So that's a false comparison.

These scrapers have upped both the server load (requests per second) and bandwidth requirements, without me consenting to it. If they were actual human users OR bots that were appropriately designed to minimize their impact on the target sites, that's perfectly OK.

Maybe if this was truly the only way to get to our god-like LLM to work in a god-like way (*), it would also be acceptable. But it isn't.

And on top of that, they are incompetently designed and they are causing real issues that a huge number of sites need to address.

(*) put differently, if all this current scraping activity delivered some notable benefit to humanity
by Mawr | 2025-08-22 15:32:23+00:00
> I find myself wishing for Optional[T] quite often.

Well, so long as you don't care about compatibility with the broad ecosystem, you can write a perfectly fine Optional yourself:

type Optional[Value any] struct { value Value exists bool } // New empty. func New[Value any]() Optional[Value] {} // New of value. func Of[Value any](value Value) Optional[Value] {} // New of pointer. func OfPointer[Value any](value *Value) Optional[Value] {} // Only general way to get the value. func (o Optional[Value]) Get() (Value, bool) {} // Get value or panic. func (o Optional[Value]) MustGet() Value {} // Get value or default. func (o Optional[Value]) GetOrElse(defaultValue Value) Value {} // JSON support. func (o Optional[Value]) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {} func (o *Optional[Value]) UnmarshalJSON(data []byte) error {} // DB support. func (o *Optional[Value]) Scan(value any) error {} func (o Optional[Value]) Value() (driver.Value, error) {}

But you probably do care about compatibility with everyone else, so... yeah it really sucks that the Go way of dealing with optionality is slinging pointers around.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-22 15:32:25+00:00
interesting take. i dont know a lot about grammarz yet in my own language i can speak fairly ok...

all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.

copilot told me to cast an int to str to get rid of an error.

thanks copilot, it was on kernel code.

glad i didnt do it :/. just closed browser and opened man pages. i get nowhere with these things. it feels u need to understand so much its likely less typing to write the code. code is concise and clear after all, mostly unambiguous. language on the other hand...

i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt
by lotharcable | 2025-08-22 15:32:33+00:00
yeah Quadlets are a pretty reasonable improvement.

It was introduced in Podman 4.4 which is circa 2023.

And it takes a while for podman to get up to date in non-Redhat related distributions. Like Debian Stable was stuck on 4.3 until Trixie release this month.

So unless you are using Fedora and friends or something like Arch it is kinda hard time going for podman users. Which is unfortunate.

Docker has a bit of a advantage here because they encourage you to use their packages, not the distribution's.

Here is a example Quadlet configuration i use for syncthing that I run out of my home:

[Unit] Description=syncthing After=default.target [Container] ContainerName=syncthing Image=docker://docker.io/syncthing/syncthing:latest Volume=/home/lothar/.syncthing:/var/syncthing:z Volume=/home/lothar:/var/home/:rslave Network=host Pull=always Environment=PUID=1000 Environment=PGID=1000 Environment=STGUIADDRESS='' UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000 SecurityLabelDisable=true [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

This then gets dropped into ~/.config/containers/systemd/syncthing.container

And it is handled automatically.

This configures the syncthing container to always get updated on each startup, bypasses the "rootless" networking by using host networking (rootless networking is limited and slow), and the default Sync dir ends up in ~/.syncthing where as I can add more sync'd directories to my real home directory by directing it to /var/home/ in the syncthing web ui.

As you can see the arguments under "container" is just really capitalized versions of docker/podman arguments.

Also if you like GUIs the podman desktop has support for helping to generating quadlets. Although I haven't tried it out yet.
by adamcharnock | 2025-08-22 15:32:34+00:00
This is certainly interesting, and is something I often wonder about. In our case we mostly run Kubernetes clusters on EX130 servers (Xeon, 24c, 256GB). In this situation there are a lot of processes running, for which increased cores-count and memory availability seems worth it. Particularly when we have the cost of 10-25g private networking for each server, lower node counts seems to come out being more economical.

But, but with fewer processes I can totally believe this works out to be the better option. Thank you for the write-up!
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-22 15:33:34+00:00
I don’t follow the zero copy argument. You pass in an owned buffer and get an owned buffer back out. There’s no copying happening here. It’s your claim that async is supposed to look like synchronous code but I don’t buy it. I don’t see why that’s a goal. Synchronous is an anachronistic software paradigm for a computer hardware architecture that never really existed (electronics are concurrent and asynchronous by nature) and cause a lot of performance problems trying to make it work that way.

Indeed, one thing I’ve always wondered is if you can submit a read request for a page aligned buffer and have the kernel arrange for data to be written directly into that without any additional copies. That’s probably not possible since there’s routing happening in the kernel and it accumulates everything into sk_buffs.

But maybe it could arrange for the framing part of the packet and the data to be decoupled so that it can just give you a mapping into the data region (maybe instead of you even providing a buffer, it gives you back an address mapped into your space). Not sure if that TLB update might be more expensive than a single copy.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-08-22 15:34:17+00:00
IMO this whole situation is ridiculous.

#2-#4 are the government trying to impose its national laws on an entity in a completely different country, operating entirely in that completely different country, with no business relationship whatsoever with your country. It's a futile and frankly rather insulting effort; no different from if Iran declared it was illegal for UK women living in the UK to leave the house without wearing a burka.

#5 is an authoritarian offense against your own citizens; trying to prevent them from being able to communicate with people in another country even if they want to do so.
by barbazoo | 2025-08-22 15:34:36+00:00
> Except when they "extract" something that wasn't in the source. And now what, assuming you can even detect the tainted data at all?

You gotta watch for that for sure but no that's not a issue we worry about anymore, at least not for how we're using it for here. The text that's being extracted from is not a "BLOB". It's plain text at that point and of a certain, expected kind so that makes it easier. In general, the more isolated and specific the use case, the bigger the chances of the whole thing working end to end. Open ended chat is just a disaster. Operating on a narrow set of expectations. Much more successful.
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-22 15:34:48+00:00
I'm in potentially the target demographic for this. I regularly bounce between R, Python, Maxima, and occasionally MATLAB/Octave. Passing data between these is usually done using the lowest common denominator: CSV. Having four completely different interfaces to these tools is a hassle. I'm also not a big fan of Jupyter and if this feels better for me it might be a decent Jupyter replacement even without the cross-language stuff.
by pmarreck | 2025-08-22 15:35:59+00:00
Impressed anytime I have to use it (even if I have to study its man page again or use an LLM to construct the right incantation or use a GUI that just builds the incantation based on visual options). Becoming an indispensable transcoding multitool.

I think building some processing off of Vulkan 1.3 was the right move. (Aside, I also just noticed yesterday that Asahi Linux on Mac supports that standard as well.)
by newpavlov | 2025-08-22 15:37:02+00:00
>If you're not doing things better than threads then why don't you just use threads?

Because green threads are more efficient than the classical threads. You have less context switching, more control over concurrency (e.g. you can have application-level pseudo critical section and tools like `join!`/`select!`), and with io-uring you have a much smaller number of syscalls.

In other words, memory footprint would be similar to the classical threads, but runtime performance can be much higher.

>So you only allow join/select at the task level? Sounds awful!

What is the difference with join/select at the future level?

Yes, with the most straightforward implementation you have to allocate full stack for each sub-task (somewhat equivalent to boxing sub-futures). But it's theoretically possible to use the parent task stack for sub-task stacks with the aforementioned compiler improvements.

Another difference is that instead of just dropping the future state on the floor you have to explicitly send a cancellation signal (e.g. based on `IORING_OP_ASYNC_CANCEL`) and wait for the sub-task to finish. Performance-wise it should have minimal difference when compared against the hypothetical async Drop.

>Yes, exactly.

Ok, I have nothing more to add then.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-22 15:37:05+00:00
I'm not sure when this changed, but in school for me in the 1970s and early '80s the teachers (at least the older ones) were all pretty much of the attitude that "what you get out of school depends on what you put into it" i.e. learning is mostly up to the student. Grades of "F" or zero for uncompleted or totally unsatisfactory work were not uncommon and students did get held back. Dropout age was 16 and those who really didn't care mostly did that. So at least the last two years of high school were mostly all kids who at least wanted to finish.
by furkansahin | 2025-08-22 15:37:31+00:00
Thanks for the comment! Yeah, if you are using the servers dedicated to yourself and considering the larger server packs more, it definitely makes sense.

In our case, though, if we provide 1/48 of 10Gbit network, it really doesn't work for our end customers. So, we're trying to provide the VMs from smaller but more up-to-date lineup.
by SkepticalWhale | 2025-08-22 15:37:32+00:00
Go has its fair share of flaws but I still think it hits a sweet spot that no other server side language provides.

It’s faster than Node or Python, with a better type system than either. It’s got a much easier learning curve than Rust. It has a good stdlib and tooling. Simple syntax with usually only one way to do things. Error handling has its problems but I still prefer it over Node, where a catch clause might receive just about anything as an “error”.

Am I missing a language that does this too or more? I’m not a Go fanatic at all, mostly written Node for backends in my career, but I’ve been exploring Go lately.
by 0xbeefcab | 2025-08-22 15:37:56+00:00
Linking a previous discussion to FFMPEG's inclusion of whisper in this release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44886647

This seemed to be interesting to users of this site. tl;dr they added support for whisper, an OpenAI model for speech-to-text, which should allow autogeneration of captions via ffmpeg
by jdietrich | 2025-08-22 15:38:30+00:00
Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).

If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.

Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.

Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...
by exprez135 | 2025-08-22 15:39:00+00:00
Not an insider, but I noticed that there is now a filter for using Whisper (C++) for audio transcription [1]. It looks like you provide the path to a model file [2].

[1]: https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp

[2]: https://git.ffmpeg.org/gitweb/ffmpeg.git/commit/13ce36fef98a...
by z3c0 | 2025-08-22 15:39:06+00:00
The statistical certainty is indeed present in the model. Each token comes with a probablility; if your softmax results approach a uniform distribution (i.e. all selected tokens at the given temp have near equal probabilities), then the next most likely token is very uncertain. Reporting the probabilities of the returned tokens can help the user understand how likely hallucinations are. However, that information is deliberately obfuscated now, to prevent distillation techniques.
by glenstein | 2025-08-22 15:39:35+00:00
Not true, because it's (2), not (1) in a context where we were talking about (1).

Drawing from an ambient energy source is perfectly legitimate, and is not what anyone meant by perpetual motion machine in the context of this thread. Next you say "but that distinction didn't exist at the time" and then I say "but it did in the comment section here where the example was introduced" and round and round we go.
by kace91 | 2025-08-22 15:39:36+00:00
This is a very valid point. Loops also let you play with the iteration itself for performance, deciding to skip n steps if a condition is met for example.

I always encounter these upsides once every few years when preparing leetcode interviews, where this kind of optimization is needed for achieving acceptable results.

In daily life, however, most of these chunks of data to transform fall in one of these categories:

- small size, where readability and maintainability matters much more than performance

- living in a db, and being filtered/reshaped by the query rather than code

- being chunked for atomic processing in a queue or similar (usual when importing a big chunk of data).

- the operation itself is a standard algorithm that you just consume from a standard library that handless the loop internally.

Much like trees and recursion, most of us don’t flex that muscle often. Your mileage might vary depending of domain of course.
by h2zizzle | 2025-08-22 15:40:03+00:00
I'm gonna add another perspective. I was placed, and excelled, in moderately advanced math courses from 3rd grade on. Mostly 'A's through 11th grade precalc (taken because of the one major hiccup, placing only in the second most rigorous track when I entered high school). I ended that year feeling pretty good, with a superior SAT score bagged, high hopes for National Merit, etc.

Then came senior year. AP Calculus was a sh/*tshow, because of a confluence of factors: dealing with parents divorcing, social isolation, dysphoria. I hit a wall, and got my only quarterly D, ever.

The, "if you get left behind, that's on you, because we're not holding up the bright kids," mentality was catastrophic for me - and also completely inapplicable, because I WAS one of the bright kids! I needed help, and focus. I retook the course in college and got the highest grade in the class, so I confirmed that I was not the problem; unfortunately, though, the damage had been done. I'd chosen a major in the humnities, and had only taken that course as an elective, to prove to myself that I could manage the subject. You would never know that I'd been on-track for a technical career.

So, I don't buy that America/Sweden/et al. are full of hopeless demi-students. I was deemed one, and it wasn't true, but the simple perception was devastating. I think there is a larger, overarching deficit of support for students, probably some combination of home life, class structure, and pedagogical incentives. If "no child left behind" is anathema in these circles, the "full speed ahead" approach is not much better.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-22 15:40:04+00:00
> Does it bother you for measurement to play a fundamental role in quantum mechanics?

> While an unobserved particle is described by the smoothly changing Schrödinger equation that captures its multiple possible states, when measured the particle only ever has one defined outcome.

> Does it seem strange that it is measurement that leads to this change?

Options provided did not cover my response.

If one throws away their misconceptions and self deceptions one may rephrase this in a revealing way.

If quantum world is potential distribution and localities are super amplitudes themselves, they only resolve to classical considerations during real time resolve (“measurement” which should be restated “interference”.)

The internal quantum disposition is only relevant when it interferes with something, and everything does all the time giving form to manifest reality. Not “measurement.” You derps are reading it with a hammer and calling that quantum resolve. Any interference even negative differential resistance has influence within the quantum bubble under investigation. Its actual “state” is only a fleeting reading which instantaneously begins to decay without continuity (embodiment of stable potential).
by Bender | 2025-08-22 15:40:05+00:00
They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.
by oconnor663 | 2025-08-22 15:40:16+00:00
Note that C++ coroutines use heap allocation to avoid the problems that Pin is solving, which is a pretty big carve-out from the "zero overhead principle" that C++ usually aims for. The long development time of async traits has also been related to Rust not heap allocating futures. Whether that performance+portability-vs-complexity tradeoff is worth it for any given project is, of course, a different question.