MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnlmorg | 2025-09-08 21:08:26+00:00
> The things all being described are way beyond non trivial to solve, and they'd need to be solved for every language.

Except it already is a solved problem.

If languages compile to a common byte code then you just need one tool. You already see examples of this with things like the IR assembly produced by LLVM, various Microsoft languages that compile to CLR, and the different languages that target JVM.

There are also already common ways to create reusable parsing rules like LSP for IDEs and treesitter.

In fact there are already grep-like utilities that are based on treesitter.

So it’s not only very possible to create language agnostic, reusable, tools; but these tools already exist and being used by a great many developers.

The problem raised in the article is that we just don’t push these concepts hard enough these days. Instead relying on outdated concepts of what source code should look like.

> Grep works great

For LF-separated lists it does. But if it worked great for structured content then we wouldn’t be having this conversation to begin with.
by tavavex | 2025-09-08 21:08:33+00:00
I don't think you and ModernMech are really disagreeing over the core premise. They aren't saying that Meta isn't reprehensible on a personal level, but that Meta is acting in a very predictable way given the incentives that our system provides to companies like them.

If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
by lioeters | 2025-09-08 21:08:42+00:00
> improving itself in an exponential growth

That seems like a possibly mythical critical point, at which a phase transition will occur that makes the AI system qualitatively different from its predecessors. Exponential to the limit of infinity.

All the mad rush of companies and astronomical investments are being made to get there first, counting on this AGI to be a winner-takes-all scenario, especially if it can be harnessed to grow the company itself. The hype is even infecting governments, for economic and national interest. And maybe somewhere a mad king dreams of world domination.
by theologic | 2025-09-08 21:09:11+00:00
It turns out that the vast majority of the USA POPULATION, which I think we have some of the best data for, is magnesium deficient or 50%. The issue is basically vitamins are a catalyst, and is very difficult to justify putting more catalyst into any type of chemical equation. So overdosing on magnesium doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

By the way, I also love Gwern.
by alexpotato | 2025-09-08 21:09:31+00:00
The technology for this has been around for the past 10 years but it's still not a reality, what makes AI the kicker here?

e.g. Alexa for voice, REST for talking to APIs, Zapier for inter-app connectdness.

(not trying to be cynical, just pointing out that the technology to make it happen doesn't seem to be the blocker)
by xorcist | 2025-09-08 21:10:13+00:00
If Javascript people were bad programmers, we wouldn't see two new frontend frameworks per year. Many of them are ambitious projects that must have had thousands of hours put in by people who know the language well.

The observation is real however. But every culture develops its own quirks and ideas, and for some reason this has just become a fundamental part of Javascript's. It's hard to know why after the fact, but perhaps it could spark the interest of sociologists who can enlighten us.
by davsti4 | 2025-09-08 21:10:15+00:00
Its simple usability polish. Tomato had it, OpenWRT doesn't. But where it shines is in the reliability. I've been using it for over 10 years, and prior to that DD-WRT on a 54L.

That's the biggest challenge with many of these open source tools. They're built to solve a single or handful of problems, but don't always fit for a larger audience. I'm not complaining either, and I'd be happy to provide the polish, but right now, my time is spent with my clients ($$).

If you invest the time in getting it configured the way you want, you'll be happy too, for 10 years. ;)

Food for thought of why I'm exploring other options currently: 1. Need a WAN failover that can check with a custom heartbeat 2. Need an easy-to-configure VPN that doesn't use an open port, but will register against my own cloud server 3. Need an easy way to monitor traffic of particular devices - DNS queries and active connections 4. Need a big button to turn off the internet for all, and individual buttons to turn it of for specific devices 5. Need an easy way to manage VLANs and traffic routing rules (for local-only designated devices)
by WorldMaker | 2025-09-08 21:10:33+00:00
The form factor of NACS is the old Tesla plug from before the EU mandated Tesla switch to CCS2. So there is still some "NACS" in Europe, kind of, but it is mostly phased out I hear.

In North America it's attempt at a CCS plug was awful and ugly and so much worse than CCS2 and made J17772 almost look preferable. The marketplace winner (by almost a landslide) was Tesla's plug and NACS is CCS protocols over Tesla plugs. All of the car companies at this point are mostly agreed that NACS is the present and future in North America.
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-08 21:11:01+00:00
This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices.

Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.

Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.
by Humorist2290 | 2025-09-08 21:11:19+00:00
From Patrick Brewer's analysis [0] it seems like written into the proposal is to enable members of the government to have access to excepted systems, if applied for things like law enforcement or "national security." If I had to guess, at least a few MEPs expect they will be able to use such an exemption for their personal communications.

[0] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
by john01dav | 2025-09-08 21:11:22+00:00
They need to add some free way to backup to my own server. I have my own raid array with backups sitting in my basement. I'll back up to that. I do not want to pay them for cloud storage.

Right now, theoretically, I can do this by backing up to my phone and then copying the file over. But, this has many issues. Firstly, it is manual, so it will happen way less. Secondly, it is not differential, so the storage requirements will explode. Thirdly, if my signal message archive is bigger than the free space on my phone (especially if it takes more than 50% of total space) then I'm just fucked — there's no way to back it up anywhere else. Fourthly, the backup system is EXTREMELY buggy, to the point that it takes me HOURS babysitting it every time I make a backup.

A good solution would be let me put FTP/FTPS/SFTP/SCP/WebDav/SMB/etc. credentials in the Signal app and have it do periodic differential backups to there. Let me decide if I want it to be encrypted or not based on my threat model. Tell my contacts if this is enabled and let me exclude and/or encrypt specific chats if you want to let other people apply their security model too.

Only supporting any reasonable (meaning automatic and convenient) backup system with their paid cloud and not supporting my own server smells like a money grab to me. This is utterly unacceptable in a supposedly non-profit app. I have no problem with their paid cloud being an option, to be clear.

Another problem with Signal is that they only provide an official Linux package for Debian-based distributions. This forces people using other distributions to either do repeated manual effort to pull it out of their .deb files or build it themself (which is made way harder than it should be), or rely on sketchy third parties for packags. Given how much privatea information goes over Signal, such third party packages are an extremely tempting target for anyone from criminals to national spy agencies. This lapse in security due to not packaging for any Linux except Debian-based Linux (or even providing an ideally auto-updating portable binary!) is a much larger security lapse than letting me backup to my own server conveniently. So, their cries of security concerns relating to backups ring hollow.

Overall, it's quite a shitty app. I only use it because the alternatives are worse.
by anon84873628 | 2025-09-08 21:11:44+00:00
Want another rich one? After acquiring HCA in 1994, Rick Scott was CEO of the company while it systematically defrauded the US government by overcharging Medicaid and various other schemes. In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine, which was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time.

In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
by o11c | 2025-09-08 21:11:50+00:00
It's useless to mention number of parameters without also mentioning quantization, and to a lesser-but-still-significant extent context size, which determine how much RAM is needed.

"It will run" is a different thing than "it will run without swapping or otherwise hitting a slow storage access path". That makes a speed difference of multiple orders of magnitude.

This is one thing Ollama is good for. Possibly the only thing, if you listen to some of its competitors. But the choice of runner does nothing to avoid the fact that all LLMs are just toys.
by flax | 2025-09-08 21:12:53+00:00
I don't watch Youtube, but my young kid loves to watch screaming Minecraft morons pretend to scare themselves. I've been growing increasingly concerned by the ads he's incidentally seeing and was just yesterday looking at giving in and subscribing to a premium. There's a normal premium for $14 and a premium "lite" for $8. I'd have subscribed at $1/month, but those prices are absolutely insane. Instead, I installed revanced on his tablet. For free.
by john01dav | 2025-09-08 21:13:09+00:00
Please add some way to send it over FTP/FTPS/SFTP/SCP/WebDav/SMB/whatever so I can automatically backup to my own server that isn't on my phone. I need something fully automated or I won't often do it. This is also really important if the free space on my phone is less than the size of the Signal archive, and even more so if the Signal archive is more than 50% of the total space on my phone.
by newpavlov | 2025-09-08 21:13:11+00:00
Tangential note: I sometimes wish that signed integers were symmetrical. i8 would represent the range of [-127 to 127] with 0xFF representing NaN. Any operation which can not be computed (division by zero, overflows, operation with another NaN, etc.) would result in NaN. For further symmetry we could do the same for signed integers as well.

Yes, it's possible to encode such types manually, but it will not be efficient since CPUs do not natively support such operations.
by crinkly | 2025-09-08 21:13:21+00:00
Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials.

Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.

It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.

I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
by moffkalast | 2025-09-08 21:13:44+00:00
We've been mostly deplatformed for any kind of organized action against it, there's just writing an email to your MEP or... a change.org petition. Yes really. Nothing official one could sign their name under.

But even so, the commission does whatever it wants anyway, they are complete autocrats when it comes to law proposal, it's up to the parliament and the courts to something about it afterwards. And they should given that it's unconstitutional in many EU countries and incompatible with GDPR as it currently exists.
by doubled112 | 2025-09-08 21:14:05+00:00
I would have thought most people here are doing much more complicated work all day.

All four bearings are part of an assembly that bolts in. 8 or 12 bolts depending on position. I'm lucky that I don't even need a press.

The wheel comes off (5 bolts), the brakes come off (2 bolts), the axle/hub bolt comes out (1 bolt), and then on the front there are four bolts holding the assembly to the car. On the rear, nothing holds it on except that hub bolt.

Use a torque wrench to get them to spec. The kits came with new bolts. The axle bolts go on tight tight.
by Eextra953 | 2025-09-08 21:14:10+00:00
Speaks to the disconnect between our representatives and the people they represent so many of these policies are extremely unpopular and yet they still get pushed through to terrible effect. I don't understand why 'we' can't hold them accountable. Is it due to lack of education in what is happening? A lack of understanding in our political system? Is the populate just completely disconnected?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-08 21:15:21+00:00
I can't imagine all the struggle the author must feel like.

Like the need to constantly explain himself because of one single blunder.

It shows how much so many open source projects rely on dependencies which are owned by one person and they can be pwned and (maybe hacked too)

Everyone can get pwned I suppose. From a more technical perspective though, from the amounts of times I am listening AI,AI & AI BS, Couldn't something like deno / node / bun etc. just give a slight warning on if they think that the code might be malware or, maybe the idea could be that we could have a stable release that lets say could be on things like debian etc. which could be verified by external contributors and then instead of this node world moving towards @latest, we move towards something like @verified which can take builds / source from something like debian maintained or something along that way...

I hope people can understand that author is a human too and we should all treat him as such and lets treat him with kindness because I can't imagine what he might be going as I said. Woud love a more technical breakdown once things settle and we can postmortem this whole situation.
by coldblues | 2025-09-08 21:16:32+00:00
Even without Chat Control, I still self-censor even in private communications. The majority of people you chat with show complete disregard for your privacy. They piss on it. There are very basic requirements that a minuscule amount of people follow, like: full-disk encryption, using a password manager, being aware of your rights to protect yourself against searches, having good computer hygiene and competency. The level of incompetency and ignorance when it comes to privacy & security makes me deeply angry and frustrated to a level that brings me to nihilism and misanthropy
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-08 21:16:59+00:00
> including end-to-end encrypted ones

How the hang are they planning to do that?

I mean, if someone has an end to end encrypted conversation, it's encrypted when it gets to the carrier, and the carrier shouldn't (technically, not anything related about whether they are allowed to or not) be able to decrypt the conversation.

If the carrier is terminating the connection, then it's either not end to end encrypted, or it's broken.

edit: sorted the grammar/punctuation at the end to improve clarity
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-08 21:17:05+00:00
As many, many critics have pointed out, the EU claiming to defend human rights, protect free speech, and respect personal privacy, is demonstrably nothing more than a fictional moral high ground.

Russia and China are in your face and obvious about where they stand, and don't mind being a boolean of true. The EU just prefers some subtlety with more politically correct and polite wording, and prefers a float of 0.92.

Part of me almost prefers the Singapore model. Clear rules, even harsh rules, but near-total do-whatever-you-want if it's not on the list. None of this gray-area nonsense. Uncertainty is a form of oppression, and the US/EU are masters in that regard.
by utyop22 | 2025-09-08 21:17:13+00:00
Im not convinced at the comparison to the .com boom of the internet, its intellectually lazy.

The internet was always going to disrupt the way we think about the discovery and purchase of goods and services at the bare minimum. Some saw that the role of the personal computer was evolving from just computation to communication and so on.. this stuff was obvious early on. Irrespective of the equity bubble at that time, the potential was real. It was just too early.

There is nothing of this sort happening with LLMs. Where do they fit? Nobody has a clear answer and I don't see a clear one emerging any time soon. If someone has a very clear and direct answer, please feel free to reply :=)
by Bender | 2025-09-08 21:17:23+00:00
I have not but if there was enough interest I could make a rough go at it. It's not a very complicated setup.

It's basically Alpine Linux with some custom sysctl and interface settings, sch_cake with custom settings, cdg, netfilter, Unbound DNS with some local zones for limited spam filtering and a cron based refresh of common domain names, blackhole routes for known clowns and DoH/DoT IP addresses, chronyd for NTP, dnsmasq for static and dynamic DHCP, gratuitous arp cron job to lower latency and steal back my IP if someone tries to take it and restore quickly from ISP router failover all running on a Protectli VPN class small business firewall with cron snapshots/backups from another node.

My first pass would probably just be a static page with linked text files of the configurations and a brief synopsis of what each file or in some cases individual settings are performing.
by thangalin | 2025-09-08 21:17:35+00:00
I've created several PDF documents written in plain text (CommonMark plus pandoc-compatible extensions) that showcase what's possible with Markdown and the ConTeXt typesetting system. People claim that AsciiDoc and reStructuredText are "better" than Markdown for technical documentation, without citing a feature matrix.

My hope is that claimants will offer their own feature matrix---or improve mine---to help writers assess what text format meets their needs.
by ac29 | 2025-09-08 21:17:52+00:00
> Your bone health is almost entirely correlated to the load bearing exercise and gravity stress that you put on your musculoskeletal system.

This is a somewhat bold claim.

I have literally zero dairy in my diet or calcium fortified alternatives. My best estimate is that without supplementation I would get 20-50% of the recommended calcium intake. Is your suggestion that lifting weights is better than a calcium supplement for bone heath in this case?
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-08 21:18:09+00:00
It wasn't fully understood, but at the time they understood it well enough to make it work. It was lost because it was an extremely classified material that we had no use for for decades. By the time we needed it again, most of the original records had been lost and all previous engineers were long dead.

We knew what it was and roughly how it worked, but it was very much a process of re-inventing from scratch.
by rdtsc | 2025-09-08 21:18:09+00:00
I went with a TP-Link Archer C7 V2. It's quite dated by now, but it's been sitting quietly in the closet and working for all these years and I am still happy with it. My speeds are also not that fast, I only pay for 100Mbps so something faster might overwhelm this hardware. I also don't have anything fancy on it, no vlans just a few wifi networks on 2.4ghz and 5ghz, some wired devices, and two usb drivers which I access via ssh (these do require I install a few extra packages to allow mounting them).
by Humorist2290 | 2025-09-08 21:18:27+00:00
Sure, but the way this was written it also includes everything from Gmail to root access servers hosted by Hetzner. Gmail has been doing this for years, but (I assume) not Hetzner. If even hosting providers are dragged into this the scale grows dramatically. Can Hetzner really not even be bothered about having to comply with such ridiculous requirements?

To give a simple example: imagine a script that constantly dumps /dev/urandom into JPG-like files nonstop onto a 16 TB disk, then repeats. I've seen enterprise systems that aren't so dissimilar. If indeed the EU commission wants all files scanned, then will Hetzner need to spy on all of their machines at least enough to check for compliance? I'm guessing their board members think it can't possibly be so dumb, or stand to gain handsomely and privately.
by rasz | 2025-09-08 21:19:12+00:00
Not a lot is not how I would describe it. Take a 64bit piece of fetched data. On ARM64 you will just push that into two decoder blocks and be done with it. On x86 you got what, 1 to 15 bytes range per instruction? I dont even want to think about possible permutations, its in the 10 ^ some two digit number order.
by halyconWays | 2025-09-08 21:19:47+00:00
I bet they'll phase it out and try to force their worse service, wherein your data is stored on their servers, like they tried to do with PINs. It took enormous pushback to get them to stop mandatory PINs, and even then they made it nagware for a year or two.

I didn't trust their rationale about PINs and remote attestation somehow meaning your data is secured by a small passphrase, just like I won't trust them to not remove a useful and existing feature I already rely on for backups.

Also not mentioned, they designed their existing backup solution to require reverse-engineered community solutions to actually access your data; I have to use a Github project to unencrypt the backup and export my chats, which is something I've never had to do with any other messenger.
by kortilla | 2025-09-08 21:19:51+00:00
It’s an emu, not a duck. I hate that I’m forced to waste my time to see that and that it occupies space in my brain.

I’m also annoyed because this is a bit of a rug pull by youtube. The videos I watch of some obscure mechanical repair on a motor uploaded 15 years ago aren’t being monetized and they do not cost youtube enough to justify the multiple ads at the start and another in the middle that I have to sit through now to see it.

Youtube is going through major enshitification and is destroying the experience of consuming the largest video library in the world.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-08 21:19:51+00:00
There's nothing accurate about stories, just as there is nothing accurate about words, which are all metaphors and all are arbitrary. Comp sci's glaring mistake was confusing content with format. It's a fatal error.

"Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.” Daniel Kahnemann Thinking Fast and Slow

“The same science that reveals why we view the world through the lens of narrative also shows that the lens not only distorts what we see but is the source of illusions we can neither shake nor even correct for…all narratives are wrong, uncovering what bedevils all narrative is crucial for the future of humanity.” Alex Rosenberg How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories 2018