MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-09-11 05:28:32+00:00
My CachyOS / KDE install with pure Wayland has been buttery smooth and recently got an update that finally lets me calibrate the max brightness of my HDR OLED monitor (which was the monitor's fault. Not even Windows could make it work properly for non-games until now). CachyOS is also the first distro I've used in years that does things close enough to way I like out of the box that I haven't bothered to update my system reinstall script in months.

I've also been giving Bazzite to some non-tech people who have not once asked for help. That one is immutable and Wayland only, so it's a further testament to how far Wayland has come if you're on an up-to-date-enough system.

Sadly, I'm stuck on older Ubuntu for my work laptop because the mandated security software won't run on anything better.
by TiredOfLife | 2025-09-11 05:29:24+00:00
> SUSE Tumbleweed > They test packages more thoroughly, and they actually hold back breaking or buggy changes instead of the "lol read log and get fucked" policy.

I am currently on Arch specifically because Tumbleweed shipped a broken Firefox build and refused to ship the fixed version for a month.

As a workaround I uninstalled the bundled firefox and replaced it with flatpak. And on next system update the bundled Firefox was back because for some strange reason packages on suse are bundled.
by sudohalt | 2025-09-11 05:29:26+00:00
The team is good, and I enjoyed the read. But this is just an engineering blog post. They're promoting this like it's ground breaking research and it's on their front-page. Ultimately this paper is not very meaningful and just a fun debugging session.

I've seen this play out dozens of times. So many startups that have come and go in the bay area were composed of extremely talented individuals, but almost all of them failed.
Show HN: See Before You Shave]
by machinetree | 2025-09-11 05:29:28+00:00
Need a clean resume shot? 3‑sec clean‑shave export for a pro first impression (beardless filter). Unsure to shave? See Before You Shave: side‑by‑side clean vs stubble, decide with confidence. Want more matches? Natural, consistent light and angles build real appeal.
by collingreen | 2025-09-11 05:29:36+00:00
> wanted a border and were buying people flights home

This is a really really disingenuous way to describe what is happening, which I expect you fully understand.

The bit I don't get is _why_ does this smirking, bad faith, intentional misrepresentation happen? What good actually comes from pretending and trying to mislead? I find this kind of thing extremely discouraging. Maybe that's the answer to my question?
by rigrassm | 2025-09-11 05:30:44+00:00
Not op but I've seen the video they referenced and their account is accurate from what I remember and the whole debate is shown (it's actually a long video). There were preselected topics with time limits for each one. The way they picked who was up was a bit odd with them basically racing to the chair but the ones not up there could vote to stop the current debaters turn and let someone else take over. It was definitely interesting.

In that production he was pretty engaged and most of the time seemed to be putting out relevant, thought out responses.

That's not to say there weren't any gotcha responses being thrown around but IIRC (it's been a while) it was coming from both sides of the debate. IIRC, there was some one of the debaters was actually more ,than Kirk (provided I'm not mixing up videos, healthy distrust for my memory lol).
by 13point5 | 2025-09-11 05:31:28+00:00
I've seen a lot of purple gradient websites made by LLMs and I was curious if we can change a model's favorite color by messing with the activations instead of prompts.

So I used Representation Engineering with just 1 pair of contrastive prompts to make Mistral-7B prefer orange as its favorite color.

I used the repeng library by Theia to test this out.

Next I'm gonna implement it from scratch to understand why this even works.

I wonder if we can introduce "taste" into a model with methods like this.

The paper is "REPRESENTATION ENGINEERING: A TOP-DOWN APPROACH TO AI TRANSPARENCY".

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01405
by avazhi | 2025-09-11 05:31:43+00:00
If you agree that he never actively promulgated violence and if you agree that there is a difference between (i) actively promulgating violence, or (ii) saying that people should have a right to own guns, then I'm sure you and I don't disagree so far.

Look, I haven't lived in America in 20 years (dual Australian-American citizen), nor have I been back there since the mid 2000s. I live in a place that doesn't really have regularly occurring mass shootings and, personally, I do take comfort in knowing that almost nobody I am around and interact with in public is carrying a lethal weapon - for better or worse even pocket knives and pepper spray can't be legally carried around here. Having said that, while I disagree with Mr Kirk about guns philosophically, I understand the constitutional, legal, and philosophical arguments that some Americans make vis-a-vis the 2nd amendment, and I don't see how you could conflate those arguments with an exhortation to actively kill other people.

We can both agree that if a judge interprets US constitutional law in such a way that he issues a judgment protecting the right to 'bear arms', he isn't also necessarily, by virtue of the ruling, promoting violence, right? Guns and violence aren't the same thing. Guns no doubt are used as instruments of violence in many cases, but at least in many respects they are also used solely for their deterrent effect, and it doesn't seem difficult to me to understand that you could support one (a right to bear arms) but deny the legitimacy of assassinations or extrajudicial killings. Indeed, several legal judgments from America have featured judges that are personally opposed to guns and who personally don't carry or own guns nevertheless finding that under American law they have to rule in a way that results in increased availability of guns to the public. That's very clearly not the same thing as advocating violence.
by devn0ll | 2025-09-11 05:32:06+00:00
As an Enterprise user of Rancher, we had long discussions with Suse about Longhorn. And we are not using it.

You need a separate storage lan, a seriously beafy one at to use Longhorn. But even 25Gbit was not enough to keep volumes from being corrupted.

When rebuilds take too long, longhorn fails, crashes, hangs, etc, etc.

We will never make the mistake of using Longhorn again.
by m463 | 2025-09-11 05:32:54+00:00
> There is some level of centralization if I want to buy a domain name or do other certain things, but it's pretty minimal and I feel mostly in control, at least for the kind of things I want to do.

This actually related to a fundamental lack of control.

Lots of tech we buy now promises "smart" but because you need to get to it from your phone, some corporation "needs" to "help" connect your device and your phone.

for example - you want a "smart" thermostat. To connect to it from anywhere from your phone to change the temperature, the thermostat contacts the mannufacturer. Then your phone has to talk to them as an intermediary to contact your thermostat.

Conveniently, they can collect data from your thermostat, or your house, or your phone, maintain a "customer relationship" or even charge you for the "service".

if things were properly decentralized, your phone could just contact your "smart" stuff and nobody else would need to be involved.
by vkou | 2025-09-11 05:33:05+00:00
> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.

The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.
by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | 2025-09-11 05:33:19+00:00
"Your options as an individual, or even sizable portion of society, are to shit on the wait staff's income"

My primarily option is to multiply the estimated cost of going to the restaurant by 1.3 (tip+tax) and make my decision about going there based on that figure, not on published menu prices.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-11 05:33:42+00:00
Just to be clear, I don't think security improvements like this are the problem, they're genuinely welcome and appreciated. The problem is when this technology is weaponized against us by removing the escape hatches to stifle our freedoms, but that's a separate independent decision.

GrapheneOS makes similar security improvements, but it doesn't lock the escape hatches or stifle our freedoms. I could still root my device if I wanted to (although this is not recommended) and I can turn exploit protections off and customize the level of enforcement in detail, per-app, if I want/need to.
by 14 | 2025-09-11 05:34:00+00:00
I was fortunate enough to once have the daughter of a client I took care of in a nursing home ask me if I would escort her dad and her on a day trip as he needed help into the bathroom and such. We ended up going to a Ukrainian hall in Vancouver BC where he was going to meet some old friends.

The older ladies busy making handmade perogies was such a delicious treat.

But I also got to meet Stefan Petelycky. He wrote the book: Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine

He ended up there and was one of the lucky ones who made it out. When he pulled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo, the number he was given there, a chill crossed my entire body and an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.

I of course had heard about the concentration camps but seeing a tattoo in person made the event much more real where I could connect to the tragedy in a way I never did.
by Frieren | 2025-09-11 05:34:50+00:00
If a doctor fucks up is liable for bad practice. If an architect fucks up is liable for bad practice.

CEOs, CTOs, etc. of organizations with the budged of small countries can be stupid, unknowledgeable and reckless and there are no consequences (unless it affects shareholders money). Executives should be held legally accountable of the damage that their companies do.

Accountability is required for a civilized society. When the people with the most power do not need to follow any rule we get into anarchy and chaos. Just watch the news to see that it is already happening.
by monocasa | 2025-09-11 05:35:21+00:00
Ok, digging into the schematic, I think I see the problem.

Almost all of the normally free GPIO is eaten up by a DPI (Display Parallel Interface) connection to the screen.

The screen should instead use the currently unused MIPI pins if you're already at the level of sophistication of laying out PCIe and USB3 traces.

That gives you back nearly all of your GPIO to use for stuff like I2S, and you can then even expose more non USB externally than just that one stemma port.

On top of that, for a project like this, I would disagree with the quality you get out of the pwm as audio thing. It's not audiophile by any means, but neither is some cheap Bluetooth receiver chip, and it's certainly good enough for the speakers that weren't designed for this case.
by m463 | 2025-09-11 05:35:47+00:00
> "telecommunications service" only encompasses voice call service

I wonder if those helpful text messages from some company can locate you?

I've heard that tow truck companies can find your location because it is somewhat like and emergency.

by the way, verizon is just plain evil.

I remember years ago when they would add identifying cookies to all web requests outgoing from your phone to identify your specific handset. (search "verizon supercookie")
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-09-11 05:36:13+00:00
> So it seems the ESTA isn't worth anything anymore. You can't go to the USA without a very very heavyweight working VISA.

There really isn’t much between a B-1 and an H1-B, so there isn’t much of a path forward here. That factory isn’t getting built until the USA re-instates previous exceptions.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-11 05:36:20+00:00
Maybe the way forward is to break the impact factor game. Everybody in a field get together and publish a paper: literally every topologist could put their name on the paper “Generally we all agree that Topology is an interesting topic.”

Everybody in the field cite that paper going forward, giving it a massive impact factor, making impact factor useless. Do this occasionally, randomly, do it in niche sub fields, everybody who goes to a conference put their name on the paper “we had a nice time at <conference> this year.”

I mean, it is something everybody hates, right? There’s no point in preserving it.
by hollerith | 2025-09-11 05:36:49+00:00
>The second amendment literally defines a free state by its capacity for armed revolt

Aren't you confusing the text[1] with what one person, namely Thomas Jefferson, said about it?

[1] "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
by bccdee | 2025-09-11 05:36:57+00:00
A position like his doesn't really take well to steelmanning… It's not really the kind of viewpoint that's meant to be spelled out explicitly. You're supposed to shroud it in euphemisms.

I guess the steelmanned version of his beliefs would be something like, "racial and sexual minorities are an enemy to the white Americans who own this country; they threaten things we value about our culture and society, and we have no obligation to tolerate or accommodate them if we don't want to."

He spoke out against the Civil Rights act. He said the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory (that immigration is a deliberate attempt to dilute and ultimately replace the white race) is "not a theory, it's a reality." He said the Levitican prescription to stone gay men is "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters." (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Social_policy)

Coverage of Kirk's killing has largely skirted around his views, because to describe them at all feels like speaking ill of the dead. If you bring up the fact that Kirk was a loathsome hatemonger, it somewhat tempers your message that political violence is never acceptable
by mgsloan2 | 2025-09-11 05:39:46+00:00
My homedir is just a git repo, similar to https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles. The .git folder has a different name so that git commands aren't accidentally applied to it. What I love most about this is keeping my homedir clean - I can see what files are new (untracked) and either delete them or add to .gitignore
by collingreen | 2025-09-11 05:41:08+00:00
I am not in these spaces so it's nice to get your summary. I agree that is tragic.

I've wondered about this kind of shift being an inevitable response to the growing online trope of autism being the boogeyman used to shill everything from not getting vaccinated to making your kids drink your urine.

The head of us health regularly talks about autistic people as a terrible tragedy inflicted on their parents and a net negative to society. I expect that kind of rhetoric would fuel hostility across any group.
I built a free tool to take down pirated versions of my app – AMA
by damonosi | 2025-09-11 05:41:46+00:00
I’m an indie developer who got really frustrated because my app was being pirated everywhere. Every time I found a copy online, I wasted hours trying to figure out:

Who’s actually hosting the site?

Where do I send the DMCA request?

How do I make sure it actually gets seen?

It got so bad that I built my own tool to solve the problem. You just paste the link to the pirated content (apps, software, media, whatever) and it instantly finds the ISP that’s hosting it. Then it gives you either the DMCA report form or the abuse email address for that host.

No more digging through WHOIS or sending emails into the void. It’s free, and I originally built it just for myself, but I figured other creators/developers might find it useful too: https://www.easy-report.com/app

I’d love feedback — especially from other indie devs, creators, or anyone who’s had to deal with piracy. What features would make this more helpful for you?

AMA!
by bigyabai | 2025-09-11 05:42:37+00:00
> everyone needs to take a step back regardless of which side you’re on and say “Why?”

It's easy to get sucked into a learned helplessness doing this, though. We know exactly why it happens - Charlie Kirk explained it himself:

"You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense, [...] But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."

America means guns. It's written in our constitution, reinforced through our history, reflected in our multimedia franchises and sold to American citizens as a product. The only way out of this situation is through it - we can't declare a firearms ban in-media-res without inciting even more violence and dividing people further. At the same time, America cannot continue to sustain this loss of our politicians, schoolchildren and minority populations. The threat to democracy is real, exacerbated by the potential for further "emergency powers" abuse we're familiar with from both parties.

When people push for firearms control in America, this is the polemic they argue along. You can say they're justified or completely bonkers, but denying that these scenarios exist is the blueprint for erasing causality.
by stakhanov | 2025-09-11 05:42:50+00:00
CachyOS and openSUSE have you covered with btrfs and snapper pre-configured to take snapshots before/after doing potentially damaging things (and, of course, you can make them manually, whenever the thought occurs to you that you're entering the "danger zone"). You can boot into a snapshot directly from the boatloader, then rollback if you need to.

Immutable distros just one-up that by trying to steer the system in a direction where it can work with a readonly rootfs in normal operation, and nudging you to take a snapshot before/after taking the rootfs from readonly to read-write. (openSUSE has you covered there as well, if that's your thing; it's called MicroOS).

Both of those distros use KDE by default, so the value-add of KDE having its own distribution is basically so they can have a "reference implementation" that will always have all the latest and greatest that KDE has to offer, and showcase to the rest of the Linux world, how they envision the integration should be done.

If I were to set up a library computer or a computer for my aging parents, I would choose openSUSE Leap Micro with KDE, as that would put the emphasis on stability instead.
by hildolfr | 2025-09-11 05:43:25+00:00
It's a wireless device that is burning battery making negotiations with itself and wasting precious bt bandwidth in the process, and since most of Linux Bluetooth stack is user space stuff provided by the wm/de managers it guarantees no console sound compatibility without another layer of work. I think I could live without a pre console system beep but the other issues are pretty major oversights.
by linmob | 2025-09-11 05:43:46+00:00
Mind sharing which two apps you went with?

When installing just two apps, even if both are in the same (KDE or GNOME) realm, you can very easily end up with 8 flatpaks (including runtimes) or more. This is due to a variety runtimes and their versions: One for KDE or GNOME Platform release (about two a year) plus a yearly freedesktop base) and not all apps being updated to the latest runtimes constantly.

You then have to add at least 6 locale flatpaks to these hypothetical 8 flatpaks.

Especially with Debian, locales matter, of you don't do a `sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales` and pick what you need before installing flatpaks on a default install, you will get everything and thus gigabytes of translations you don't even understand, wasting your disk space.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-09-11 05:44:06+00:00
Thank you for the real "insider" information. As usual govt tries to get rid of something, but by their incompetence they create other problems.

Me myself living in a large city, try to avoid car as much as possible. But when the incompetence kicks in, the public transport fails at so many levels, I have to use my car, or I'd spend 2-3 times more on commuting (e.g. instead of 1hr - 3hrs daily)
by petertodd | 2025-09-11 05:44:09+00:00
"Just following orders" is not a valid excuse.

Besides, one reason why they can be coerced is because these actions aren't clearly illegal. If they are, the employee can just report what they're being asked to do to the police. Workplace safety has been dramatically improved in western countries simply by making many unsafe practices illegal and creating entities to report illegal work to. While this did require criminal charges for some managers and employees, because safety has improved so much, they're really not that common.

I remember when I had workplace safety training as a poorly paid university lab monitor. They made clear that I had potential criminal legal liability if I allowed egregiously unsafe things to happen. So they didn't.
by m463 | 2025-09-11 05:44:16+00:00
I wasn't saying you can't debug the kernel.

I was saying that for practical purposes, debugging the kernel is needlessly hard.

As one example, say you are running the current ubuntu. A kernel panic will give you a bunch of hex addresses. How do you get a symbol'd backtrace of the kernel panic?

(if you can't get that easily, running kgdb won't let you do symbolic debugging either)
by yibg | 2025-09-11 05:45:00+00:00
I think there is a general distance to a lot of things in today's society. Very few of us have to farm or hunt for our own food, or clean an animal carcass. I don't have a strong view on the moral aspects of eating animals (I'm not a vegetarian or vegan), but I think it'll probably do some good if anyone that eats meat at some point slaughters, cleans and butchers one of the animals they eat.
by theturtlemoves | 2025-09-11 05:45:20+00:00
I've always had the feeling that AI researchers want to build their own human without having to change diapers being part of the process. Just skip to adulthood please, and learn to drive a car without having experience in bumping into things and hurting yourself.

> Language doesn't just describe reality; it creates it.

I wonder if this is a statement from the discussed paper or from the blog author. Haven't found the original paper yet, but this blog post very much makes me want to read it.
by yobbo | 2025-09-11 05:45:20+00:00
It's not clear from the formulas how x=[x1,...,xN] relates to y, μ, and σ since these are defined without x. Assuming y = Wx + b, and μ, σ, and π are learnable parameters for each output dimension. The symbol π seems to mean both weight and the constant 3.14159 in the same formula.

Overall it looks similar to radial basis activations, but the activations look to be log of weighted "stochastic" sums (weights sum to one) of a set of radial basis functions.

The biggest difference is probably log outputs.
by collingreen | 2025-09-11 05:45:31+00:00
There is a lot of info out there about the long term damage and destabilization driven by climate change. Telling people it doesn't matter is rude at best and dangerous at worst.

Even your own flippant dismissal has holes though - what problem like every other problem have we solved well? Especially at this scale?

History is full of nasty times; trying to avoid them isn't extremist rhetoric and calling it that is shitty.
by riazrizvi | 2025-09-11 05:45:36+00:00
So is ‘2’ or ‘3’ or ‘19’ or ‘99’ or ‘a jam sponge cake with gaming dice for frosting’… The point is in natural language there are many perfectly acceptable answers. Usually any particular answer is arbitrary, and it would probably be undesirable to have the same answer everytime. For a majority of use cases.