MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackinthebochs | 2025-09-08 23:09:45+00:00
You're right. I've been comparing it to 1984 all this time, when in fact it literally is 1984 just with modern technology. It's interesting how the story 1984 strikes a chord in many people, but something like Chat Control just seems normal. I guess having a camera in your house feels more invasive on a visceral level, despite the fact that we're now putting our whole lives on our phones and online services.
by deater | 2025-09-08 23:09:48+00:00
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time.

I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
by zokier | 2025-09-08 23:11:06+00:00
Sure, openwrt works. I too have run it on x86 vm at a time. That being said, there is lot that could be improved. My biggest gripe is the weird filesystem layout with overlays and stuff in /tmp and whatnot. I can see it being needed on tiny devices, but on bigger ones can I just have regular ext4/xfs gpt partitions please? Another thing is just replacing the tiny versions of software with regular ones, like busybox->gnu or dropbear->openssh etc. Systemd could be at least considered as init.

All of this kind of things make sense when you consider openwrts origins. But on "big" system I'd just much rather have it be closer to "normal" Linux.
by hamdingers | 2025-09-08 23:11:06+00:00
- just like any web service, reverse proxy with SSL, it has internal user management

- there are a variety of apps to choose from on ios/android, smart TVs might be limited or nonexistent (LG has a good one though)

- consider a separate dedicated tool for music, like Navidrome

- it's open source, its developers respect me and my users and do not abuse their access to them using dark patterns to extract revenue

- features that they have removed anyway (plugins, photo sync, plex cloud)
by chpatrick | 2025-09-08 23:11:45+00:00
Who says what degree of complexity is enough? Seems like deferring the problem to some other mystical arbiter.

In my opinion AI slop is slop not because AIs are basic but because the prompt is minimal. A human went and put minimal effort into making something with an AI and put it online, producing slop, because the actual informational content is very low.
by lordhumphrey | 2025-09-08 23:11:47+00:00
Yes, and the name for this behaviour is called "being scientific".

Imagine a process called A, and, as you say, we've no idea how it works.

Imagine, then, a new process, B, comes along. Some people know a lot about how B works, most people don't. But the people selling B, they continuously tell me it works like process A, and even resort to using various cutesy linguistic tricks to make that feel like it's the case.

The people selling B even go so far as to suggest that if we don't accept a future where B takes over, we won't have a job, no matter what our poor A does.

What's the rational thing to do, for a sceptical, scientific mind? Agree with the company, that process B is of course like process A, when we - as you say yourself - don't understand process A in any comprehensive way at all? Or would that be utterly nonsensical?
by rpdillon | 2025-09-08 23:11:59+00:00
Yeah, companies that treat customers this way earn a permaban from me. I got my whole family into Switch back in 2016. Now? We're all on Steam. The store actually loads properly, the selection is better, games are cheaper, I don't worry about being able to play my games on the next console, and I can hack my Steam Deck to my hearts content, and I can play games from flatpak and GOG.

It's a mad world that Switch 2 is the best selling console of all time.
by palata | 2025-09-08 23:12:07+00:00
I hate Meta as much as the next person, but it feels like "endangering billions of users" is exagerating here. The complaint is pretty much that WhatsApp engineers can access metadata (NOT the content of the messages).

This said, WhatsApp is not open source, so it's impossible for users to verify how the encryption works, so users have to trust that it's properly end-to-end encrypted.

If you care about privacy (and you should), then you should use Signal instead of WhatsApp.
by jjk166 | 2025-09-08 23:12:11+00:00
Yeah, it's way off. GPT-4 required the energy of about 1.3 million gallons of jet fuel; a fully fueled A321 has about 9000 gallons of jet fuel. That's 2 orders of magnitude off. Even a GPT-3 training run would have been about 4 times as energy intensive as an A321 flight.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-09-08 23:12:36+00:00
Hartmut Rosa coined the term and theory of social acceleration.

You've heard of accelerationism, the political idea that people should make the rate of change of society go as fast as possible. Social acceleration, if you take away the jargon around it and its causes, is the sociological theory that this is already happening uncontrollably, regardless of what direction people would like to steer things in.
by haukem | 2025-09-08 23:13:27+00:00
I assume that about 20% to 50% of the home routers, Access points and Wifi mesh devices sold world wide are based on OpenWrt. Often some old versions of OpenWrt with many vendor modifications, the UI is always custom.

I know that the main vendor SDKs from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Maxlinear are based on OpenWrt. I think only Broadcom uses an own Linux distribution which is not based on OpenWrt in their main SDK. Linux has a market share of about 99% in this market, I haven't seen VxWorks in any recent home router or access point.
by to11mtm | 2025-09-08 23:13:42+00:00
I mean sometimes you gotta ship a product (and remember back then, that meant masters for CDs,) and it's perfectly possible that whatever team was in charge of handling 'conversion' stuff for old format (remember that old excel formats have OLE type cruft going on, the sorts of things that led to VBA viruses, imagine what other functionality needs to be implemented) just plain had to take shortcuts in uglifying the spec to support all the jank.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-08 23:13:58+00:00
I mean the options are

1) leave quietly and tell no one: con - no one on HN gets to talk about it. The next person needing money does it anyway.

2) leave loudly when you're still poor: con - you get blacklisted from tech and die from a preventable disease working at a gas station without insurance. The company implements the policy anyway.

3) leave loudly when your rich: con - people accuse you of selling out the users.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-08 23:13:59+00:00
The UK does have default rules, for example if there are houses directly facing onto the street (no front garden or similar maybe hard to imagine in most of the US but common in some UK towns) then the limits are low, if there are no houses at all the default limits are much higher. You are taught some rules of thumb for this when learning to drive. The posted limit signs are in addition to these rules, though they're more obvious.

But the tiny roads are usually where there is no housing - hardly anybody lives there so even the single lane of tarmac is a great expense considering average traffic. The "No housing => faster" is part of why there aren't signs limiting them. It's still a terrible idea to do 60mph though, just not necessarily illegal.
by thatxliner | 2025-09-08 23:14:19+00:00
Regarding all the chat control posts, I've not seen any comments regarding the potential use for homomorphic encryption to abide by this law: if chat control is only used for the detection of CSAM (which is another issue in itself; Apple, for instance, already solved this with NeuraHash), then could "allowing the government to snoop" be letting them have the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext?

Disclaimer that I actually don't know what the full extent this chat control law is asking for, except for the fact that it will deeply compromise encryption
by selcuka | 2025-09-08 23:14:58+00:00
I don't fully understand the situation. This statement [1] seems to indicate that Nova doesn't have to open-source it:

> Cliff: Branch owns Nova completely and Kevin has no access to it in any way at all. So no, he can't re-brand, keep coding and go forward. That's a breach of contract on his behalf.

...but this post says they are obligated to:

> Cliff: Much more to it than word of mouth. There's a contract as well.

[1] https://infosec.exchange/@cliffwade/115168015274422682
by codethief | 2025-09-08 23:15:40+00:00
Hi @greysonp

> Once you’ve enabled secure backups, your device will automatically create a fresh secure backup archive every day, replacing the previous day’s archive.

So IIUC backups will not be incremental and I will have to re-upload my 15 GB backup archive every day? Why is that? What's the security risk here? (Obviously I'm not suggesting encrypting & uploading each message & media file individually but splitting things up into same-sized chunks, like e.g. borgbackup does.)

> At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. This key is different from your Signal PIN, which serves different purposes.

Both recovery key and Signal PIN seem to serve the exact same purpose, though, namely restoring data (conversations, contacts, account, …)? Why not unify them?
by mandevil | 2025-09-08 23:15:45+00:00
Intel and AMD both sell quite a lot of customized chips, at least in the server space. As one example, any EC2 R7i or R7a instance you have are not running on a Sapphire Rapids or EPYC processor that you could buy, but instead one customized for AWS. I would presume that other cloud providers have similar deals worked out.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-08 23:15:50+00:00
Unfortunately I think it'd be too much putting the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. The way people are used to working in Rust is like filling their shopping cart with crate treats and then gluing them together.

I dunno maybe what is needed is a crates.io alternative that is highly highly moderated and highly highly selective. A subscription service with a paid staff that manages the packages and makes sure their deps are minimal, consistent with each other, secure, etc.

I can see that being a service that some corporations might pay for. I just came off a gig at a medical devices company that was using Rust and the software BoM side of things kept me up at night. The list of dependencies in the root workspace was long, and in my imagination, full of terrors.

Maybe they'll be fine, but it's not a practice I would recommend if I were starting such a project from scratch.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-09-08 23:16:23+00:00
I have been using Jellyfin for two years now. I am yet another happy user with no issues. I am happy that all my data is secure and there is nothing shady to happen.

It was not surprising when Plex had a huge investment coming from VCs who might as well just be connected to the movie industry and Hollywood as a whole, when they committed the act of banning Hetzner and all of their data centers.

They also had slowly become just another low quality streaming service like Tubi or IMDb with really low quality content being pushed down onto the homepage and actually keeping your own media hidden somewhere in the submenus. With their updates they threw the entire UX upside down.

Plex has the most mature platform to be frank. But I am happy I jumped ship as soon as I saw their predatory practices. They are not going to stop.
by seabass | 2025-09-08 23:17:23+00:00
> how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

You can run Jellyfin in any docker container. If you want to run it on a NAS in your home office and put it on the internet through ngrok or tailscale, you totally can. But you can host it pretty much wherever.

> how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

The official clients are just ok. They'll support all the file types you'd expect, but they're fairly slow and not great at streaming 4K. I pay for a client (Infuse Pro) that addresses a lot of those pain points, but it's been relatively poor at auto-detecting tv show metadata, so I'm still in the market for an app I'm happy with. Ideally an open source one.

> - what about for streaming music?

Technically works, but whether it's a good experience depends on the client you're using.

> - what do you like the most about jellyfin

Easy to set up. Great plugins for finding subtitles/artwork/metadata. Open source with good docs. Works with lots of clients. Easy to create and share accounts, and has fun features like synced remote viewing parties.

- what do you miss most about Plex?

The ads. jk never used it.
by nimih | 2025-09-08 23:17:42+00:00
I have no idea how Plex runs their servers, but I've worked at companies where new systems are rolled out for new users/accounts, but old users/accounts are left on the "legacy" system (usually with the plan to migrate once the new system has been deployed and there is bandwidth available to handle the complexity of migrating users between systems). In particular, if you have a long-running service where some very old accounts might have special billing/pricing logic that you want to continue honoring but is difficult to implement in the new system, such a setup might make sense to continue long-term for a small subset of accounts.

Alternatively, maybe they mean that the limited subset of data was specifically the "email" and "password_hash" columns of the database ;P
by yannyu | 2025-09-08 23:18:46+00:00
Babel is a story structured like a certain YA wizard series with very clear antagonists that are not remotely good people with very little in terms of shades of gray. Kuang has very clear themes and ideas that she wants to convey, and she leaves little to the imagination in terms of plot arcs and motivations and morality.

On the other hand Babel has interesting characters that have a realistic representation of what it's like to have grown up in a cross-cultural context and how it can feel like you're betraying someone no matter what you do, which is not something I see in much media at all. She also starkly portrays and analyzes a trap that minorities can fall into where they are complicit in their own oppression.

Also, I appreciate Kuang's refreshing approach to having the bad people be bad people as opposed to misguided or misunderstood people with good intentions. Some kinds of bad-ness really shouldn't be excused, or perhaps have been explored to death already.
by to11mtm | 2025-09-08 23:19:50+00:00
IME there at least used to be a difference between 'fresh OO doc' and 'oo doc upsaved from legacy' as far as parsing.

I know when I had to deal with a LOT of excel in 2008-2013, somewhere in that range I gave up on trying to parse the XML (admittedly with the then-rudimentary tools, to say nothing of nascent state of nuget at the time) and just learned how to do VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) as we all had excel installed anyway, and it led to less overall code for the tasks we had to do that involved Excel...
by kfrzcode | 2025-09-08 23:20:10+00:00
Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality.

Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.

It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.

It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.

Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.

I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
Ask HN: Strategies for living with infinite online content?
by mixto | 2025-09-08 23:21:55+00:00
I have been noticing lately that because of the plethora of content available on the Internet, I have a hard time choosing what to consume. I enjoy reading a good article, watching a YouTube video, or listening to a podcast. However, every day it seems like there are so many new, high quality pieces of content put out that I just feel overwhelmed. Not to mention every day on a HN there are many new interesting clicks. I want to consume less, but consume smartly. I find myself desiring an artificially limited internet, where I can only listen to a certain number of albums at a time, watch a certain number of videos, or read from limited options of articles.

What strategies do you use to consume content in a sea of endless choice?
by akdor1154 | 2025-09-08 23:22:02+00:00
From memory, i think other recent research is along this approach, but not yet good enough. Cant remember where I read this but was likely HN. I think the posted paper got 95% accuracy when picking from a known set of target sentences/words, but far less (60%?) when used for freeform input.

I'm sure that's not the last word though!
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-08 23:22:51+00:00
NVLink matters if you want to combine a whole bunch of GPUs, e.g. you need more VRAM than any individual GPU is available with. Many workloads exist that don't care about that or don't have working sets that large, particularly if the individual GPU actually has a lot of VRAM. If you need 128GB and you have GPUs with 40GB of VRAM then you need a fast interconnect. If you can get an individual GPU with 128GB, you don't.

There is also work being done to make this even less relevant because people are already interested in e.g. using four 16GB cards without a fast interconnect when you have a 64GB model. The simpler implementation of this is to put a quarter of the model on each card split in the order it's used and then have the performance equivalent of one card with 64GB of VRAM by only doing work on the card with that section of the data in its VRAM and then moving the (much smaller) output to the next card. A more sophisticated implementation does something similar but exploits parallelism by e.g. running four batches at once, each offset by a quarter, so that all the cards stay busy. Not all workloads can be split like this but for some of the important ones it works.
by cyberax | 2025-09-08 23:23:36+00:00
> There are places where it says the equivalent of "Works the same as Word 95" [3], but does not specify in the specification what that means.

Yeah, sure, whatever. You'll never see these kinds of documents in real life. And the specified quirks were minor. If you don't implement them, you'll get subtle formatting issues in documents imported directly from Word97.

MS could have just put them into a "vendor-specific" extension and not documented them at all.

> ODF 1.4 is around 1,100 pages across all 4 parts whereas OOXML is over 6,000.

LOL, no. SVG spec alone is 800 pages. ODF formula spec is 200 pages alone, and is still underspecified.
by haukem | 2025-09-08 23:24:00+00:00
MediaTek chips are well supported by OpenWrt. Broadcom is not good supported. Mainline Linux kernel supports recent MediaTek Wifi chips quite well [1]. MediaTek is also working on these upstream Linux drivers, but they still have a proprietary Linux driver in addition.

Also the rest of the recent MediaTek SoC is supported quite well by upstream Linux and OpenWrt.

You can run OpenWrt on recent MediaTek SoCs with all code running on the main CPU being open source, no closed source code needed inside the Linux kernel address space or in user space. The chips need firmware running directly on the IP cores. It needs a firmware running on the wifi core itself, there are probably one or more CPUs inside the wifi cores doing real time stuff. The Ethernet PHYs also need a firmware which is running on the PHY.

[1]: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17-rc5/source/drivers/ne...
by 0xc0ff338 | 2025-09-08 23:24:12+00:00
I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved than that, 99% of people aren't going to do it.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 23:24:54+00:00
Apple's SOC does a bit more than AMD's, such as including the ssd controller. I don't know if Apple is grafting different nodes together for chiplets, etc compared to AMD on desktop.

The area has nothing to do with peak performance... based on the node, it has to do with the amount of components you can cram into a given space. The CRAY-1 cpu was massive compared to both of your examples, but doesn't come close to either in terms of performance.

Also, Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is top dog on the AMD mobile CPU front and is around 308mm^2 combined.
by protocolture | 2025-09-08 23:25:02+00:00
>My hypothetical book is not, at all, public domain. This is always a non-starter.

Right but in your weird strawman argument that assumes big scary amazon can reproduce it for free, it is effectively public domain.

>I could simply choose not to publish my book, and carry it around and let people read it in front of me. Apparently this is an insufferable “property norm” as you would be unable to consume my work at all, let alone for free and in the manner of your own choosing. What an absurd thing to believe in.

"I only want to contribute to human society if I can profit by it" as long as you can live knowing you are a sell out, I can live without reading your book, or using it to prop up my table.

>Do you similarly think your entitled to sleep on my couch, or eat my dinner, or do you only think you’re entitled to take what you want when it’s words rather than, say, oranges? Or do you just have a weirdly tenuous grasp of what culture is?

"Do you think you are entitled to <Scarce, physical thing> because you believe everyone is entitled to <non scarce, non physical thing intrinsic to human culture, able to be spread around the world to millions of people instantly>"

No lmao.
by shayway | 2025-09-08 23:25:20+00:00
> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?

To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.

(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)