MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-09-08 12:56:20+00:00
That study appears to be comparing violent protests to non-violent protests.

At 3.5% of the populace taking up arms (not in protest but in war), that would far outnumber armed government officials in most countries. I don't doubt that a government choosing to concede at the point those 3.5% signaled peacefully they are likely to get violence soon, since the government conceding before that happens indicates they are weak enough to not be able to fight it off. Of course, If you have 3.5% of the populace fighting you can defeat even a horribly asymmetric situation, as the Chechens showed when they gained independence in the first Chechen war against Russia where almost everything beyond small arms were obtained via capture from the enemy.

At best your study shows that a government that capitulates before violence is more likely to be defeated, which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win -- and if both sides think they can win then odds are quite good the odds of winning lie somewhere closer to the middle of the odds if the actors are rational. Concession before violence is more likely to indicate the odds lie outside the middle.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-08 12:57:28+00:00
They have all registered with Nepal's revenue office and are paying VAT [0]

The issue is the government in Nepal wants every social media holding company to have a designated person in Nepal who they can directly communicate with for takedowns without going through the traditional process, and if the company does not flllow through, hold that person legally liable.

It's a blatant censorship ploy because protests and dissatisfaction against the KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda musical chairs along with various constant corruption scandals are pushing Nepalis to ask for an alternative.

[0] - https://ekantipur.com/business/2025/01/28/en/from-google-met...
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-09-08 12:58:15+00:00
Ahh, just realised it also interprets block size as KiB instead of KB.

I have this config:

bs=512KB size=16GB

But it interprets KiB and GiB so this was causing my confusion.

The IOPS and timing is basically identical.

So output seems fine but it always interprets parameters as SI.

Edit: Actually after looking into it more. It seems like there is a good chance that fio reports GiB and KiB in output and it also does the calculation based on that but in reality it uses GB/KB so measurements are a bit wrong.
by Jomah_123 | 2025-09-08 12:59:09+00:00
Hey HN ,

I built Alika (https://alika.app) to make it easier to bring people together for small, meaningful gatherings.

Most of us have experienced this: a group chat where plans get messy, RSVPs are unclear, and contributions are hard to track. On the other side, big platforms like Eventbrite or Meetup are built for large-scale events — not casual hangouts like dinners, picnics, game nights, or road trips.

Alika is designed to fill that gap. With Alika you can: • Create customizable invite cards • Add Spotify playlists to set the vibe • Link a Google Photos album so everyone can share memories • Collect group contributions seamlessly (coming soon) • Track RSVPs (Yes / Maybe / No) in one place

We launched just recently and have seen some encouraging early adoption (200+ users in the first week). Now I’d love to hear what you think. Feedback, feature ideas, and critiques are all welcome — especially from folks who’ve felt the same pain around planning hangouts.

Try it here: https://alika.app

Thanks for reading, and I’d be happy to answer any questions!
by myrmidon | 2025-09-08 12:59:33+00:00
What exactly are you referring to, reduced political correctness demands?

On the other hand, you have the government meddling with the political alignment of educational institutions, which is both new and alarming (e.g. the Harvard thing).

Domestic use of military is another really bad precedent from a "freedom" point of view, so I think the current administration is significantly net-negative so far.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-08 12:59:39+00:00
Sadly true.

In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
by spacechild1 | 2025-09-08 12:59:44+00:00
> Technically you can, but it's unreasonable to create an os-level socket just to put into the moved-out object where it will be immediately destroyed again. This is not an issue when the moves are destructive.

No, the class can use a sentinel value internally only to mark moved-from objects. That's exactly where we actually started the conversation. That's why I said that destructive moves would only somewhat simplify the move operations, but not make a qualitative difference (in this area).

> The sentinel value need not be exposed in the public interface of the class, it can only be accessible via the customization point of the optional.

Since the optional would need to construct an instance with the sentinel value, I thought that the "sentinel" constructor must be public. However, you might be right that one could write a template specialization that contains the template argument as a friend class. In this case you could use a private constructor. Note that the destructor still has to handle the sentinel value... But I guess this is just something you have to accept.
by vidarh | 2025-09-08 12:59:52+00:00
Because I spent the vast majority of the time I spent on code reading it, and the layout matters to me in terms of how much time it takes for me to read code.

Yes, I can get used to other layouts, but that by no means means all layouts are equal to me in terms of how readable they are, and how well things stand out when they should, or blend in when they should.

I recognise this isn't the case for everyone - some people read code beginning to end and it doesn't matter how its laid out. But I pattern match visually, and read fragments based on layout, and I remember code based on visual patterns.

Ironically, because I have aphantasia, and don't visualise things with my "minds eye", but I still remember things by visual appearance and spatial cues better than by text.
by pndy | 2025-09-08 12:59:59+00:00
Mozilla decided to remove its fantastic live bookmarks feature that seamlessly integrated RSS within bookmarks in 2018 with Firefox 64. Someone then made an extension which was ported to Chromium, and then back again to Firefox because original one was abandoned.

A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays.

I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.
by jcgrillo | 2025-09-08 13:00:09+00:00
I've identified serious bugs that were lurking in large legacy codebases for years with this approach. Whenever I read code I always try to find the gaps between "what was the author(s) trying to do?" and "what does this code actually do?" There's often quite a lot of space between those two, and almost always that space is where you find the bugs.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-08 13:01:00+00:00
> study appears to be comparing violent protests to non-violent protests

No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].

Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.

> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win

This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.

Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.

[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...
by rfoo | 2025-09-08 13:01:29+00:00
How what?

The fp64 GFLOPS per watt metric in the post is almost entirely meaningless to compare between these accelerators and NVIDIA GPUs, for example it says

> Hopper H200 is 47.9 gigaflops per watt at FP64 (33.5 teraflops divided by 700 watts)

But then if you consider H100 PCIe [0] instead, it's going to be 26000/350 = 74.29 GFLOPS per watt. If you go look harder you can find ones with better on-paper fp64 performance, for example AMD MI300X has 81.7 TFLOPs with typical board power of "750W Peak", which gives 108.9 GFLOPS per watt.

The truth is the power allocation of most GPGPUs are heavily tilted for Tensor usages. This has been the trend well before B300.

That's all for HPC.

And Pezy processors are certainly not designed for "AI" (i.e. linear algebra with lower input precision). For AI inference starting from 2020 everyone is talking about how many T(FL)OPS per watt, not G.

[0] which is a nerfed version of H200's precursor.
by dtagames | 2025-09-08 13:02:09+00:00
This is only a concern if you're not writing JS or TS. There, JSON is the native format and it makes more sense to store everything in JSON objects or arrays (which are also valid JSON).

If you create JSON interfaces, scaffold them declaratively, then modify them with destructuring, you can output the values at any time (like for print debugging) in their native form.

LLMs are good at JSON, too, and you can ask them to keep their internal data in JSON while working on a problem, making it easy to save to a file or use elsewhere.
by NiloCK | 2025-09-08 13:02:15+00:00
I sort of love this, but immediately wonder about curation.

My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.

But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.

Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
by arutar | 2025-09-08 13:02:26+00:00
Once one exists the realm of differentiable manifolds, it is not really reasonable to talk about a single notion of 'dimension'.

Topological dimension is indeed something one can define: e.g. the Koch snowflake [1] or the graph of the Weierstrass function [2] have topological dimension 1. Actually, the first is homeomorphic to the unit circle and the second is homeomorphic to real line. It's great if you are doing topology and you only care about how things look like up to homeomorphism. But if you have metric structure (and you care about it), it is not so useful.

Minkowski dimension is certainly easy to define but it has some problems: sets which are "very small" (like a sequence `1/log(n)`) can have Minkowski dimension 1. The article has a minor technical oversight: the limit certainly does not need to exist. Minkowski defined it as the limit supremum of the sequence (actually, he defined it in terms of the decay rate of the size of the neighbourhood of the set, but this is equivalent). But one could analogously define a "lower" variant by taking the limit infimum instead.

Hausdorff dimension is not discussed in this article, but it is probably the most "robust" notion of dimension one can define. The Hausdorff dimension of any sequence is 0. But even then, lots of sets with Hausdorff dimension 1 can be very small, like the fat Cantor set which has dimension 1 but has length 0 [3]. So this 'dimension' does not necessarily line up with the intuition for "1-dimensional" in esoteric circumstances.

But even Hausdorff / Minkowski dimension does not capture the essence of some matters. For example, one might be interested in when a certain space can be mapped into another space without too much distortion (let's say by a map which respects the metric, like a bi-Lipschitz map). It can easily happen that a set has small (finite) Hausdorff or Minkowski dimension, but it cannot be embedded in a non-distorting way in any finite dimensional Euclidean space. This happens for instance with the real Heisenberg group [4]. If you are interested in this type problem then you want something like Assouad dimension [5].

The moral of the story is: the correct notion of dimension depends critically on what you want to do with your notion of 'dimension'. For sets which are very nice (smooth manifolds) all "reasonable" notions of dimension will coincide with what you expect; but beyond this there is an infinite zoo of ways to define dimension which are all reasonable in various ways, but capture genuinely different notions of 'size'.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Volterra%E2%80%9...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenberg_group

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assouad_dimension
by alephnerd | 2025-09-08 13:02:40+00:00
China and India are meddling in this. Nothing in Nepali politics happens without either China or India's hands or implicit blessing. Heck, regional Nepali politicans will literally vie for Nitish Kumar or Lalu Prasad Yadav's (the two perpetual CMs of Bihar) backing.

Even the Armed Forces(pro-India) and the Armed Police Force (pro-China) are at each others throats.

Whenever India feels Nepal is getting too close to China, a crisis happens. When China feels Nepal is getting to close to India, a crisis happens as well.

It's like how Iraqi and Lebanese politics is always meddled in by Saudi and Iran.

Also, the social media ban is extremely damaging.

Most students use Google and YouTube to study, and WhatsApp is heavily used by Nepalis both domestically and abroad (a large portion of Nepalis work abroad in India, the Gulf, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Japan as migrant workers) so people are cut off from communicating with each other and getting job offers.
by Bender | 2025-09-08 13:02:49+00:00
Before going through the effort of setting up a VPN, first test whichever cheap VPS provider you choose using an SSH Socks proxy. There are articles showing how to use your SSH connection as a Socks proxy for your browser. Once you find a VPS node that is not blocked then go through the setup of configuring a VPN so all your other devices can use it. I only suggest this as I am lazy and projecting my laziness on others. Try to build a list of VPS providers that charge by the minute to avoid wasting money on providers that are blocked.

The easiest way to use a SOCKS proxy is to call the program from the command line using either proxychains-ng or torsocks after editing the configuration to use your SSH Socks port. This prevents leaking DNS out your local DNS resolver which still matters even if the browser is using DoH, chicken-vs-egg Anycast DoH resolver lookups exposes region. This still does not remove the NetworkID that gets embedded in the browser under that Linux account after first startup but it's good enough unless one is hiding from a government.

In my experience the cheaper the VPS provider the more likely everyone is blocking it due to the phrase, "And this is why we can't have nice things." from others abusing it and getting all the CIDR blocks under all of their ASN's null routed or flagged as abusers.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-08 13:03:00+00:00
Luna has the aluminum but probably not the stuff to make mylar or kapton or something similar. You need CHN (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen) for that.

On the other hand, O'Neill's students did think a bit about how to make metal films without any plastic backing and that might be (1) practical w/ Lunar materials assuming you can get the mass driver, catcher and all of that working, and (2) produce a very high performance sail if it survives the corrosive space environment, metal-Kapton sails didn't do that well here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-08 13:03:01+00:00
What an absurd argument. His main point is not about abundance or about any specific technological aspect of trains, but rather their aesthetics in his feeling that they belong in a previous century.

There are things that trains do exceptionally well, far better than planes or cars. And there are things that planes and cars do exceptionally well, far better than trains. And all three have trade-offs and externalities that a true abundance society would at least attempt to balance.

An abundant society is one that does not put up arbitrary roadblocks in front of people who want to deploy useful technology. Asking that your technology not break other people‘s windows or wake them up in the middle of the night is not an arbitrary roadblock. It’s a reflection of inherent trade-off of a specific type of technology and societies attempt to balance it with the need to sleep and avoid externalities.

This argument ignores an even more fundamental aspect of abundance. That a great deal of transportation demand is not driven by transportation, but by arbitrary limits on construction. No not everyone wants to live in the city and that’s fine. But if they were allowed, millions of millions up on millions of people would live closer to their destinations, then they currently do, requiring less logical innovation in transportation that is required if they are forced to live hundreds of miles away.
by brucehoult | 2025-09-08 13:03:02+00:00
> I'm interested to hear what you used SWEET16 for.

Just generic coding that needed 16 bit calculations but wasn't speed-critical. Pointer-chasing code is particularly tiresome on 6502.

> cm.push and cm.popret seem like very appealing instructions from this point of view, yes! They look more expressive than ldm/stm. I imagine they would hurt interrupt latency?

They are designed to be easily interruptible / restartable with a variety of possible implementations (non-interruptible, complete restart, continue where you left off). The tradeoff is up to the designer of the individual CPU. A basic idea is to hold them in the decoder and emit normal instructions to the execution pipeline, while simplifying the original instruction towards a base case. A correct (interrupt-safe) sequence of normal instructions to generate is given in the specification.

Also, that code didn't show other instructions to copy `a0` and `a1` to two arbitrary `sN` registers, or to copy two arbitrary `sN` registers to `a0` and `a1`. This helps a lot both implementing and calling functions with two or more arguments, if you're not using arithmetic to marshal the arguments anyway.

> How do they affect page fault handling in practice?

It it unlikely that anyone will ever make a machine with both Zcmp (and Zcmt) and page faults. Architects of high performance CPUs would have a fit, and besides which they use the same opcode space as RVC instructions for floating point load/store, making them incompatible with standard Linux software.

> Perhaps you could describe the required activation record structure in a header word before the subroutine entry point that need not follow the usual ISA encoding at all, and if the return instruction can reliably find the same header word (on the stack, say, or in a callee-saved register like lr) there is no need for it to contain a redundant copy of the same information.

VAX, begone!

As Patterson showed, JSR subroutines outperform CALLS/G subroutines.
by roryirvine | 2025-09-08 13:03:04+00:00
Especially since engine noise is increasingly a thing of the past - in my part of London, only one out of ~20-ish routes still uses hybrid buses.

Almost all delivery vehicles and taxis round here are BEV too, along with a good chunk of private cars. Can be very hard to hear them above wind noise and general background hubbub, especially when wearing a helmet.
by tpoacher | 2025-09-08 13:03:13+00:00
While the concept of atomic blogposts is a nice one, I think this characterisation is a bit unfair in this case.

In my view he put four separate but related and logically linked nice thoughts together, and tried to link them all thematically by restating the pie analogy briefly each time.

And the post was otherwise quite short and punchy.

I read this comment before the post itself and I expected to read some sort of lengthy AI slop repeating the same idea ad nauseam, but it was nothing of the sort.
by petethepig | 2025-09-08 13:03:24+00:00
I have terabytes of iphone photos/videos accumulated over the years. Apple Photos app is trash when it comes to handling large libraries so I’ve been splitting them by year which is fine for archiving but horrible for actually browsing photos.

Immich has been absolutely awesome for this — I can finally look at all my pictures from any year from anywhere in the world. I’m very happy and hope the creators find a way to sustainably finance the project.

The upload feature in the mobile app is not a 1 to 1 replacement of apple photos import so i still do that via apple photos, but that’s something I can live with.
by Agraillo | 2025-09-08 13:03:57+00:00
> finds that they're not credible enough to generate an answer

The credibility is one side of the story. In many cases, at least for my curious research, I happen to search for something very niche, so to find at least anything related, an LLM needs to find semantic equivalence between the topic in the query and what the found pages are discussing or explaining.

One recent example: in a flat-style web discussion, it may be interesting to somehow visually mark a reply if the comment is from a user who was already in the discussion (at least GP or GGP). I wanted to find some thoughts or talk about this. I had almost no luck with Perplexity, which probably brute-forced dozens of result pages for semantic equivalence comparison, and I also "was not feeling/getting lucky" with Google using keywords, the AROUND operator, and so on. I'm sure there are a couple of blogs and web-technology forums where this was really discussed, but I'm not sure the current indexing technology is semantically aware at scale.

It's interesting that sometimes Google is still better, for example, when a topic I’m researching has a couple of specific terms one should be aware of to discuss it seriously. Making them mandatory (with quotes) may produce a small result set to scan with my own eyes.
by Zambyte | 2025-09-08 13:04:32+00:00
> It only feels that way, until you learn how destructuring works in Clojure

Well... yes. The original comment was about how Clojure code looks very foreign. The reply to that was that Lisp code is not actually that foreign because it's just taking the common foo(bar baz) and making it (foo bar baz). My comment was that Clojure is more foreign to most programmers than other Lisps, because it's not simply mapping foo(bar baz) to (foo bar baz).

Of course when you learn the things that make it unique, it becomes familiar.
by philistine | 2025-09-08 13:05:02+00:00
Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other.

People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.

People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.

People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.