MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thereitgoes456 | 2025-10-29 19:05:41+00:00
It's too early to say if his risks "keep working out". Restructuring is not a risk. His, and others', original decision to make the company a non-profit was also not a calculated risk in this sense.

When he was fired from OpenAI, his use of employee manipulation to regain his position is not a risk; it is the only option he had. It was his bond maturing, of carefully cultivated loyalty he had accrued over years. Gaining that loyalty was not really a risk. It was smart politics.

One risk he took is: signing away such a large portion of the company to Microsoft. I'm not sure whether that is working out.

Another risk he took is: neglecting and sidelining the "safety" portion of his organization. This caused a talent exodus and led to the formation of many competitors. I'm not sure whether that is working out either.
by sholladay | 2025-10-29 19:05:45+00:00
Some time ago, there was a project called Citizendium that aimed for quality over quantity, with articles written and peer-reviewed by subject matter experts who had to use their real names and working email addresses, among other requirements. I always thought that was interesting, since the main critique of Wikipedia is its open editing model.

Citizendium is still around, though they've loosened some of the requirements in order to encourage more contributions, which seems self-defeating to me. I think they should have tried to cooperate with Wikipedia instead. The edits and opinions of subject matter experts could be a special layer on top of existing Wikipedia articles. Maybe there could be a link for various experts with highlights of sections they have peer-reviewed and a diff of what they would change about the article if those changes haven't been accepted. There could also be labels for how much expert consensus and trust there is on a given snapshot of an article or how frozen the article should be based on consensus and evidence provided by the experts. This would help users delineate whether an article contains a lot of common knowledge or whether it's more speculative or controversial.
by vel0city | 2025-10-29 19:06:09+00:00
> The whole engine? Dump the car. You got a lemon. Did you get it checked out by a trusted mechanic before buying

Ok, so ICE cars are incredibly reliable, assuming you write off a ton of them as "you bought a lemon". I might as well say "the whole battery? You bought a lemon, dump the car."

Like, yeah, don't get me wrong, I bought a 2000 V6 Accord with ~80,000mi on it from a friend who I know babied it. I sold it later still in good condition to a family member. It's now nearly 200,000mi and largely just fine, although every now and then the transmission behaves strangely. I'm tempted to buy it back when they're done with it, I loved that car! But it ignores the massive flood of these that ended up with bad transmissions (seemed like a roll of the dice on this generation) and cars that weren't well taken care of. Even if you were to think Accords are generally reliable, the next generation wasn't anywhere near as reliable as that one in the end.

And it ignores all the millions of cars that were scrapped in that same time period.

If your standard of reliability is "hunt for a unicorn", well, that'll happen with EVa as well. It's still a curve of failures, some will be worse and faster than others. Some might make it several hundred miles before significant failures. Some may barely break 100,000. At least I can see the current battery health on the OBD-II port, I can't tell if they actually did fluid changes properly on an ICE.
by spankibalt | 2025-10-29 19:06:24+00:00
> "We need these kind of projects, not kneeling down to a company like Google and begging for Android to be open."

Indeed.

> "Effort needs to be put elsewhere."

Also correct. Outside of offering (an) alternative product(s), one also needs to fight the inevitable pushback of industry dinosaurs and their political toadies.

In other words: One needs to invest in massive lobbying efforts on the same playing field of corporations as well, e. g. in the EU or the US. For without sound organizing all efforts will be relegated to hobbyist spaces with an assortment of "Are we there yet?" products.

Smartphones and function-alikes are an entirely different breed of device, or at least can be: the general-purpose computing platform for your pocket. In this market, "somewhat different" rules apply.
by vkou | 2025-10-29 19:06:49+00:00
What exactly is going on that:

1. You (or someone else) gives enough of a crap to be doing forensics about how a lock was circumvented.

2. You clearly care so much about security to do those forensics, but not enough to, I don't know, install a camera?

Will an insurer, or a cop that you're making a police report to actually physically check if the lock was shimmed?
by synergy20 | 2025-10-29 19:07:27+00:00
have not played with zig for a while, remain in the C world.

with the cleanup attribute(a cheap "defer" for C), and the sanitizers, static analysis tools, memory tagging extension(MTE) for memory safety at hardware level, etc, and a zig 1.0 still probably years away, what's the strong selling point that I need spend time with zig these days? Asking because I'm unsure if I should re-try it.
by alistairSH | 2025-10-29 19:07:46+00:00
I think we agree?

Putting the military into a peace-time law enforcement role is asking for trouble, as we've seen in the past. There's a reason the Posse Comitatus Act exists. Allowing the administration to declare "Insurrection!" (and effectively bypass Posse Comitatus) whenever it wants is awful precedent.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-29 19:07:54+00:00
> Yogurt-making produces a lot of whey too, though probably closer to ~50% whey rather than 90% (when made at home). The only difference between greek yogurt and regular yogurt is that greek yogurt is strained to remove the whey, making it thicker / creamier.

If you don't strain the whey, yogurt-making produces 0% whey. And I make it at home, so I know I'm not missing anything. Your math is wrong.
by kianN | 2025-10-29 19:08:01+00:00
I see that the model has not yet finished training: I think you are referring to the "Raw Search Results Section".

Our tool works a little different than LLM style tools. We are doing a bulk search — for academic search, ~1000 papers — and then training a hierarchical Bayesian model to organize the results. Once the model trains, it provides a visual representation of the high level themes that you can then use to explore the results.

The trade off is we are willing to lower the relevance filter to enable a broad set of exploration.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-29 19:08:13+00:00
I've found that lift and shifting to EC2 is also generally cheaper than the equivalent VMs on Azure.

Microsoft really wants you to use their PaaS offerings, and so things on Azure are priced accordingly. A Microsoft shop just wanting to lift-and-shift, Azure isn't the best choice unless the org has that "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" attitude.
by alistairSH | 2025-10-29 19:08:57+00:00
Show me where the cities where Trump has deployed the NG have fallen into anarchy and I'll agree. But they haven't, so I won't.

Hint: Crime is higher in some of cities of the Deep South, where voters trend red, but we haven't sent in the NG. It's all about pwning the libs, not quelling make-believe insurrections.
by kmeisthax | 2025-10-29 19:08:59+00:00
IBM had very little patentable subject matter in the original 5150 design, and anything they could patent would have been subject to an antitrust decree that legally required them to, in Tim Kulak[0]'s words, "work for free". That's why they focused on copyright in the BIOS so heavily.

Also, none of this impacts Linux, beyond the fact that IBM clones were ubiquitous by the time Linus started writing the kernel. If IBM clones weren't around, Linux probably would have originally ran on an Amiga. It was very much expected that personal computers would run anything compiled for the CPU, mainly because the companies making them shipped very little software. I guess you could say that Linux was possible because there were PCs to buy - otherwise we'd be stuck with BSD or GNU running on computers we had to rent. But even then, what IBM did here was not directly open the floodgates to a Free OS, they just accidentally opened the floodgates to a bunch of companies entering the PC market by blatantly and legally ripping them off.

[0] Kulak is a Russian word for owners of rural land that refused to join the Soviet collectivization regime, which was then later applied to basically anyone accused of not meeting the hilariously awful production quotas Stalin put on shit. Despite this awful history, I'm appropriating the term because A) it's a good pejorative for land-owning nobility and B) it almost rhymes with Cook.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-29 19:09:58+00:00
> user IDs are 36 base64 chars, or 27 bytes if you store them max-packed

Stupid. You aren't going to have 2^288 users, why do you need that many user IDs? A 64-bit integer is already overkill.

>YT video IDs are 11 base64 chars, so 66 bits, doesn't quite fit in 8 bytes (not to mention that trying to pack the video IDs would mean your db becomes useless if youtube suddenly added a new video ID format)

Your video table has a 64-bit integral row ID. You have a column that is a foreign key to it. Join on them.

>IP needs another bit somewhere for ipv4 vs ipv6, so likely 24 bytes (or just a string could be used).

All IPv4 addresses can be encoded as IPv6 addresses so this only requires 16 bytes.

>Then you have some overhead for padding and string field lengths,

None of these things are strings.

>and whatever overhead for packing the data for the disk storage (padding for all entires to stay within a page? maintaining a percentage of free space to ensure the B-tree property?).

This is pretty low overhead. It won't take you to hundreds of bytes per row.

>Granted, even that's probably around 200 bytes, not 500, in a reasonable db, but who's to say that the db used used is a reasonable & well-configured one; of course it's possible that a bunch more metadata is stored for user trustworthiness statistics or something, or duplicated tables where relations would work.

If it stores IDs as strings then the DB probably won't be set up correctly either. That would be clearly wrong and wrong people are usually wrong about other things too.
by r0fl | 2025-10-29 19:10:12+00:00
How will you enforce this?

What if a child is at school where there are Chromebooks and teachers aren’t as tech savvy as the majority of hacker news?

What if a child is at a library that has Chromebooks you can take out and use for homework?

Wha if a child is at an older cousins place?

What if a child is a park with their friends and uses a device?

Should parents be next to their child helicopters parenting 24/7?

Is that how you remember your childhood? Is that how you currently parent giving zero atonony to children?

Blaming parents is ridiculous. Lot of parents aren’t tech savvy and are too dumb to be tech savvy and stay on top of the latest tech thing
Ask HN: Thoughts on /etc/hosts instead of DNS for production applications?
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-29 19:10:41+00:00
Hi HN,

"It's always DNS" is a theme we're all familiar with when it comes to outages. I understand why DNS is critical for most users. But for applications that are managed/deployed using an "Infrastructure as Code" system, where changes can, and should always be pushed in a way that treats the changes the same way code changes are treated (Devops and all that), is there any harm with using /etc/hosts files everywhere?

That way name-to-ip association changes benefit from IaC, and DNS related instabilities are minimized. Of course, I am assuming the name-to-ip association is under the control of the system's engineers to begin with, for every other use case DNS can and should still be used.

Why aren't cloud providers and FAANGs doing this already, where saving costs by eliminating things like DNS request traffic and CPU cycles is encouraged?
by Razengan | 2025-10-29 19:10:51+00:00
Reddit is mostly trash now, but here's the thing though: If people stop talking to each other, what are all the AIs going to train on?

Like say a hot new game comes out tomorrow, SuperDuperBuster (don't steal this name). I fire up Chatgrokini or whatever AI's gonna be out in the next few days and ask it about SuperDuperBuster. So does everyone else.

Where would the AI get its information from? Web search? It'll only know what the company wants people to know. At best it might see some walkthrough videos on YouTube, but that's gonna be heavily gated by Google.

When ChatGPT 5 came out, I asked it about the new improvements: it said 5 was a hypothetical version that didn't exist. It didn't even know about itself.

Claude still insists iOS 26 isn't out yet and gives outdated APIs from iOS 18 etc.
by tiagod | 2025-10-29 19:10:53+00:00
I'm not from the USA, and here in fact Paracetamol is the term people know (well, they actually mostly knew the Ben-u-ron brand, but with the rise of generics Paracetamol seems more used now.)

However, from exposure to American culture in forums and whatnot, I was under the impression Acetaminophen was widely used over there.
by aengelke | 2025-10-29 19:10:54+00:00
> I’d suggest starting with arm

I agree: AArch64 is a nice instruction set to learn. (Source: I taught ARMv7, AArch64, x86-64 to first-year students in the past.)

> how simple instruction encoding is on arm64

Having written encoders, decoders, and compilers for AArch64 and x86-64, I disagree. While AArch64 is, in my opinion, very well designed (also better than RISC-V), it's certainly not simple. Here's some of my favorite complexities:

- Many instructions have (sometimes very) different encodings. While x86 has a more complex encoding structure, most encodings follow the same structure and are therefore remarkably similar.

- Huge amount of instruction operand types: memory + register, memory + unsigned scaled offset, memory + signed offset, optionally with pre/post-increment, but every instruction supports a different subset; vector, vector element, vector table, vector table element; sometimes general-purpose register encodes a stack pointer, sometimes a zero register; various immediate encodings; ...

- Logical immediate encoding. Clever, but also very complex. (To be sure that I implemented the decoding correctly, I brute-force test all inputs...)

- Register constraints: MUL (by element) with 16-bit integers has a register constraint on the lowest 16 registers. CASP requires an even-numbered register. LD64B requires an even-numbered register less than 24 (it writes Xt..Xt+7).

- Much more instructions: AArch64 SIMD (even excluding SVE) has more instructions than x86 including up to AVX-512. SVE/SME takes this to another level.
by ipdashc | 2025-10-29 19:11:05+00:00
To be fair, in the AWS/Azure outages, I don't think any individual (already created) boxes went down, either. In AWS' case you couldn't start up new EC2 instances, and presumably same for Azure (unless you bypass the management portal, I guess). And obviously services like DynamoDB and Front Door, respectively, went down. Hetzner/DO don't offer those, right? Or at least they're not very popular.
by buzzerbetrayed | 2025-10-29 19:11:23+00:00
> typing blind on a keyboard I am not used to is anyway a hopeless endeavor.

Sounds like you’re a special case then. Most people can type fine on any qwerty keyboard. And your willingness to turn a blind eye to pretty major annoyances makes it seem like you’re trying to justify the effort you’ve put into Colemak. Even if you aren’t doing that, you’ll get more mileage out of just admitting that it’s annoying to have to use another keyboard.
by worik | 2025-10-29 19:11:56+00:00
The government is not your biggest concern, (if you are not a brown skinned immigrant)

* Insurence companies

* Health insurers

* Banks

These all would like a chance to increase their profits at your expense based on your private data. Just because they will get it wrong 25% of the time will not mean positive profits for them...

The government does not really care if you pay your taxes
by LogicHound | 2025-10-29 19:12:47+00:00
> I think what you want is for software developers not to write bloated code, instead of computers not getting faster. The bloated code is a result of undisciplined programming and not paying attention to users' devices.

I am so fed up of hearing this. I would love to optimise my code, but management will always prioritise features over optimisations because that is what drives sales. This happens at almost every company I've worked at.

Also more often than not, I have a huge problem even getting stuff working and having to wrangle co-workers who I have to suffer with that cannot do basic jobs, do not write test and in some cases I've found don't even run the code before submitting PRs. That code then get merged because "it looks good" when there is obvious problems that I can spot in some cases from literally the other side of the room.
by EchoReflection | 2025-10-29 19:13:22+00:00
I think, even though the ideas aren't "perfect"/"complete", Nietzche's "Will to Power" does a pretty good job of explaining "why" animals/ideologies/organizations/systems "unfold" the way they do. Everything (mostly) tries to protect/strengthen/replicate itself.(viruses being the most obvious example) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52915/52915-h/52915-h.htm
by godelski | 2025-10-29 19:14:00+00:00
> Did you read my comment at all? :-)

Did you read *MY* comment at all?!

Everything @mechanicalpulse said was accurate.

To answer @grishka's question (because it seems you also don't know)

> What did that look like?

Well I literally answered that in my comment!

>>> Back when software came on physical media we still had patches. We had patches that came through the internet AND WE HAD PATCHES THAT CAME THROUGH PHYSICAL MEDIA. THE ***LATTER*** MAKING IT ***HARDER TO PATCH.***

I broke it up and emphasized the key parts.

If you are going to accuse someone of not reading your comment you damn well better be reading the comments you're responding to.

> Oh I get it. Maybe we just weren't playing with the same toys

Considering it was "harder to patch", yes, it does also mean "things often went unpatched." Mind you, this doesn't mean patches didn't exist nor does it mean, as you suggest, patches don't matter.

But again, I already addressed that in my original comment, so I'm not going to repeat myself again...
by cwmma | 2025-10-29 19:14:10+00:00
my understanding is that technically only gzipped content is supported, not gzipped transport of arbitrary content. Due to ambiguity around the word 'append' [1] in the spec, firefox adds 'identity' (aka don't compress) to the end of the list of compressions supported while most other browsers replace the list with 'identity'. Also it should be noted that this is not a user configurable header so you can't actually try to override it.

There is a second layer to the bug in that github pages should almost certainly not be sending back slices of compressed files even if gzip is listed before identity and some change to something in the github stack probably exposed the bug that was there in firefox all along.

I literally just stumbled on this last week while doing a side project that involved browser range requests so this is fresh in my head.

1. it comes down to whether it was meant that 'Accept-Encoding:identity' should be appended to the list of header values possibly overwriting the one that already was there or if 'identity' should be appended to the list of values already in the 'Accept-Encoding' header. Firefox does the latter, everyone else does the former.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-29 19:14:48+00:00
My 2ct: A much more useful stdlib (that's also currently the most unstable part though, and I don't agree with all the design decisions in the stdlib - but mostly still better than a nearly useless stdlib like C provides - and don't even get me started about the C++ stdlib heh), integrated build system and package manager (even great for pure C/C++ projects), and comptime with all the things it enables (like straightforward reflection and generics).

It also fixes a shitton of tiny design warts that we've become accustomed to in C (also very slowly happening in the C standard, but that will take decades while Zig has those fixes now).

Also, probably the best integration with C code you can get outside of C++. E.g. hybrid C/Zig projects is a regular use case and has close to no friction.

C won't go away for me, but tinkering with Zig is just more fun :)
by hinkley | 2025-10-29 19:14:58+00:00
I wonder if there’s enough space for a Do Well By Doing Good company out there to provide a ladder from cheap self managed up to fully automated rolling upgrades.

Because it was mostly fine at first, but later we had some close calls when there were changes that needed to be made on the servers. By the time we managed to mess up our hand managed incremental restart process, we had several layers of cache and so accidentally wiping one didn’t murder our backend, but did throw enough alerts to cause a P2. And because we were doing manual bucketing of caches instead of consistent hashing we hit the OOMKiller a couple times while dialing in.

But at this point it was difficult to move back to managed.

This feels closest to digital ocean’s business model.
by btown | 2025-10-29 19:15:55+00:00
Azure to me has always suffered from a belief that “UI innovations can solve UX complexity if you just try hard enough.”

Like, AWS, and GCP to a lesser extent, has a principled approach where simple click-ops goals are simple. You can access the richer metadata/IAM object model at any time, but the wizards you see are dumb enough to make easy things easy.

With Azure, those blades allow tremendously complex “you need to build an X Container and a Container Bucket to be able to add an X” flows to coexist on the same page. While this exposes the true complexity, and looks cool/works well for power users, it is exceedingly unintuitive. Inline documentation doesn’t solve this problem.

I sometimes wonder if this is by design: like QuickBooks, there’s an entire economy of consultants who need to be Certified and thus will promote your product for their own benefit! Making the interface friendly to them and daunting to mere mortals is a feature, not a bug.

But in Azure’s case it’s hard to tell how much this is intentional.
by tguvot | 2025-10-29 19:15:59+00:00
From poll summary:

Palestinian opinion is polarized: the Trump Plan is widely known but support is split, with Gazans more favorable than West Bankers. Majorities back Hamas’s response yet reject disarming Hamas; most doubt the plan will end the war or deliver statehood. A leadership crisis endures—dissatisfaction with Abbas and the PA, Marwan Barghouti leading, and Hamas outpolling Fatah. Since Oct 7, support for the attack persists even as expectations of Hamas victory wane. Gazans are more open to negotiated arrangements;` West Bankers favor armed struggle. Across both, skepticism of external plans coexists with demands for elections and self-defense.
by zahlman | 2025-10-29 19:16:04+00:00
> Another

No, the same uv that people have been regularly (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=uv) posting about on HN since its first public releases in February of 2024 (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39387641).

> How many are there now?

Why is this a problem? The ecosystem has developed usable interoperable standards (for example, fundamentally uv manages isolated environments by using the same kind of virtual environment created by the standard library — because that's the only kind that Python cares about; the key component is the `pyvenv.cfg` file, and Python is hard-coded to look for and use that); and you don't have to learn or use more than one.

There are competing options because people have different ideas about what a "package manager" should or shouldn't be responsible for, and about the expectations for those tasks.