MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by init7 | 2025-10-05 18:26:01+00:00
In India, termite mounds are culturally revered and even worshipped.

I was fascinated by permaculture and tried my hand at digging pits, swales and ponds. We would hire local earthmoving machines to dig large amounts of mud.

Over time I observed that the operators of these machines would never - 1. Break a termite mound 2. Cut a ficus tree

Long story short, we now try to incorporate termites into our work. And even rats!

Normally, every pit you dig for water recharge eventually fills up with biomass and silt. We plant root based crops like sweet potato and tapioca inside the pits to attract rats and termites.

They dig deep beneath the pits and multiply surface area of soil-air boundary millions of times over.

I am beginning to belive that a lot of nature's algorithmic intelligence is in surface areas, folding, unfolding.

A tree takes up a square metre on the ground but creates many football fields worth of leaf areas over. A termite mound does the same below.

I heard that Sri Lanka had terminated rats and as a second order effect, their aquifers dried out. They later had to import rats.

Hats off to termites - a very difficult to understand algorithm of mother nature.
by bonesss | 2025-10-05 18:26:21+00:00
Yeah, but if you use F# that then you’ll have all the features C# has been working on for years, only in complete and mature versions, and also an opinionated language encouraging similar styles between teams instead of wild dialects of kinda-sorta immutablity and kinda-sorta DU’s, and everything in between, requiring constant vigilance and training… ;)

I’m a fan of all three languages, but C# spent the first years relearning why Visual Basic was very productive and the last many years learning why OCaml was chosen to model F# after. It’s landed in a place where I can make beautiful code the way I need to, but the mature libraries I’ve crafted to make it so simply aren’t recreate-able by most .Net devs, and the level of micro-managing it takes to maintain across groups is a line-by-line slog against orthodoxy and seeming ‘shortcuts’, draining the productivity those high level guarantees should provide. And then there’s the impact of EF combined with sloppy Linq which makes every junior/consultant LOC a potentially ticking time bomb without more line-by-line, function-by-function slog.

Compiler guarantees mean a lot.
by sd9 | 2025-10-05 18:27:31+00:00
I worked for a gambling syndicate. We often made money from bad initial prices. Many bookies tolerated us because they wanted to know what we thought was mispriced and rapidly adjusted their odds after we started betting.

It was a balancing act though. They really wanted to know what we were doing, but didn’t want to lose too much to us. So there was some give and take / bartering around the fair value of our information in the form of our accounts being banned and limited or bets being voided. But they definitely didn’t want to eradicate us.
by hajile | 2025-10-05 18:27:34+00:00
The “no cost” is an evidence free zone.

ARM shed 75% of their decoder size when removing support for the 32-bit ISA in their A-series cores and it’s nowhere near as bad as x86.

A Haskell analysis showed that integer workloads (the most common in normal computing) saw some 4.8w out of 22.1w dedicated to the decoder. That’s 22% of total power. Even if you say that’s the high-water mark and it’s usually half of that, it’s still a massive consideration.

If the decoder power and size weren’t an issue, they’d have moved past 4-wide decode years ago. Instead, golden cove only recently went 6 wide and power consumption went through the roof. Meanwhile, AMD went with a ludicrously complex double 4-wide decoder setup that limits throughput under some circumstances and creates all kinds of headaches and hazards that must be dealt with.

Nobody would do this unless the cost of scaling x86 decided was immense. Instead, they’d just slap on another decoder like ARM or RISC-V does.
by murderfs | 2025-10-05 18:27:43+00:00
> most "real" work in the humanities is locked behind not just academic paywalls but an impenetrable wall of inward-focused jargon.

The problem isn't that there's value obfuscated by jargon, it's that almost all of it is obscurantist nonsense that hides its vacuity by trying to sound profound with jargon.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-05 18:28:23+00:00
It's more like a musician "playing" a player piano or a singer performing to a backing track with an auto-tuner or a driver "driving" a self-driving car. The machine is doing all the work, the human is just (at most) prompting it.

Whereas really playing a piano or performing live or driving an F1 car or writing a long essay takes some real effort and talent. That's what makes it interesting.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-05 18:28:34+00:00
Not wealthy at all. We downsized from a big house in the burbs to a condo 1/3 the size in state tax free Florida, we have one relatively cheap car that was 2/3rd the median price of a new car in the US, and we churn credit cards for points and use a few other tricks.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-05 18:28:35+00:00
You realize that when typing into a calculator, you probably hit a wrong key more than 1% of the time? Which is why you always type important calculations twice?

I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about how because LLMs aren't perfect, they therefore have no value. Do they just forget that nothing in the world is perfect, and the values of things are measured in degrees?
by j1elo | 2025-10-05 18:29:10+00:00
I'd like more ellaboration on the technical side. Not literally how to do the same and what commands to use, but more in the line of how are the ZFS pools configured, or if Garage is opinionated and configures it all by itself. Are there mirrors in there? Or it's just individual pools that sync from some disks to others?

I have 2 USB disks and want to make a cheapo NAS but I always doubt between making a ZFS mirror, making 2 independent pools and use one to backup the other, or just go the alternate route and use SnapRAID and then be able to mix more older HDDs for maximum usage of the hardware I already own.
by dhosek | 2025-10-05 18:29:34+00:00
Yes, it is quite thoroughly defunct. Back issues show up at high prices at specialty bookshops occasionally. I offered what I had in the basement a few years back at a discount and what was left at the end of the summer went into the recycling bin, so a lot is truly rare. I’m not sure I even have a complete set myself.

In the backlog of my things to do is a best-of compilation of articles from the published (and one planned but unpublished) issues.
by qcnguy | 2025-10-05 18:30:10+00:00
Congrats on being an excellent example of why leftists should never be allowed anywhere near anything important, especially not Wikipedia.

You could have cited ANY story from the long history of the Daily Mail to demonstrate some kind of inaccuracy. It would have been only a single data point and not that useful, but you could have done it. But like always with this claim by the left, you picked a story that is fully accurate. In fact it's just a retelling of a medical case report written by doctors:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21834723/

There's nothing inaccurate in the Daily Mail's coverage of this story.

Instead:

- You reacted to the headline for dumb aesthetic reasons

- You made assumptions instead of checking

- You engaged in nonsensical ad hominem attacks. The New York Times famously ran interference for Stalin. Do you consider that questionable history to disqualify all NYT coverage for Wikipedia too?

Your response is a perfect encapsulation of the problem that Wikipedians have. Like all leftists you aren't actually concerned about accuracy, you just hate any news source not controlled by your ideological allies, and want to censor them all out of existence.
by theodric | 2025-10-05 18:30:14+00:00
Ireland has had hydro for a century[1], and wind and tidal are productive here. There are wind farms EVERYWHERE around where I live (mountains, Cork/Limerick border). There are solar farms, as well, but sun is not our strong suit. Trouble for individuals is that small, affordable wind turbines are basically useless, and most people don't have hundreds of thousands of Euros plus planning permission to erect megawatt-scale units, so solar is pretty much it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_hydroelectric_scheme
by api | 2025-10-05 18:30:19+00:00
That too, but I was being generous. Honestly it kind of doesn't matter if it's meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit or if it's meaningful but impenetrable jargon-laden discourse aimed only at other members of the field. In either case, it has no effect on the world outside the field.

Always ask: is a field engaging with the world or with itself? If the latter, run away (unless you're looking for escapist fun, like a fandom).

You even see it in tech fields that become inwardly focused, like cryptocurrency. 99% of the work in that space is aimed at users of cryptocurrency to... use cryptocurrency... so they can... use cryptocurrency? That field also has reams of "whitepapers" that are full of obscurantist nonsense. I'm giving it as an example because same disease, different patient.
by noxymon | 2025-10-05 18:30:30+00:00
Hey HN! I've been working on Things-Kit, a microservice framework for Go that aims to bring the productivity and developer experience of frameworks like Spring Boot to the Go ecosystem, while staying true to Go's philosophy of simplicity.

This is an early release, and I'm actively seeking feedback from the community. What would make this more useful for your microservices?
by schoen | 2025-10-05 18:30:43+00:00
That's usually called "mirror writing", but it's a different concept. If you look closely at these examples, you'll see that the letter forms are carefully chosen so that the texts are still readable as normal under symmetry (unlike regular text).

This is done by creating letter forms that can be interpreted as other letter forms under symmetry, similar to the u and n being interpreted as each other's inverted forms. These ambigrammists are making designs in which more pairs of letters have that kind of relationship.
by lacy_tinpot | 2025-10-05 18:31:23+00:00
Sure, we can use that comparison if you'd like. And sure you need to know what you're doing as well.

But "vibe coding" is this vague term that is used on the entire spectrum, from people that do "build me a billion dollar SAAS now" kind of vibe coders, to the "build this basic boilerplate component" type of vibe coders. The former never really get too far.

The later have staying power because they're actually able to make progress, and actually build something tangible.

So now I'm assuming you're not against AI generated code, right?

If that's the case then it's clear that this kind of tool can be useful.
by brendoncarroll | 2025-10-05 18:31:32+00:00
I couldn't find an email in your bio. You can reach me via the email at the bottom of my website (in my HN bio).

Looking through the docs on Peergos, it looks like it's built on top of IPFS. I've been meaning to write some documentation for Blobcache comparing it to IPFS. I can give a quick gist here.

Blobcache Volumes are similar to an IPNS name, and the set of IPFS blocks that can be transitively reached from it. A significant difference is that Blobcache Volumes expose a transaction API with serializable isolation semantics. IPFS provides distributed, available-but-inconsistent, cryptographically signed cells. IPFS chooses availability, and Blobcache chooses consistency. A Blobcache Volume corresponds to a specific entity maintained and controlled by a specific Node. An IPFS name exists as a distributed entity on the network.

Most applications need some sort of consistent transactional cell (even if they don't realize it), but in order to be useful, inconsistent-but-available cells have to be used carefully in an application specific way. I blame this required application-specific care for the lack of adoption of CRDTs.

There's a long tail of other differences too. IPFS was pretty badly behaved the last time I used it, trying to configure my router, and creating lots of connections to other nodes. Blobcache is more like a web browser; it creates transient connections in immediate response to user actions.

That whole ecosystem is filled with complicated abstractions. Just as an example, the Multihash format is pervasive. It amounts to a tag for the algorithm used to create a hash, and then the hash output. I'd rather not have that indirection. All the hashes in Blobcache are 256 bits, and you set the algorithm per Volume. In Go that means the hashes can just be `[32]byte` instead of a slice and a tag and a table of algorithms.

I haven't used IPFS in a while, but I became pretty familiar with it awhile ago. Had I been able to build any of the stuff I was interested in on top of it, I probably wouldn't have written Blobcache.
by mantas | 2025-10-05 18:31:46+00:00
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.

On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.

Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
by lostlogin | 2025-10-05 18:32:34+00:00
There is the opposite too, which is just as bad. The stream of consciousness messaging.

‘Hi’ ‘I’m’ ‘Trying to get the’ ‘File’ ‘But’ ‘I’ ‘Need’

Etc etc and it’s 20 messages before you have any idea what’s going on. The deluge of notifications is distraction.
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-10-05 18:32:41+00:00
Shabby 10 year old Fritzbox is my home LAN. It plays DHCP-Server, VDSL-Modem and Firewall.

Next step will be most likekly a VDSL-modem + something from Ubiquiti as the new Fritz! product portfolio is... a weird mess.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-05 18:32:52+00:00
> Why would you even need to say «call for violence» if speech were violence in itself?

Because violence can take forms other than speech.

> that doesn’t make the speech itself violence

This is not something I agree with. If I say something and hearing what I say makes you reasonably feel afraid or hurt, I have said something violent. If I say something about physically harming another person, I have said something violent. The speech itself is violence.
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-10-05 18:34:05+00:00
> the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.

It used to be that instruction sets were not copyrightable, and you had to resort to implementation patents to extract money (e.g. the MIPS vs Lexra case https://www.eetimes.com/mips-technologies-sues-lexra-for-pat... )
by sebastianconcpt | 2025-10-05 18:34:53+00:00
From where the higher IQ groups would get their even higher IQ inspiration from and push up / raise their networks of influence? (improve social mobility).

How their daily lives will cross vs common experiences with substantial opportunities creators be permanently aborted?

How that wouldn't produce irreversible consequences in a population?

You could say, oh wait, just loosing one Elon has zero impact in a population and yet whole humanity might not become multiplanetary without that one guy in the country that had created the conditions for that raising a ton of talented guys up.
by watwut | 2025-10-05 18:36:00+00:00
> relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute.

They rank up unpayable debts and their married partners end up being legally obligated to pay half of that even after divorce.

Getting life together after gambling is super hard to impossible. It is literally easier to get back on track as alcoholic, as those have much smaller debts.

And it is easier to avoid keep alcohol out of house then ... cell phone put of house.
by dmix | 2025-10-05 18:36:10+00:00
> Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you?

I believe LLMs will be niche tools like databases, you pay for the product not 'gpt' vs 'claude'. You choose the right tool for the job.

I have a feeling coding tool with be separate a niche like Cursor, which LLM it uses doesn't matter. It's the integration, guard rails, prompt seeding, and general software stuff like autocomplete and managing long todos.

Then I pay for ChatGPT because that's my "personal" chat LLM that knows me and knows how I like curt short responses for my dumb questions.

Finally I pay for https://www.warp.dev/terminal as a terminal which replaced Kitty terminal on macos (don't use it for coding) which is another niche. Cursor could enter that arena but VSCode terminal is kinda limited for day-to-day stuff given it's hidden in an larger IDE. Maybe a pure CLI tool will do both better.
by eallam | 2025-10-05 18:36:11+00:00
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by _zoltan_ | 2025-10-05 18:36:47+00:00
my ISP gives me native v6 and a /56. I had sooo much trouble, I gave up and just disabled v6 in the kernel.

For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the issues, disabling is easier.
by fock | 2025-10-05 18:37:02+00:00
Quite some time ago I implemented NFS for a small HPC-cluster on a 40GBe network. A colleague set up RDMA later, since at start it didn't work with the Ubuntu kernel available. Full nVME on the file server too. While the raw performance using ZFS was kind of underwhelming (mdadm+XFS about 2x faster), network performance was fine I'd argue: serial transfers easily hit ~4GB/s on a single node and 4K-benchmarking with fio was comparable to a good SATA-SSD (IOPS + throughput) on multiple clients in parallel!
by evilduck | 2025-10-05 18:37:25+00:00
You're gonna get downvoted for being a bad liar and an obvious troll who degrades the conversation and the overall site, not because of bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Hortman

Getting yourself downvoted doesn't validate your lies either. Farming downvotes isn't being clever, it's being toxic.
by nekusar | 2025-10-05 18:38:04+00:00
I remember when gambling was actually just illegal in most of the USA.

In my state, it was the state run lotto that was used to sell the idea "Hey we'll take lottery proceeds and fund education with it!!!!!". Of course, state-run lottery was legalized, and yes, the proceeds did run schools.

The next funding session, they CUT the existing funding to schools and had the lottery run the bulk of the funding. They naturally never said that part out loud.

And riverboat gambling was a quazi-legal thing. Then casinos were legalized. Then normalized gambling everywhere. Even the local groceries have state-run lotto vending machines that gobble 20's and 50's for a chance to strike it rich, or more likely, get poorer.

I prefer when gambling was decriminalized individually, but not endorsed for the state or companies to run. I also don't want cop squads cracking down on the penny or quarter games in peoples' houses.
by shmerl | 2025-10-05 18:38:30+00:00
> Because… some lack business value

Very dumb response to the code modernization work. Just because it's not a product feature, it absolutely doesn't mean it has no business value.

I also completely disagree that the lesson from it is saying no to such efforts. Increasing tech debt in the name of "more business value" is the worst idea any team can have.

If team leadership sees no value in such work, the team is set to fail.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-05 18:38:35+00:00
Are you sure you're not just mostly seeing the candidates who are using LLMs to pass through the earlier screening phases with flying colors despite their lack of skills? (i.e., they haven't atrophied, they just weren't very good to begin with). There's always a lot of unqualified applicants to a job but LLMs can make them way more effort to filter out.
by dardeaup | 2025-10-05 18:38:51+00:00
They might be singing this song now. (To the tune of 'Yesterday' from the Beatles).

Yesterday, All those backups seemed a waste of pay. Now my database has gone away. Oh I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, There’s not half the files there used to be, And there’s a deadline hanging over me. The system crashed so suddenly. I pushed something wrong What it was I could not say. Now my data’s gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay. Yesterday, The need for back-ups seemed so far away. Thought all my data was here to stay, Now I believe in yesterday.
by mattcollins | 2025-10-05 18:38:55+00:00
I'm the person who ran the test.

The context I used in the test was pretty large. You'll see much better (near 100%) accuracy if you're using smaller amounts of context.

[I chose the context size so that the LLM would be scoring in the ballpark of 50% accuracy (with variation between formats) to maximise the discriminative power of the test.]
by lapcat | 2025-10-05 18:39:04+00:00
> That's a quite literal interpretation of the quote, which I did not intend.

Yes, but considering the contemporary assault on democracy and the rule of law, it seems apt.

> the call to favour pragmatism I believe Adams had intended

It depends on what you mean by pragmatism. I'd call it public pragmatism, not mere private pragmatism. Adams calls it his "duty" to study, and goes on to talk about the "liberty" and "right" to student other subjects. The obvious interpretation, I think, especially given who Adams is and his role in the founding of the US, is that he has the obligation to fight for democracy and liberty. Otherwise, he could probably just accumulate person wealth and allow his literal descendants, and those only, to study whatever they want.
by idopmstuff | 2025-10-05 18:39:53+00:00
> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.

> $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.

This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house.

To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
by zaphar | 2025-10-05 18:41:06+00:00
There are plenty of people in poverty who do not put themselves in a postion to have a government put guns in their face. It is not poverty by and large that causes a government to put guns in their face in America. Poverty may at times be used as a justification for the actual reason that a gun was put in their face but it is not in fact the reason. Neither is it in the general case a good justification either.