MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by monkmartinez | 2025-10-18 21:19:00+00:00
I hope you get traction with your letter, it is vitally important and one of the main reasons I stopped using Obsidian.

I had maybe 10 plugins and they managed to step all over each other. One would break sync, another would break some theme and so on. There is nothing to ensure they play nice with the system itself, let alone anything malicious as you pointed out. From what I understand, there are people that have upwards of 50 plugins installed! They must never shut it down because it probably takes 20 minutes for it to start with that many plugins.

I will say that I am experimenting with various PKMS software. I am running SiYuan and it is has been very pleasant. I have only installed one plugin to make cool indexes on folders as folder notes. Everything else can be configured and used as is out of the box.

There are several others that I will try in the coming months as well. Anytype, Flusterapp, Joplin and Craft are going into my evaluation cue.
by elric | 2025-10-18 21:19:02+00:00
My tinnitus gets louder when I press my jaw/cheek, but no amount of neck/jaw therapy, exercises, or dry needling has made any difference.

The scans and hearing tests are not useless, they help rule out the nastier causes of tinnitus. Calling them useless and going straight for jaw therapy is potentially dangerous advice for some.

Sure, give it a try, but don't skip the rest of the diagnostic process.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 21:19:38+00:00
Molecular and behavioral geneticists absolutely, in modern studies, attempt to deconfound heritability statistics. Within-family and sibling regression are two of those techniques. When you use those study designs, heritability plummets for IQ, but not for traits like height.

I'm not trying to stake out a position about whether IQ is in any sense genetically causal or fixed. I'm saying that it's much more complicated than the Wikipedia page on "Heritability of IQ" would suggest. That's the only reason I dipped into this thread. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but this is an actively (indeed, furiously) studied open question, and the answer is definitely not "twin studies from 20 years ago set a heritability number that resolves the question".
Ask HN: Is a POSIX like interface for cloud infra a bad idea?
by Asymi | 2025-10-18 21:20:00+00:00
As the title says, when humans think about infra, say in a systems design interview, we think high level in terms of components and data flow - not in any particular language (Terraform, CloudFormation) and not in any particular cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure).

I want to be able to declare cloud agnostic infra in some universal language, specify my functional and non functional requirements and push a button to deploy to any cloud.

There would be some intermediate representation of infrastructure and it would then up to us to implement for each cloud. We'd need to maintain a mapping from our language and the clouds in such a way that we can reproduce the infra we need in any cloud from the standard.

We'd need to stay on top of changing cloud APIs and we'd version our language, say a monthly release or something. The focus would be less on how does the user configure X DB, Y message queue, and Z compute - and more the user tells us that X, Y, Z should satisfy some NFRs and be connected in some way. Then we'd just create the infra for them.

I know this sounds a lot like Terraform, but I use that on the daily and have seen first hand how hard it is to go from one cloud to another. I'm aware cloud providers don't have an incentive to be interoperable and did some brief research on the topic. Seems like this has been tried before and hasn't really taken off - why is that? Just too hard? Cloud providers won't let you?

Is it a tarpit idea? Please let me know!
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-18 21:20:29+00:00
You can do leader election without etcd. The thing etcd buys you is you can have clusters of 3, 5, 7 or 9 DB nodes and lose up to 1, 2, 3, or 4 nodes respectively. But honestly, the vast majority of k8s users would be fine with a single SQL instance backing each k8s cluster and just running two or more k8s clusters for HA.

k3s doesn't require etcd, I'm pretty sure GKE uses Spanner and Azure uses Cosmos under the hood.
by itsnowandnever | 2025-10-18 21:20:32+00:00
that touches on what I consider the dichotomy of k8s: it's a really scalable system that makes it easy to spin up a cluster locally on your laptop and interact with the full API locally just like in prod. so it's a super scalable system with a dense array of features. but paradoxically most shops won't need the vast majority of k8s features ever and by the time they scale to where they do need a ton of distributed init features they're extremely close to the point where they'd be better served by a bespoke system conceived from scratch in house that solves problems very specific to the business in question. if you have many thousands of k8s nodes, you're probably in the gray area of if using k8s is worth it because the loop of k8s will never be as fast as a centralized push control plane vs the k8s pull/watch control plane. and naturally at scale that problem will only compound
by busterarm | 2025-10-18 21:20:54+00:00
Look. I brought up Arko's credibility. I didn't bring up the Ruby Central folks credibility. That's a separate thread -- there's literally like 500 other threads to discuss that topic.

What you're doing is called a Whataboutism. I was responding to a comment about gem.coop.

Andre Arko is not credible and thus gem.coop is not credible. He can explain all he wants but his actions were plainly inexcusable. Whatever Ruby Central did is immaterial to the point of whether or not Andre Arko can be involved with services that we rely on.
by kevin_nisbet | 2025-10-18 21:21:18+00:00
I'm with you, I think most people might think they don't need this reliability, until they do. I'm sure there is some subset of clusters where the claim is correct.

But from the article, turning off fsync and expecting to only lose a few ms of updates. I've tried to recover etcd on volumes that lied about fsync and experienced a power outage, and I don't think we managed to recover it. There might be more options now to recover and ignore corrupted WAL entries, but at that time it was very difficult and I think we ended up just reinstalling from scratch. For clusters where this doesn't matter or the SLOs for recovery account for this, I'm totally onboard, but only if you know what you're doing.

And similar the point from the article that "full control plane data loss isn’t catastrophic in some environments" is correct, in the sense of what the author means by some environments. Because I don't think it's limited to those that are management by gitops as suggested, but where there is enough resiliency and time to redeploy and do all the cleanup.

Anyways, like much advice on the internet, it's not good or bad, just highly situational, and some of the suggestions should only be applied if the implications are fully understood.
by drewcon | 2025-10-18 21:21:28+00:00
Same exact story for me.

Audiologist suggested treating it like a rock in your shoe. At the time seemed like impossible advice but now I just live with it and it’s 100% fine.

Also the idea that it is actually made worse by anxiety was a game changer for me. Literally, “don’t worry about it” is the exact right advice.
by Leftium | 2025-10-18 21:23:59+00:00
Raycast configures the Hyper key as ⌃⌥⇧⌘; if shift key is optionally excluded: ⌥⇧⌘

I like excluding the shift key:

- ctrl-option-cmd is simple to press even without special key mappings

- simple to add shift (esp. with a CapsLock mapped to ctrl-option-cmd)

I also mapped tab to an "Ultra" key: shift-hyper (shift-ctrl-option-cmd)

---

several other references map "meh" to shift-ctrl-option, and "hyper" to shift-ctrl-option-cmd. I find those less logical/ergonomic and prefer matching Raycast's convention.
by manquer | 2025-10-18 21:24:32+00:00
India has similar number of laureates and nowhere had the similar kind of social upheaval or authoritarian regime like China or the soviet union had.

I think it is bit more nuanced than just Mao, pre 1935 you could do ground breaking research in almost any field with limited to no funding at all. Since the war you need increasingly large amount of budgets which western universities with full government support enjoy, ans it was not possible to compete for India or China or even the Soviet Union to keep up.

--

The cultural changes you allude to, certainly were a medium term negative factor, but the pre 1950 setup were hardly sustainable or efficient. In pre Mao China or similarly British India (or even till recently) it was not a meritocracy there was a privileged elite who had all the opportunity and few shined if they were also talented.

Today China is one of the most meritocratic economies after all - despite all the authoritarian flaws, we are only seeing positive growth in foundational scientific research and rapidly in contrast with the rising anti-science sentiment we are seeing in so many parts of the western and western influenced world.

The socio-cultural reset was important and necessary for both China and India to progress, the methods of the Mao era are questionable both for their cruelty and also for how efficient and effective they were it was just bad all around however the need of the reset came from a valid place I think.

---

There is whole dimension of bias which does disadvantage particularly Chinese research output today. Don't get me wrong I am not saying there is conscious bias against Chinese researchers. The bias is because despite the esteem the Nobel prize is not a global one.

The committee sit in Scandinavian countries closely working with Norway government. The members are predominately affiliated to western universities and fluent in English or other European languages and read Nature / Science type of western journals.

This always put Soviet researches before and now Chinese and Indian(to a lesser degree) at a disadvantage compared to their western peers.

The committee are not equipped to judge the research output of the whole world, till recently this was not a problem, because western research post WW-II was the majority of the world output, but that is increasingly not true and in a multi-polar world.
by wppick | 2025-10-18 21:24:42+00:00
If you don't need the isolation of of k8s then don't forget about erlang, which is another option to scale up to 1 million functions. Obviously k8s containers (which are fundamentally just isolated processes) and erlang processes are not interchangeable things, but when thinking about needing in the order of millions of processes erlang is pretty good prior art
by Animats | 2025-10-18 21:24:43+00:00
Actual paper: [1]

This could be useful. I've been plugging away, on and off, on the concept of statically checked back-references for Rust. This is one of the biggest complaints that C/C++ people have about Rust - if A points to B, it's really hard to have a pointer from B to A. This leads to unsafe workarounds.

You can do it safely with Rc, RefCell, Weak, borrow(), borrow_mut(), upgrade(), and downgrade(). It's verbose, adds run-time overhead, and there's the potential of panicking at run time on a double borrow. But the expressive power is there. This is work in progress, and I have some notes here.[2]

The thing that's hard to check statically that borrows are disjoint as to scope. Borrows have lifetime scopes. If those lifetime scopes do not overlap, the borrows do not clash. Checking this across function calls is hard. (Checking across generic function calls is worse.) The Flowistry approach might help. The note that "Flowistry does not completely handle interior mutability" is a concern, because we're analyzing things that use RefCell.

The practical problem is to come up with a set of restrictions that are 1) sound, 2) checkable at compile time without too much compute effort, 3) allow programmers to do most of the legit things people want to do with back pointers, such as have a reference to the parent node in a tree, and 4) lead to usable diagnostic messages for problems.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.13662

[2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/technotes/blob/main/docs/rust/...
by technothrasher | 2025-10-18 21:25:03+00:00
I've had it as long as I can remember. Like you, I thought it was normal. When I was a little kid I thought that was what the Simon & Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence" was talking about. Since I suspect I've had it since birth, it doesn't bother me. It's just something that is. I feel bad for the folks who get it later in life and have trouble with it. My neighbor got it a few years ago and it keeps him up at night sometimes.
by lrvick | 2025-10-18 21:25:40+00:00
It is way behind Debian on even the basics sadly. Maintainers do not even sign in NixOS making them easy to impersonate. Debian security is a joke too though in other areas, and like nix, should never be used in production either.

See a security comparison of both with stagex: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex#comparison
by bjourne | 2025-10-18 21:25:52+00:00
I'm not a giant like Schmidhuber so I might be wrong, but imo there are at least two features that set residual connections and LSTMs apart:

1. In LSTMs skip connections help propagate gradients backwards through time. In ResNets, skip connections help propagate gradients across layers.

2. Forking the dataflow is part of the novelty, not only the residual computation. Shortcuts can contain things like batch norm, down sampling, or any other operation. LSTM "residual learning" is much more rigid.
by pipes | 2025-10-18 21:25:55+00:00
Bit off topic but anyone here use white noise with their young kids, as a sleep aid?

I'm really paranoid about giving them tinnitus. I am just back from holiday with extended family, I mentioned to my brother that the white noise he is using with his kids is extremely loud, he's using a phone app. To the point my daughter moved rooms out of his kids room. Google ai agrees with me that hearing damage is definitely a risk. I mentioned this to him and it went down really badly. I'll not mention it again.
by mft_ | 2025-10-18 21:27:13+00:00
Exactly the same story for me: right tinnitus just started one day in my 30s; examination, hearing test, MRI all normal. ENT specialist exhausted his diagnostic options then suggested ginger tablets.

It rarely bothers me (although it’s always there) but obviously there’s a cause and I’d like to find it. I have a suspicion it may be somehow related to neck anatomy and/or postural factors (it sometimes seems to worsen slightly with particular positions) in bed but beyond that I’m at a loss.
by coppa | 2025-10-18 21:27:21+00:00
Speaking of which I would advise : Svante Pääbo Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes then even better imho The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak. After these books I spent many hours listening to the full courses of Jean-Jacques Hublin, chaire Paléoanthropologie in college de France ( in french but probably translatable now with automatic features ?). This was an unexpected and wonderful path.
by kragen | 2025-10-18 21:27:41+00:00
9 if you count people from the Republic of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...).

But, since the Nobel was established, China has been invaded by Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain (largely India), France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan again, and had a civil war which hasn't technically ended (plus the end of the Boxer Rebellion), a revolution, and the worst famine in human history. But probably the worst event for its Nobel chances was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution. The civil wars also brought to power brutal dictatorships, including in the so-called Republic of China.

The US has been invaded zero times and had zero civil wars during that period, and in the US, the Cultural Revolution and dictatorship are just starting. Consequently many people who might have been Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, etc., during the period in question were instead born in the US. And note that, on the page I linked above, 6 Nobel laureates from the US were actually born in China: Charles K. Kao, Daniel C. Tsui, Edmond H. Fischer, Yang, Tsung-Dao Lee, and Walter H. Brattain (!).
by Aurornis | 2025-10-18 21:28:48+00:00
Interesting concept, but between the broken hardware and the way they gave up before getting anything useful this article was rather disappointing:

> Another problem was our flow cell was malfunctioning from the start — only 623 out of 2048 pores were working.

Is this normal for the machine? Is there a better write up somewhere where they didn’t give up immediately after one attempt?
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-10-18 21:31:01+00:00
i gave up on expectations a few posts ago.

for T3, there is a scene towards the end, where Terminatrix is shown injecting something into the present day robots. It was little sparkly things, and then present day robots started killing everyone. I assumed these are 'nano bots'. She took control.

I didn't like that the present day machines only rose up and started killing everyone after she did this, they didn't have any 'emergent' moment and gain sentience. As far as I know, none of the Terminator Movies went back and showed 'achieving consciousness' and deciding to kill all humans.

As opposed to

T2. Where the present day humans studied the damaged chip left from T1. And rushed head long into disaster. The present day humans were rushing towards tech development at all costs, just like in todays world, regardless of risk. So I thought T2 was more similar to today.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-18 21:31:33+00:00
I know it's complicated, but you seemed to be arguing pretty strongly that the genetic component is zero which while possible is not well supported by the evidence.

If you're not trying to stake out a position then you did a very good job of convincing me otherwise.

I don't know where I implied it wasn't complicated?

Also my original statement was just that it's "entirely reasonable".
by wppick | 2025-10-18 21:33:01+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

"Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher-order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence (e.g., reasoning and problem-solving)."

Executive function is not just emotional control. It's higher levels of thinking. It's the E in CEO. AI is really just an amplifier, just like how a calculator in one person's hand could be much powerful than in someone else's
by ThomasPw | 2025-10-18 21:34:35+00:00
Obviously both sides would NOT release items, not favourable to themselves.

Then there is also media self censoring - like media that consistently only publishes stuff favourable to one sided. And a weaker form that I would cause media bias. Israel/Hamas/Gaza people/ Palestine people would all be participating in media manipulation / blocking. Its naive not to realize this. There is a saying , something like this ..... "...In war the first causality is truth ..." Also friendly fire deaths and mistakes are not unusual in warfare.

I always remember the 2010 "so called collateral MURDER " FROM wikileaks, incident, the gunner thought the reporters telephoto lens was a rocket launcher, when viewing from a few KM away ...
by janalsncm | 2025-10-18 21:34:44+00:00
So the central controversy in the story is whether the journalist fans should share the solution with the world or keep quiet for the auction.

Sanborn wants the money for medical reasons so he needs to maintain a high sale price.

The two fans want to share the solution with the world.

Presumably the winner of the auction will be buying a severely depreciating asset: the right to know but not disclose the solution. There are at least four people who have the solution and as soon as one of them shares it, its value goes to zero.

Maybe the “solution” to this meta problem is simple: auction it off to the public with a go fund me. As soon as it reaches $500k, publish the solution. That way everyone wins.

The whole thing got more complicated with the addition of lawyers, not less. I don’t see how the two fans violated any contracts with the artist or auction house since they never signed one. But of course lawyers will charge a ton for you to find out.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-10-18 21:35:40+00:00
I wanted to try this, but I looked into Nebula a bit more.

Nebula is facing a class action for apparently disclosing detailed genomic data to Meta, Microsoft & Google. The subreddit is also full of reports of people who never received their results years after sending their kits back. There are also concerns about the quality of sequencing and false positives in all DTC genomics testing. Given what happened with 23andme as well and all of this stuff, I'm wary of sending my genetic data to any private company.
by hansvm | 2025-10-18 21:35:52+00:00
Once the bot is stealthy (the current sub-thread if I haven't misread) they absolutely do. A couple examples where I've been flagged as a bot for normal traffic:

1. Discord's telemetry was broken on my browser, and on failure they immediately retried. It didn't take many actions queued up on the site before my browser was initiating over 100RPS, on their behalf.

2. Target and eBay still flag my sessions as bot traffic (presumably because they don't recognize the user agent or because I use Linux or something). Target allows browsing their site for a few items before heavily rate-limiting me for a day or so, and eBay just resets my password a day or two after I log in, every single bloody time.

The problem is that from time to time normal users will generate large traffic volumes, and if the bot owner uses many IPs then you're forced to use less reliable signals for that ban hammer (i.e., no single user will be near 700 RPS).
by godelski | 2025-10-18 21:36:26+00:00
> 1. Make it clear to them that with "internal monologue" you do not mean an actual audible hallucination

What do you mean? I hear my voice in my head. I can differentiate this from a voice outside my head, but yes, I do "hear" it.

And yes, this has been discussed in depth. It was like literally the first thing...

But no, they do not have conversations in their heads like I do. They do not use words as their medium. I have no doubt that their experience is different from mine.

> 2. Ask them if they EVER have imagined themselves or others saying or asking anything

This is an orthogonal point. Yes, they have imagined normal interactions. But frequently those imaginary conversations do not use words.

> The cat actually proves my point.

Idk man, I think you should get a pet. My cat communicates with me all the time. But she has no language.

> Fun fact: whenever animals (apes, birds) have been taught language, they never ask questions (some claim they did, but if you dig in you'll see that the interpretation is extremely dubious).

To be clear, I'm not saying my cat's intelligence is anywhere near ours. She can do tricks and is "smart for a cat" but I'm not even convinced she's as intelligent as the various wild corvids I feed.
by tptacek | 2025-10-18 21:36:31+00:00
Do I understand part of the complexity of the situation is that Kryptos is in some sense "crackable" (unlike real cryptography), and these two people sleuthed their way to the answer book without solving it? Which is not quite exactly the same thing as them independently working out a solution; it's more like a nicer and more legal version of breaking into the guy's house and stealing it out of his desk drawer?
by wkjagt | 2025-10-18 21:36:41+00:00
It would be cool if someone made a mass produced "watch" that's all the hardware but none of the firmware. So a tiny computer on your wrist that doesn't do anything out of the box, and you can make it do whatever you want. Maybe a watch, maybe something else. It just provides the housing, microcontroller, battery, screen, etc., and an SDK.