MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-10-19 20:26:21+00:00
Could you use LoRA adapters to free up your context with all the stuff that normally has to go into it? Coding standards and fuzzy preferences like "prefer short names" or "prefer functional style", reference materials, MCP definitions, etc.?

For training data, I was thinking you could just put all the stuff into context, then give it some prompts, and see how the responses differ over the baseline context. You could feed that into the fine tuner either as raw prompt and the output from the full-context model, or as like input="refactor {output from base model}", output="{output from full-context model}".

My understanding is that LoRA are composable, so in theory MCPs could be deployed as LoRA adapters. Then toggling on and off would not require any context changes. You just enable or disable the LoRA adapter in the model itself. Seems like this would help with context poisoning too.
by mmooss | 2025-10-19 20:26:21+00:00
That hasn't been my experience with many trees and homes. Lots of people live with trees around - maybe most people who are in houses. I don't personally know of anyone with these problems, though I've heard of things like it.

Maybe the tree doesn't need to be right next your structure?

> A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed.

Definitely not my experience!
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-10-19 20:27:20+00:00
Even if it was relatively simple and security was lax you have to question why they targeted the Louvre.

You can’t fence these items because of how high-profile they are. You can melt them down and sell the gold, but you’d destroy a lot of the value by doing that. Because it’s such a high-profile target you know a lot of resources will be allocated to track you down. You’d think that there be much safer targets to rob that wouldn’t draw as much attention and would provide similar returns.
by electroly | 2025-10-19 20:27:30+00:00
> fixed DPI-density display

This part is maybe technically true but not in spirit. High-DPI didn't exist in Windows as a literal scaling percentage, but it had "Large Fonts" as an option which acted as a system-wide scale. VB GUIs were scalable based on twips (device-independent unit). The entire form and all controls would scale according to the Large Fonts setting.

Many of my VB6 forms were resizable. There was a simple library that let you have anchors in the Tag property so you didn't have to write any sizing logic yourself.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-19 20:27:33+00:00
Dang has told me more than once to let the mods do the moderating and to not hash it out amongst ourselves, as it steps on their toes and makes any enforcement by mods seem selective. Email and/or flag, and move along.

I don’t work here, and neither do you, so let’s both agree to disagree on it being on-topic or not, as it’s not my place to speak for dang or the other mods, and it’s not yours either, for that matter.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-10-19 20:28:06+00:00
It is an official flavor[1], that is, maintained as a community effort, but endorsed by Ubuntu. The related packages are hosted in Ubuntu's universe repository[2]. There is indeed a risk of reputation damage.

1. https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors

2. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xubuntu-desktop
by samdoesnothing | 2025-10-19 20:28:31+00:00
A free market simply means that individuals are free to conduct consensual transactions with others. In other words, they aren't compelled through violence or the threat thereof, to make or not make transactions that they otherwise would.

Generally speaking, what all other definitions boil down to is Sam and Hanna wanting to make a consensual transaction, and some third party who has nothing to do with said transition interfering "for the greater good" or whatever. Which is nonsense, it's the complete opposite of freedom.
by charcircuit | 2025-10-19 20:29:21+00:00
It shouldn't have happened in the first place. OpenSSH should control their exact dependencies and Debian shouldn't be meddling with them and swapping them out, loading random code into OpenSSH's process.

>we can only trust open source software. There is no way to audit closed source software

The ability to audit software is not sufficient, nor neccessary for it to be trustworthy.

>systems of a closed source vendor was compromised, like Crowdstrike some weeks ago, we can’t audit anything

You can't audit open source vendors either.
by stefanwebb | 2025-10-19 20:29:43+00:00
Seems topical given some recent front-page HN articles on fine-tuning. I discuss a large-scale empirical study from 2014 of fine-tuning 7B models to outperform GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-Turbo, as well as arguments why fine-tuning is coming back into favor
by jeffbee | 2025-10-19 20:29:56+00:00
Seems like a poor example since CPU performance metrics differ not only between ISAs, and between vendors of one ISA (AMD vs. Intel, for example) but also between items from a single vendor. There's a 1000-page PDF that tries to explain what all the Intel PMU counters mean on different CPUs and it's full of errors and omissions as well.
by geysersam | 2025-10-19 20:30:17+00:00
> Does anyone else find this article rather AI-ish?

After reading the whole thing, yes! Specifically it feels incoherent in the way AI text often is. It starts by praising unix pipes for their simple design and the explicit tradeoffs they make, and then proceeds explaining how we could and should make the complete opposite set of tradeoffs.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-19 20:31:17+00:00
You are really going to regret having this comment history one day I guarantee it.

As for your question in the other comment chain: Whitewashing/downplaying =/= justifying. We didn’t say you “justified” it. Though neither is a great look.

Have a good one dude. I’ve stomached all I can of this thread.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-19 20:31:19+00:00
//To understand poetry, one must first be fluent with its technical aspects. To fully grasp poetry, you must first understand its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. After mastering the technical side, you should ask two questions: First, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered? This rates the poem's perfection. Second, how important is that objective? This rates the objective's importance. I propose a formula to rate a poem's greatness by plotting its perfection on a horizontal axis and its importance on a vertical axis, with the resulting area indicating its greatness. --Dr. J. Evans Pritchard//
by strogonoff | 2025-10-19 20:32:48+00:00
> I'm a cancer researcher. Obviously. my job is of value to me because it pays my bills (and yes, I do get satisfaction from it in other ways). But if an AI can do cancer research better than me, then the human benefit (to every human except perhaps me) favors the AI over me.

I’ll note that I didn’t mention “AI”, I was addressing robots vs. jobs, but sure.

Let me straw man myself and say up front that it would be simplistic to say that if something hurts one person today then it is bad, even if it benefits a million tomorrow. However, does that mean if death of N people can cause N+1 people to be saved at some indefinite point in the future, we should jump on the opportunity?

Utilitarian math is not the answer. We don’t have to go far for examples of tragic loss of life and atrocities that were caused by people following utilitarian objectives, so I am much more wary of this logic than its inverse. We probably should neither let everybody starve while we are fighting cancer nor stop studying cancer, even if we could feed millions of people in dire need with that money.

With that in mind: feeling fulfilled and needed is important, being able to pay bills is important, etc., no matter who you are. It is probably unacceptable to reduce human life to “be the most efficient cog in the system or GTFO”.

> I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills.

Does your cancer research institution have no public relations department? Should there be no public relations departments in any of them? Would it help cancer research?

--

Tangentially, the Wikipedia article on inflammation makes two claims: 1) inflammation can be caused by stress—I imagine via lack of sleep, bad habits, eating disorders, etc.—and 2) cancer is one of the non-immune diseases with causal origins in inflammatory processes. Now, there’s many things that could cause a person to stress, but I imagine losing your job and struggling to make ends meet, with a promise that it helps humanity at some point, is definitely high up there (especially if you have a family). I jest, but only in part.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-19 20:32:59+00:00
That sounds like a variation on: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" which rests on some very shaky (yet comforting) set of assumptions in a "just world."

Heck, just look at yesterday: Myself and several million other people wouldn't have needed to march if smart people reliably ended up in charge.

I think it's more valuable to flip the lens around, and ask: "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-10-19 20:33:20+00:00
Ternary quantized weights for LLMs are a thing. Most of the weights in Bitnet b1.58[1] class models[2][3] are ternary (-1/0/1).

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17764

[2]: https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/Falcon-E-3B-Instruct

[3]: https://huggingface.co/microsoft/bitnet-b1.58-2B-4T
by idreyn | 2025-10-19 20:33:27+00:00
Yes, it is. And yes, except that it wasn't. A SWF is about building common wealth inside the systems that finance capital built (in the same way that the 401k replaced the pension) rather than turning back the clock on them. How you acquire those assets can vary wildly:

- Maybe you just decide to invest some public money

- Maybe you have some natural resources that are collective-by-default (minerals wealth on public land)

- Maybe there's a bailout of an industry that is financially broken but has become too big to fail cough and the government presses its leverage

- Maybe a president just wakes up and decides that he wants the government to own 10% of Intel, and makes that deal happen on favorable terms.
by stoitsev | 2025-10-19 20:33:33+00:00
I'm with a block storage vendor that works with a lot of companies migrating off VMware, and the diversity of KVM-based cloud management platforms we're seeing is fascinating. We have customers moving to OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenStack, HP VME, Oracle Virtualization, and even some homegrown solutions. The common thread is that they're all looking for a storage backend that is not tied to a specific hypervisor and can deliver predictable high performance. The beauty of the KVM ecosystem is the freedom to choose the best tool for the job, and that extends to the storage layer. A good software-defined block storage solution should have the features (data migration, disaster recovery) and capabilities to make the transition away from VMware as smooth as possible.
by simoncion | 2025-10-19 20:33:59+00:00
> I get that they were written before git, but not before the advent of version control.

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/bash.git git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/coreutils.git

Plug the repo name into https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=<REPO_NAME> to get a link to browse the repo.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-19 20:33:59+00:00
I don’t think Matlab or Octave are great languages for software engineering. Actually, these languages are like example #1 of the difference between engineering software vs software engineering: they are excellent tools for writing, like, 10-100 line numerical experiments.

Anyone who runs up against a limitation of Octave has probably hit the point where they should consider switching, but not to Matlab or some other scripting language, but to Fortran or maybe Julia or something.

Therefore, I disagree with the accepted answer in that StackOverflow thread. The language is only good in the first place for short codes anyway, so fixing any little octave/matlab regionalisms is not a big deal. And, since it is a mathematical experiments, you should understand what every line of code does, so running the code without reading it is not really an option.
by NaomiLehman | 2025-10-19 20:34:29+00:00
There is a really good book that touches on some of these topics:

“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”

― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (or The Fear of Freedom in another translation)
by jocaal | 2025-10-19 20:34:30+00:00
The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.

The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.
by stefanwebb | 2025-10-19 20:34:50+00:00
Here's a blog post I wrote last week on the same topic: https://blog.oumi.ai/p/small-fine-tuned-models-are-all-you

I discuss a large-scale empirical study of fine-tuning 7B models to outperform GPT-4 called "LoRA Land", and give some arguments in the discussion section making the case for the return of fine-tuning, i.e. what has changed in the past 6 months
by sthlmb | 2025-10-19 20:35:21+00:00
I guess I'll reply here and cover both of the comments :D There are currently 80 SBCs in the database, and they're all boards that I've obtained over the last few years. It's a side project/hobby and buying many more boards would be a very expensive affair :( New boards will be a mixture of those that interest me, and those that vendors (very kindly) send to be included on the website. Sadly, as much as I'd love to, I can't do a Pokémon and catch them all, so there will be some missing!
by kingstnap | 2025-10-19 20:35:52+00:00
The idea is roughly that the effort needed to use a system is in some situations ~propto the number of symbols * the number of needed positions.

Here's a concrete example, imagine you needed to create some movable type because you are creating a printing press. And you need to represent all numbers upto 100 million.

In binary you need to make 53 pieces, in ternary 50, in octal 69 pieces, in decimal 81 and in hexadecimal 101.
by roxolotl | 2025-10-19 20:36:03+00:00
Just a nit but this isn't a debt ceiling issue. They raised the ceiling by 5trillion with the big bill passed in the spring[0]. Shutdowns occur because no budget has been passed so the government hasn't been authorized to spend any money. The bill they are arguing over now would fund the government through Nov 21st[1].

0: https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/family-finan...

1: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545929/house-stopgap-f...
by Groxx | 2025-10-19 20:36:28+00:00
mostly no, from my reading - it was a multi-stage chain of relatively normal looking things that added up to an exploit. helped by the tests involved using compressed data that wasn't human-readable.

you can of course come up with ways it could have been caught, but the code doesn't stand out as abnormal in context. that's all that really matters, unless your build system is already rigid enough to prevent it, and has no exploitable flaws you don't know about.

finding a technical overview is annoyingly tricky, given all the non-technical blogspam after it, but e.g. https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-1/112354/ looks pretty good from a skim.
by amlib | 2025-10-19 20:36:44+00:00
The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it.

In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.

Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....)

Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
by lukan | 2025-10-19 20:37:13+00:00
Wow, what a story. Especially with the background what happened to him before winning twice.

"Morgan, a 37-year-old truck driver living in a caravan, was almost killed in a car crash which caused him to develop a heart condition. He then suffered an allergic reaction to the drug used to treat this condition, which triggered a fatal heart attack. He was declared clinically dead for 14 minutes and 38 seconds before being revived by paramedics. He subsequently lapsed into a coma for 12 days, during which his family were advised to turn off his life support. After being transferred to a different hospital, he woke up and made a full recovery."
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-19 20:37:38+00:00
I used empathy as shorthand for seeing other people as NPCs.

It’s the dark side of the spotlight effect. Everyone has that impulse, just like racist thoughts and many other types of bias. One needs to work to really see others as full human beings with thoughts and values unlike your own—-it doesn’t happen automatically; the automatic impulse is to see difference as a defect when compared to the ideal person, who is of course “Me.”
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-19 20:38:34+00:00
See my other message.

The owners don't want to destroy the structures at all.

They've been holding onto the properties because appreciation was outpacing taxation, allowing a predictable path to remodeling and re-habitation.

Until that changed. Primarily from greedier investors not having enough low-hanging fruit to pick from so they're shaking the trees for all they have until they can give no more.

It's new buyers instead that want to swoop in if the landscape can be further tilted in their favor. Just a little bit is all it takes to yield a big return for a privileged few.

Other costs have risen too but the taxes are so high that's what triggers the final destruction.

Property tax has that extra-financial "property" that keeps your home positioned like dominos ready to fall. Like other skyrocketing costs don't do, even though the pressure from them is huge too.

This is by design.

LVT wont help you now. It's too late.
by cguess | 2025-10-19 20:38:39+00:00
There was a digital reconstruction using the pigments analysis https://blog.world-mysteries.com/science/digital-restoration...

My memories of the few times I've been to the Louvre are exactly the same as yours.

Musee d'Orsay down the river is a much better museum in my opinion and the one I never skip when I'm in Paris, the Louvre I'll only go to if someone I'm with has never been and really wants to.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-19 20:39:11+00:00
> A 'free market' means freedom from monopolistic and rent-seeking practices (according to a Marxist).

This is also the position of Adam Smith and, for that matter, everybody except for the monopolists and their sycophants.

I think the latter are sometimes referred to as the Chicago School and someone should really buy that place out to split it up and sell it for parts. I bet they have some nice buildings that are worth way more than any of their theories.

> Yet we have a different capitalist take on what a 'free market' is, which is more like a choice between Pepsi, Coca Cola and own-brand cola, with plain old tap water not on the menu.

Let's not ignore the third thing here. There are actual economists who will make arguments like "monopolies are efficient because of economies of scale" -- all empirical evidence to the contrary -- and presumably actually believe them. But there are also, you know, monopolies, and government officials in their pockets, who say things like that knowing that they're full of crap because that mendacity has been lucrative for them.

And maybe we need to start putting those people out on their butts or into a prison cell.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-19 20:39:11+00:00
Market bubble is essentially a gambling event gone wrong. Shorting stock is widely recognized by people smarter than me, as high risk gambling, due multiple factors. So now please tell me, why would people concerned about gambling gone wrong, voluntarily engage in a reverse gambling themselves? Let imagine football and a spectator who is moderately in the know about this sport. He sees that multiple people are gambling large sums on the team he deems would likely lose. Why would such a person go and bet unreasonable sums on the opposite team, even if it's a likely win? It's still gambling and still not a reasonably defined event.

tl;dr - it is really tiring, reading these "clever" quips about "why won't you short then?", mainly because they are neither clever nor in any way new. We have heard that for a decade about "why won't you short BTC them?". You are not original.