MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-13 18:23:10+00:00
> Any of the BSDs (well 2BSD is the oldest on a quick search), the linux project, the GNU C lib, etc. Just because you can't think of it, it does not mean it doesn't exist.

Did BSD defeat Linux? No. Which BSD is even the right one? BSD's biggest success is living on as the foundation of Apple's Cathedral in XNU, and PlayStation's Cathedral in the PS4 and PS5.

Did Linux stay a bazaar vendor? No - 90% of code has been corporate contributed since 2004. Less than 3% of the Linux Foundation budget goes towards kernel development. Linux is a Cathedral, by every definition, and only exists today because Cathedrals invest in it for collective benefit. It's a Cathedral, run as a Cathedral joint venture, to be abandoned if a better thing for the investing Cathedrals ever came along.

GCC? Being clobbered by Clang. Less relevant every year. Same with GNU coreutils, slowly getting killed by uutils.

Firefox? Firefox only still exists because a Cathedral called Google funds it.

LibreOffice, Apache, PHP, Blender? Professional foundations that get very picky about who is allowed to contribute what. They aren't amateurs and they all depend on Cathedral funding. Blender only got good when it started collecting checks from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Adobe. Blender is a Cathedral funded by Cathedrals.
by hunter-gatherer | 2025-10-13 18:23:13+00:00
Indeed. I live in a pretty red state, and have lots of red or red-leaning family and friends, and practically nobody I know is "anti-solar" or even considered it a political stance. I do run into more anti-windmill though, but the reason is clearly that nobody likes looking at them across the landscape (windfarm in SE Utah was controversial for this point). Also in the southwest solar is often not favored because some amount of water is used to clean the dust off, and water scarcity here in the SW US is starting to finally creep into peoples' minds.

I'd imagine a lot of the lack of solar farms in the rural midwest and southwest is due to land use conflicts with ag and ranching. I don't have data to back that up though, just a hunch.
by drdeca | 2025-10-13 18:23:19+00:00
To remind oneself how to multiply matrices together, it suffices to remember how to apply a matrix to a column vector, and that ((A B) v) = (A (B v)).

For each 1-hot vector e_i (i.e. the row vector that has a 1 in the i-th position and 0s elsewhere), apply B e_i to get the i-th column of the matrix B. Then, apply the matrix A to the result, to obtain A (B e_i), which equals (A B) e_i . This is then the i-th column of the matrix A B. And, when applying the matrix A to some column vector v, for each entry/row of the resulting vector, it is obtained by combining the corresponding row of A, with the column vector v.

So, to get the entry at the j-th row of the i-th column of (A B), one therefore combines the i-th column of B with the j-th row of A. Or, alternatively/equivalently, you can just compute the matrix (A B) column by column, by, for each e_i , computing that the i-th column of (A B) is (A (B e_i)) (which is how I usually think of it).

To be clear, I don't have the process totally memorized; I actually use the above reasoning to remind myself of the computation process a fair portion of the time that I need to compute actual products of matrices, which is surprisingly often given that I don't have it totally memorized.

When I took linear algebra, the professor emphasized the linear maps, and somewhat de-emphasized the matrices that are used to notate them. I think this made understanding what is going on easier, but made the computations less familiar. I very much enjoyed the class.
by hvb2 | 2025-10-13 18:23:37+00:00
> Bitcoin is durable, portable, divisible, scarce, verifiable, and decentralized, which makes it a valuable form of currency

I think for it to be a currency it has to be accepted for real world products? A currency is also useless if it fluctuates this much because you cannot set prices for anything.

By your logic stocks would be a currency?

A security is what it is at this point
by jkrejcha | 2025-10-13 18:23:51+00:00
> - On Linux systems, any user process can inspect any other process of that same user for it's environment variables. We can argue about threat model but, especially for a developer's system, there are A LOT of processes running as the same user as the developer.

Here's the thing though, the security model of most operating systems means that running a process as a user is acting as that user. There are some caveats (FreeBSD has capsicum, Linux has landlock, SELinux, AppArmor, Windows has integrity labels), but in the general case, if you can convince someone to run something, the program has delegated authority to act on behalf of that user. (And some user accounts on many systems may have authority to impersonate others.)

While it's by no means the only security model (there exists fully capability based operating systems out there), it's the security model that is used for most forms of computing, for better or worse. One of the consequences of this is that you can control anything within your domain. I can kill my own processes, put them to sleep, and most importantly for this, debug them. Anything I own that has secrets can grab them my ptrace/process_vm_readv/ReadProcessMemory/etc.
by crote | 2025-10-13 18:23:53+00:00
> Most people in Western world also cannot imagine staying at conveyor belt or table doing the same assembly task whole week.

In my opinion one of the biggest reasons we won't see manufacturing come back to Western countries is that we still believe this is how most factories operate. Chinese people aren't stupid, they have been spending a fortune on automating as much of their manufacturing as possible!

Western labor is never going to compete with Asian labor, so it's no use even trying. If we want to have any chance of matching what China is already doing (let alone beating it), we're going to have to invest an absolute fortune in automation and streamlining: reduce the number of unique products, reduce the part count, reduce the number of vendors, reduce the distance to vendors, and automate everything you can reasonably automate.

Make it capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive and we might be able to keep up.
by rich_sasha | 2025-10-13 18:24:02+00:00
I see this narrative everywhere: that drones are inherently, and always, much cheaper and effective. I think it's maybe more complicated than this.

In some cases, sure, you can strip out 90% of the ability and pay 1% of the price, and that's a great tradeoff. Eliminating the human means cost savings and greater expendability - a significant consideration is losing your trainer operators and not being able to replace them.

But let's take an advanced aerial drone. Not a one-way Shahed drone but a F-35 or F-22 contender. It will still need all or most of the advanced avionics that make F-35s expensive. If this is the expensive bit, then you can't save that much by just taking the human out.

So an advanced submarine will surely still be expensive if it aims for a similar level of capability.

And if not... Sure. You can make it Nx simpler and hope it is at least Nx cheaper. But even then there's the question of how expensive it is to defeat. Ukraine is ingeniously working to defeat Russian drones at ever lower costs, as Russia tries to send ever more and more of them at lower and lower prices. It's not enough to make something cheaply - it comes down to "value" for money. If these super-simple super-cheap Chinese drones can likewise be defeated by cheap weaponry, the impact is limited.

The other thing Ukraine war demonstrates is that there are limits to what you can do with cheap drones. They are fine for harassing each other - terrorist bombings of civilian areas, disrupting oil refining etc. But apart from stunning special operations done by drones by the Ukraine side, the deep and painful strikes are still done by expensive classical rockets - ATACMS, Storm Shadow etc.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-10-13 18:24:13+00:00
It's just plain old addition. There is nothing fancy about the operation. The fancy part is training a model such that it would produce vector representations of words which had this property of conceptually making sense.

If someone says: "conceptually, what is king - man + woman". One might reasonably say "queen". This isn't some well defined math thing, just sort of a common sense thing.

Now, imagine you have a function (lets call it an "embedding model") which turns words into vectors. The function turns king into [3,2], man into [1,1], woman into [1.5, 1.5] and queen into [3.5, 2.5].

Now for king - man + woman you get [3,2] - [1,1] + [1.5,1.5] = [3.5, 2.5] and hey presto, that's the same as queen [3.5, 2.5].

Now you have to ask - how do you get a function to produce those numbers? If you look at the word2vec paper, you'll come to see they use a couple of methods to train a model and if you think about those methods and the data, you'll realize it's not entirely surprising (in retrospect) that you could end up with a function that produced vectors which had such properties. And, if at the same time you are sort of mind blown, welcome to the club. It blew Jeff Dean's big brain too.
by iscekic | 2025-10-13 18:24:51+00:00
Location: Serbia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: For the right opportunity

Technologies: Typescript, React/Next.js, Node.js, SQL, Redis, etc

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/igor-scekic/ (or via email)

Email: iscekic@protonmail.com

Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience translating complex business requirements into high-performance, scalable web applications. Expert in the TypeScript ecosystem (React/Next.js, Node.js) with a proven track record in microservices architecture, cross-platform development, and delivering robust solutions from concept to deployment.
by nibles_and_bits | 2025-10-13 18:25:16+00:00
No one in the economics profession cares.

Another contradiction by a member of the economics profession. It seems to me they care very much. By linking the prize to Alfred Nobel’s name (and to the Nobel institutions), the Riksbank ensured the prize would immediately carry great symbolic prestige. The Nobel brand was already well established internationally, so adopting the name helped the economics prize gain recognition, gravitas, and legitimacy.
by fsflover | 2025-10-13 18:25:53+00:00
> He uses software and hardware that doesn’t have the qualities that most people want.

This is true, and by design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45025116

> Now give your relatives FDroid over their iPhones and Android devices and see which one they would prefer. Give them an M series MacBook Air that runs quiet and cool with a battery life of 15+ hours.

Supporting freedom requires some compromises. Any improvement in quality of life for the people can only come with huge efforts. Some people aren't able to spend these efforts due to the personal problems. It doesn't mean they don't care.
by fair_enough | 2025-10-13 18:26:27+00:00
I still cannot believe the Geneva Conventions allowed this. This should have ended with John Kerry and Jen Psaki in a Swiss prison for at least 10 years, if not Barack Obama himself. We managed to convict accused war criminals with a lot less evidence in the Nuremburg trials. FOR EMPHASIS: I'm not comparing the severity of the crimes, I'm comparing the evidentiary basis for securing convictions.

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -Henry Kissinger
by moritz | 2025-10-13 18:26:30+00:00
And the story of how this came to be is absolutely wild. See

Mirowski, Philip. 2020. “The Neoliberal Ersatz Nobel Prize”. Pp. 219-254 in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski. Verso. Fulltext: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215796/1/Full-text-b...
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-13 18:26:51+00:00
Just to clarify, that means that by default every process of the same user can access the variables. But it doesn't really matter because by default every process of the same user can read any secret directly from the target process anyway, right?

And that the right thing to do if you want to harden your system is to disallow ptrace-read, and not bother changing software that uses environment variables?

Because I think most people that just try will be able to read the variables of any process on their computer.
by worik | 2025-10-13 18:26:56+00:00
>> - You're basically at risk of your Jeep going limp

This has happened to me twice with a Nissan Leaf. I paid money to get a read out from the computer system, and there were no timestamps on the screens of data.

Modern cars "computers on wheels" are dreadful.

Is it possible to disconnect the power from the radios used for "over the air" nonsense? Then at least they would be stable.
by nerdsniper | 2025-10-13 18:26:58+00:00
No I meant there are individual shops inside the bazaars that are still going under the same brand name for hundreds of years. The El-Fishawy Cafe inside Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar has been operating under the same name since the 1700's[0]. Bakdash ice cream parlor inside Damacus' Al-Hamidiyah Souq was established in 1895.

For me, walking through an old Souq gives me a similar feeling of awe / mortality / insignificance as viewing a cathedral or looking from the Colorado ranch land up to the Rocky Mountains.

Also some cathedrals have remained "Catholic" since their raising, but there are a lot that have changed from Christian to Islamic to Protestant ... both the cathedral and the bazaar's physical buildings are still present from the same era and both are used for their original purpose (marketplace or worship). And both have delibly shaped their regions by being engines of culture, innovation, and power.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El-Fishawy_Café

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakdash_(ice_cream_parlor)
by dang | 2025-10-13 18:27:01+00:00
No doubt it could be read that way, but this is where the following site guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) is helpful: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Clearly there are stronger plausible interpretations of the GP. Following that guideline tends to prevent getting caught in snags like this little subthread, making discussion more enjoyable for everyone.

(I don't mean this as a criticism! it's just a nice case to comment on because it's particularly clear.)
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-13 18:27:18+00:00
And you are completely ignoring viruses, ransomware, keyloggers, the 50 toolbars etc that has been the staple of Windows and before that DOS for over 40 years.

Scam apps are rife in the iOS App Store. But what they can’t do easily install viruses that affect anything out of its sandbox, keyloggers, etc
by dj_mc_merlin | 2025-10-13 18:27:55+00:00
> So I guess the takeaway is: if elections are so close that a tiny amount of voters sway them, the problem of polarization is already pretty extensive enough that AI probably isn’t going to make it much worse than it already is.

To rephrase: things are so bad they can't get worse. But the beauty of life is that they always can!
by pllbnk | 2025-10-13 18:28:17+00:00
> We are just putting layer upon layer of complexity instead of simplifying.

It really irks me that the direction every player seems to be going to is to layer LLMs on top of each other with the goal of saving money on inference while still making the users believe that they are returning high quality results.

Instead of discovering some radical new ways of improving the algorithms they are only marginally improving existing architectures and even that is debatable.
by api | 2025-10-13 18:28:17+00:00
> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.

I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.

I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.

Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
by mikeyouse | 2025-10-13 18:28:19+00:00
It’s more of an opportunity cost issue than anything else. That $15B nuke plant will need to sell power at $0.15 wholesale or some such figure to break even. You need to give them $15B today for the promise of power generation revenue in 10+ years — or you could spend $1.5B/year building all sorts of other generation and earn commiserate revenue within months after groundbreaking.

New nuke power is something like 5x more expensive than wind or solar — which buys a lot of storage. Existing nuke power is ~about the same cost as renewables so it’s obvious we should keep them running but the case for building new ones is really hard to make.
by Narushia | 2025-10-13 18:28:45+00:00
> Any good solutions for passing secrets around that don't involve environment variables or regular plain text files?

Honestly, my answer is still systemd-creds. It's easy to use and avoids the problem that plain environment variables have. It's a few years old by now, should be available on popular distros. Although credential support for user-level systemd services was added just a few weeks ago.

A TL;DR example of systemd-creds for anyone reading this:

# Run the initial setup systemd-creds setup # This dir should have permissions set to 700 (rwx------). credstore_dir=/etc/credstore.encrypted # For user-level services: # credstore_dir="$HOME/.config/credstore.encrypted" # Set the secret. secret=$(systemd-ask-password -n) # Encrypt the secret. # For user-level services, add `--user --uid uidhere`. # A TPM2 chip is used for encryption by default if available. echo "$secret" | systemd-creds encrypt \ --name mypw - "$credstore_dir/mypw.cred" chmod 600 "$credstore_dir/mypw.cred"

You can now configure your unit file, e.g.:

[Service] LoadCredentialEncrypted=mypw:/etc/credstore.encrypted/mypw.cred

The process you start in the service will then be able to read the decrypted credential from the ephemeral file `$CREDENTIALS_DIR/mypw`. The environment variable is set automatically by systemd. You can also use the command `systemd-creds cat mypw` to get the value in a shell script.

At least systemd v250 is required for this. v258 for user-level service support.
by ta988 | 2025-10-13 18:28:52+00:00
Depends... do you need wifi, screen and others always on? can you wake some on a timer? on user interaction? on interrupts?

https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp32-sleep-modes-power-cons...

You can use those sleep modes in micropython as well

https://randomnerdtutorials.com/micropython-esp32-deep-sleep...
by mfdupuis | 2025-10-13 18:29:02+00:00
Observability is a good guess, but I'd venture to guess that the conversations going on internally are about how to capture value across the entire stack. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear about them acquiring either a database/warehouse company and/or an analytics solution. Or vice versa, them getting acquired by a bigger player that wants to offer more connectors and data modeling functionality.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-10-13 18:29:22+00:00
You've described the classic Unix security model, with minor improvements. While decent for the time it is showing its age. Specifically the difficulty in adapting to cheap, ubiquitous computing which it wasn't designed for.

If you need to keep secrets from other processes—don't run them under the same user account. Or access them remotely, although that brings other tradeoffs and difficulties.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-13 18:29:36+00:00
> Given the state of the software industry, it's honestly more surprising that this doesn't happen more often.

It probably does. We just don't notice.

> Our industry is a complete joke, and somehow we've been given responsibility over people's lives.

Amen to that. kqr made some choice comments the other day in that thread about the airliner that came to within a hair of crashing due to running out of fuel. Thinking about risk is not a skill that we're born with and it is always sobering to read the 'risks digest' for a bit and to see how thin the ice really is.
by adriand | 2025-10-13 18:29:40+00:00
> I guess I just view bad information as a constant. Like bad actors in cybersecurity, for example. So I mean yeah... it's too bad. But not a surprise and not really a variable you can control for.

Ban bots from social media and all other speech platforms. We agree that people ought to have freedom of speech. Why should robots be given that right? If you want to express an opinion, express it. If you want to deploy millions of bots to impersonate human beings and distort the public square, you shouldn’t be able to.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-13 18:30:03+00:00
I understand the point of contention should be that but sadly when we dig into these discussions it often becomes clear that’s not what it is actually about. So frankly, I won’t sit here and stand for this user saying these women aren’t women.

They can talk about physical advantages/fairness in sports in good faith without erasing their identities and saying “it’s a fact that biology says they’re not women,” which is wrong. That’s just ignorance and/or transphobia, not a healthy discussion about advantages in competition.

“Men in women’s sports” is often convenient cover for many people to participate in erasure without copping to the fact that they’re just uncomfortable with trans people simply existing (or worse). Most of them, especially men with media reach/political clout constantly talking about it, are not passionate about women’s sports in the slightest and couldn’t care less if the playing field was level. So we can’t sit here and pretend that’s what this discussion is really about.

It’s very similar to when incels said “it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” during gamergate. Yeah, some people care about that legitimately, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had, but that wasn’t what the movement was actually about in any real sense. It just gave them a palatable reason to project to more reasonable people.
by great_wubwub | 2025-10-13 18:30:23+00:00
I've been playing around with this over the years and this is what I put in my .rgrc:

--smart-case --no-messages --hidden --ignore-vcs

and then point to it with

.zshenv 3:export RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/.rgrc"

Not perfect and sometimes I reach for good old fashioned escaped \grep but most of the time it's fine.