MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-08 11:54:58+00:00
tldr: Courses are fundamentally for young adults that can't manage their own time..

My anecdotal experience was that courses are sort of idiotic at the PhD level. The course work is incredibly distracting from your research and projects. It's really hard to get into a flow state with your work when you have to do a bunch of homework. My productivity during the semesters I did course work was an order of magnitude lower.

The lectures are interesting and sort of useful.. but they're not a good use of time. At the PhD level you should be comfortable enough to just pick up some textbooks, read them on your own time, do some problem sets and learn on your own. B/c that's essentially what the professors are doing to prepare the course material in the first place..

Your advisor should just assign you some reading or something. It should be enough

Seminar style courses where you intensively interact with a professor are maybe an exception.. Maybe..
by earthnail | 2025-10-08 11:55:11+00:00
Free Palestine. There, I said it. Although I think it's a rather dumb slogan, and doesn't even remotely do the situation justice.

Seriously though, the notion that free speech is impaired in Germany is completely ridiculous and just a massive hoax. Compare this with the situation in the USA where the same people - like Vance who brazenly attacked Germany for an alleged lack of free speech - were super quick to demand a cancellation of Kimmel, because "you can't say that!"

We have laws against hate speech, and they may not be perfect, but they have a reason - we simply don't want to tolerate something like the Nazis shouting "burn the jews" in the name of free speech. Calling for violence does not have to be protected by speaking your mind. That's completely silly.

But the idea that Germany is anything but a completely free country is ridiculous. Some of the shit that people say (AfD, BSW) drives me nuts, but well, it's a free country.
by teekert | 2025-10-08 11:55:59+00:00
It's not acceptable indeed, and it highlights a very important distinction between MIT/BSD-like licenses and the GPL: GPL license are about USER freedoms. The user of your software. BSD/MIT are more about company/creator freedom.

If you use GPL software, it comes with rights: You can request and inspect the source code. It also comes with obligations: You must share any changes you make so that all downstream users know what they'll get.

TiVo may not have violated GPLv2, they certainly violated its spirit with a workaround. And thus GPLv3 was born, indeed.

TiVo could have done what they wanted using BSD, but they opted for Linux, took the benefits, didn't give anything.

Of course, one can find this acceptable, Linus Torvalds seem to think it is acceptable.
Show HN: I built a way to turn concern about AI risk into collective action
by pllu | 2025-10-08 11:56:56+00:00
Powerful market and geopolitical forces are driving AI labs in a race towards smarter-than-human intelligence. We're enjoying the benefits of the progress so far, but we're fast approaching a point where AI becomes so capable and widely deployed that it could trigger massive societal disruption or even existential threats. Many of us are deeply concerned but feel powerless to act against the industry momentum.

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Listed organisations include MIRI, Pause AI, Alignment Research Center, Doom Debates, and others working on reducing or raising awareness of large-scale AI risks.

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Curious to hear what HN thinks about the approach.
by whizzter | 2025-10-08 11:57:41+00:00
Read up more on the COLA paper and funnily enough inspired by LSM-tree's I implemented something alike "basic-cola" a few months back (the thing I mentioned for size-coding), add to end of array, hierarchically re-sort for each of the bits of the new size that turns 0 from bottom up (divisible by 2, sort last 2, divisible by 4, sort last 4 and so on) and search with O((log2(n))^2) complexity.

B-tree fill factors are a parameter that can be tuned to avoid extra splits depending on your insertion patterns, an in-memory variant doesn't need to be tuned like a disk-based variation.

Also nothing preventing the "bottom" of an LSM variation to be a dense B-tree like structure that just gets less updates.

The COLA paper also never mentions threading, an in-memory B-tree should scale better with size if there is multi-threading while I don't see an easy way to avoid big locks with COLA, maybe why the COLA paper was from 2000 and we haven't seen much additional development on it? (LSM-tree's work beautifully of course but then you basically have the double-space issue like with semi-space garbage collectors).

In the end, what you choose is dependent on your application and patterns, COLA is a clever structure that probably shines in some scenarios.

Like my scenario was a mostly heavy on consecutive insertions as well as lookups of potentially arbitrary compound keys, perfect for cola like since those are cheap.
by orwin | 2025-10-08 11:57:45+00:00
Yes, I wasn't clear enough. The expansion of meaning 'targeting civilian infrastructure' is done, it's already in the current comprehension of the word, everywhere, and now terrorism is less bad because of it.

The US (and UK I think) tried to extend it to add 'surprise attack on an occupying force', and that didn't work, but if it did, the negative connotation of the word would lessen a lot faster, and you'd see it used as a positive already ('my little terror' could easily become 'my little terrorist' if the negative meaning is dissolved enough).

I agree on everything you say, I wanted to explain my point better.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-08 11:58:05+00:00
What I mean is that (at least in my experience) people are not so commonly writing serious numeric applications in Rust as Python extensions because the numeric libraries on which you'd typically write in a compiled language are not as well developed and are in themselves often thin wrappers over C/C++ code at the moment. When you write an extension library you typically want all the 'slow' stuff to be done in a layer below the interpreted language for performance reasons.

So if you wanted to write a Python Physics library that included, say, time integration with an implicit solver like those SUNDIALS provides (and SUNDIALS is like the gold standard in this area), you have less well used options for the time integration part if you write the extension in Rust as if you do in C/C++. Or you're using the same library anyway.
by nerdjon | 2025-10-08 11:58:08+00:00
I have to wonder how much to 3 new NAS systems from Ubiquiti played into this. They seem pretty targeted at Synology at a great price. I have the original UNAS pro and it has been fantastic.

Sure I can't run apps on it, but how much do people really run apps on their synology vs just use it as a basic NAS to begin with? I never found any of the apps really all that great to begin with. The only one I kinda liked was synology sync but really don't need something like that with freesync.
by 542354234235 | 2025-10-08 12:00:33+00:00
But humans can actually make conscious choices beyond their base animal pressures. We use prophylactics even though those go against our animal pressure to procreate. We help strangers even if it won't improve our own situation and without any expectation of future reciprocation. We have to eat and sleep to live, we don't have to have children.

We also have cultural pressures, which can shape individual behavior. We could have a culture where the default is not to have kids, but that you should not have kids unless you are stable and secure enough to have then and are prepared to invest sufficiently in raising them.
by numpad0 | 2025-10-08 12:00:48+00:00
Is this in response to plummeting sales or is this in response to SMR phaseout? IIRC, this began from WD sneaking in DM-SMR drives into WD Red Pro products used for NAS and RAID use cases that can't possibly work with SMRs. I was looking through HDDs and noticed that there aren't many SMR drives at mainstream price zone(which is great).

So who's the one holding the towel? Is it Synology, or could it be WD/Seagate?
by piva00 | 2025-10-08 12:00:59+00:00
Politico.eu is owned by Axel Springer, the same Axel Springer SE which received US$ 7m from the CIA back in the early 2000s [0].

It's the closest to a Fox News-esque entity in Western Europe, I believe. They also own BILD, a tabloid, and Die Welt, a newspaper that constantly publishes climate-skeptic articles, and also infamously published an op-ed by Musk supporting the AfD.

[0] https://taz.de/cia-und-presse/!734289/
by ryukoposting | 2025-10-08 12:01:18+00:00
> If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.

Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino when I was 11.

Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO, other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that you'll need for the next step.

If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.

That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be. Can't do that with a Pi.

Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
by karel-3d | 2025-10-08 12:01:40+00:00
My approach is to just tune out whenever I hear about this stuff.

I don't want it, I don't use it, I carry on as if it never existed, and they still pay me a lot.

If I really need to use agents some day I will bite the bullet, but, not today.

Literally all I use LLMs for is to ask ChatGPT about some dumb thing or two instead of asking StackOverflow as I did 5 years ago. Works for me.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-08 12:02:22+00:00
>That would just mean that it wouldn't be very useful to anybody because the airwaves will be full of people trying to shout over each other.

Nobody is using it now. Even if it becomes anarchy, you're still limited by transmit power. Typically 120v plug is only going to reach your city.

From the article, electric cars interfere a big amount.

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/spectrum-management-telecom...
by radarsat1 | 2025-10-08 12:02:38+00:00
> how to do it

If you've ever lead a team, you know how much more valuable people are if they don't need to be told how to do things. Even more if they don't need to be told what to do! But having to explain in detail the "how".. can be really a big time sink and only worth it if you are training someone to level up.
by hdersch | 2025-10-08 12:02:57+00:00
Atmospheric refraction is due to the vertical gradients of atmospheric pressure, temperature, and composition of the atmosphere, all of which are usually not precisely known, and which vary with time, so one gets larger lines of sights at certain times. For my application I used the standard formulas for astronomical refraction (-> many weblinks) with constant medium gradients. If I recall correctly this results in ~100m height correction for features in 100km distance and ~400m in 200km distance (features appear higher than without atmospheric refraction). For your application it would make sense to use two extreme values for the gradients to get maximum and minimum, as you suggested.
by davydm | 2025-10-08 12:04:05+00:00
yeah, and the bigger problem (and why regulation is necessary for other dangerous fads) is that PEOPLE ARE STUPID and BELIEVE EVERYTHING THEY ARE TOLD. So AI grifter techbros come along and tell people about how "human" these things are, how "accurate" they are, how much they're supposed to be able to do, and we have morons like the google chap who quit because he thought an LLM was sentient (how tf do you get a job at google and still be that thick?). So the "average joe" is fire-hosed with messaging that is at the very least, inaccurate, and, if we're being hones - a LIE.

It's your "average joe" users who are turning to "ai companions" when they feel depressed and want to kill themselves, because they are under the impression that it's an understanding, sentient entity. If people all thought of LLMs as "bags of words" (ie, understand that they're just token predictors with ZERO understanding of anything), perhaps that would change.

But we can't rely on the grifters to be honest - they'd lose all that yummy yummy cash! - so I guess we need regulation, just like we do for driving cars or taking medications, or any other item from a myriad I could choose from.
by rwmj | 2025-10-08 12:04:15+00:00
I can't find the reference now unfortunately, but I read it was about 50:50, so half is the data center land / building / cooling / power generation, and half is in the GPUs themselves.

This is notably very different from the dot-com build out of dark fibre, where digging the holes cost the vast majority of the money, and the fibres and network equipment cost very little in comparison.
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-10-08 12:04:35+00:00
Lot of probably's and maybes moving at the speed of government in your comment, look how many decades this has been in the works.

Circumventing the Great Firewall in China is against the rules, comes with some risk for vpn operators and users, yet we know it happens regularly.

Buying and selling drugs online is illegal, yet there's always a Silk Road or Empire Market with enough buyers and sellers to make the risk worth it. We already have "letter control" for drugs, but it doesn't stop me from buying a QP of weed and a federal employee delivering it conveniently to my house.

Good luck outlawing the parts and software, maybe they'll get to them when they finally gather up all the fentanyl.

Even if chat control doesn't happen, the social internet is fucked. Just look at Quora for a preview.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-08 12:04:49+00:00
Synology was in the back of my head for years as a straightforward home server product, but emphasis on "years". The other day I saw a competitor that had a hand grenade sized alternative, a cooling with 4 or 8 1 TB M2 SSDs arranged around it. And I thought, why the fuck is Synology still top of mind?

I suppose they have plenty of corporate customers still, companies that are too small for their own proper servers (self managed or hosted) but who do want some central storage and more importantly the tech support that comes with it. But those would just as likely go to Dell for all their requirements.
by Kzozjj | 2025-10-08 12:04:56+00:00
There was an article on here not too long ago - I can’t find it now - where the authors discussed how they leaned full in on it and were submitting 20k+ line PRs to open source projects in languages they were not very familiar with.

However, they mentioned you had to let go of reviewing every line of every PR. I read that and was fine with holding off on full vibe coding for now. Nobody intelligent would pay for that and no competent developer would operate like that.

I have a couple coworkers big on it. The lesser skilled ones are miserable to work with. I’ve kept my same code review process but number of comments left has at least 5x’d (not just from me, either). And I’m not catching everything - I get fatigued and call it done. Duplicated logic, missed edge cases, arbitrary patterns and conventions, etc. The high skilled ones less so, but I still don’t look forward to reviewing their PRs anymore. Too much work on my end.

There are many devs who are more focused on results than being correct. These are the ones I’ve seen most drawn to LLMs/agents. There’s a place for these devs, but having worked on an aging startups codebase, I hope there aren’t too many.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-08 12:05:35+00:00
This is why knowing what technical terms mean matters.

What they’re saying is: the FIDO spec allows website operators to specify which passkey implementations they trust for authentication to their site. If your passkey implementation does not follow the spec around how it secures secrets and validates user auth flows, you risk that some sites will not trust your software as a viable passkey option.

As a comparison: imagine I made an HTTP client called “wurl”, and it was like curl but when users used it with authenticated requests, it emitted their credentials in plaintext logs on their laptop. Site operators could say “I’m gonna block requests where the user agent is wurl, because we don’t want our users to think they’re making secure requests and not catch this credential mishandling”.

No free software principles have been broken here: site operators (relying parties) are free to determine which auth implementations they are willing to interact with. Users are free to stop using sites that block auth implementations they think shouldn’t be blocked. No primitive of free software demands that site operators interoperate with something just because it’s a FOSS client.
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-08 12:05:42+00:00
It is true that the dems have not been good on the topic of mass surveillance. Obama leveraged and expanded what Bush had built, the Obama DoJ defended mass surveillance in court, and Biden didn't do anything to change this direction. The dems found this stuff to be too useful and appealing to resist and helped build the machine that now supports Trump's fascism.

But it is also correct to say that Trump is a fascist and that Biden wasn't one.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-10-08 12:06:00+00:00
I think I'm heading to the place were you already are. I gave access to phones to my kids, and all the apps that monitor their time fail, when there is no will in them to stop. Also doing any task with the phone makes them navigate away (to instant messaging with their colleagues etc)

But on the other hand - the world is digital now. I have no idea how to make them learn good habits on finding things on the internet while not falling to the infinite well of doomscrolling etc.
by piva00 | 2025-10-08 12:06:32+00:00
You mean with the licencing of the EUV tech? If push comes to shove, to the point where the USA tries to strangle ASML, the EU could create pathways to not recognise the licence agreement anymore, and remove copyright protections from it.

All the engineering part of that technology is in European hands, the royalties to EUV LLC are based on mutually beneficial arrangements, if it's weaponised all gloves are off.
by 3D30497420 | 2025-10-08 12:07:06+00:00
This reads like a press release.

Here's an article that appears to provide a bit more perspective: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/txse-says-sec-appro...

Also, this is a fun nugget from the Reuters article about this new exchange providing competition to NYSE and NASDAQ:

> But those rivals are not sitting idly by. On March 31, the NYSE opened its own Texas outpost, disclosing that Trump Media & Technology would be the first company to list there.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-10-08 12:07:09+00:00
I know a million people have replied to you, and while I don't want to be jumping on the dog pile, I just want to say that along with PlatformIO (which automates the setup of ESPIDF and/or Arduino for the ESP, (and it also does it for a ton of other micros)) and Expressif having their own Arduino Core for their chips with integrates into Arduino's IDE, Expressif have also released their own extensions for VSCode and Eclipse that greatly aid the end user in getting ESPIDF setup and configured.)

You no longer have to break your back going from zero to blinking an LED. I remember when I first got into espressif chips and it was a right pita back then. But no more!

Personally I'm a fan of PlatformIO because its not just because of the wide selection of platforms it supports and that it uses VSCode which is my IDE of choice.
by foft | 2025-10-08 12:07:11+00:00
It was a strange decision to limit the drives. I can see they might want to accredit drives which would give a 'Synology Approved Experience', though outright only support their own was bizarre. I'm very pleased they are reversing this. Aside: Now we just need Apple to do the same and resume support for industry standard expandable memory and storage.

From my perspective it lined up exactly with when I was looking to upgrade. I decided to bite the bullet and go with Duplicati, storing to a European based S3 service. I decided against US cloud providers since the US is looking too politically unstable to put anything important there. It was easy to set up and so far is running well.
by chrisldgk | 2025-10-08 12:07:28+00:00
To add to this, when I went to school for design a long time ago, our typography teacher basically told us to never use underlines if we can use italics instead. It tends to mess with the readability of a paragraph and shifts the visual center of gravity downward, making text more difficult to parse. I assume that’s also why italics and underline seem to be used interchangeably from time to time, since they generally achieve the same goal of emphasizing text in the same semantic manner.
by komali2 | 2025-10-08 12:07:37+00:00
I'm fascinated by ultra high impact, nonviolent interventions by individuals, such as this.

My favorite example was when a few people made Twitter accounts masquerading as large companies, bought a verified stamp, and then issued a couple tweets that single handedly wiped billions off the companies' stock prices.

If anyone else knows of similar interventions, I would love to learn of them. It makes me think about how individuals can force multiply their impact, and whether there's methods for personal empowerment to be learned from these examples.