MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codr7 | 2025-10-11 15:10:12+00:00
In C, direct memory control is the top feature, which means you can assume anyone who uses your code is going to want to control memory through the process. This means not allocating from wherever and returning blobs of memory, which means designing different APIs, which is part of the reason why learning C well takes so long.

I started writing sort of a style guide to C a while ago, which attempts to transfer ideas like this one more by example:

https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c
by hylaride | 2025-10-11 15:10:27+00:00
If you live in a dense area with lots of APs and regularly get performance issues, power line networking will provide excellent ~400Mbps connections that are more than adequate for things like video calls unless your power cables are ancient or under-spec'd (some older houses can sometimes have lower gauge cables that may not perform as well and I imagine some knob and tube setups are not ideal for data transfer, either).

If you have newer clients that support it, Wifi 6E/7/802.11ax (or whatever it's called) uses the 6GHz spectrum that isn't as heavily used (yet). I've had good success with it in my multi-unit apartment condo (feels as clean as 5GHz did ~2010). Some higher end APs can also use multi-antenna beams that can help, too.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-11 15:10:44+00:00
Also the shacks weren’t really particularly shabby or anything, they were just more like well-enough-constructed single family homes.

Old websites before scripting became popular were pretty much solid in that boring-tech way. Hardware and networks were not as reliable, but the sites themselves could be fine via simplicity.

Modern overdesigned sites are sort of like modern apartment buildings: shitty build quality under fake plastic marble and wood.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-11 15:11:01+00:00
Until a few months ago, I was still working in (a branch of) the VR/XR space. The entire industry held its breath for the Vision Pro's entire life and when it failed the industry collapsed. All our competitors went out of business and then we couldn't find a single buyer anywhere.

I think that all US based startups working on VR haptic controllers have failed. One or two are still technically extant, but the game is well and truly over. And nothing of value was lost /j
by tcdent | 2025-10-11 15:11:12+00:00
This style of prompting, where you set up a dire scenario in order to try to evoke some "emotional" response from the agent, is already dated. At some point, putting words like IMPORTANT in all uppercase had some measurable impact, but at the present time, models just follow instructions.

Save yourself the experience of having to write and maintain prompts like this.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-10-11 15:11:27+00:00
Didn’t come up in my ethics course either. Unless you actually know someone with an accessibility issue, it’s unlikely you have encountered it or recognized it if you did.

For example: You don’t realize how absolutely abysmal voice control is for computers until you have to use it.

There are so many assumptions about the world that causes things like neurodivergence to become a disability instead of a difference.
by evolve2k | 2025-10-11 15:13:49+00:00
From the article:

“Following these budget adjustments, Mr. Arko’s consultancy, which had been receiving approximately $50,000 per year for providing the secondary on-call service, submitted a proposal offering to provide secondary on-call services at no cost in exchange for access to production HTTP access logs, containing IP addresses and other personally identifiable information (PII).”
by f_devd | 2025-10-11 15:14:02+00:00
You are probably right, although it's not similar to a GAN at all, it is significantly more like diffusion (although maybe not latent, the main reason I assumed so is because the "features" are passed-through but these can just be the image).

The ahead-of-time sampling doesn't make much sense to me mechanically, and isn't really mentioned much. But I will hold my judgement for future versions since the FID performance of this first iteration is still not that great.
by drob518 | 2025-10-11 15:14:15+00:00
Git was really useful because it allowed decentralization but didn’t require it like CVS or SVN. It catered to the “just clone the repo and create a new branch when you hop on the airline and push updates to origin when you land” model. But it’s really unusual that people really want a hugely distributed model. Typically, people want to go to The Blessed Repo and get The Blessed Code. For example, Linus’s got kernel tree is more important than everyone else’s clone.
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-11 15:14:59+00:00
That's the official stance, but if it really mattered they'd pay.

And there's of course paths to pay without losing face, like hiring a negociator or a recovery firm that acts like a bridge for the money[0]. We came to accept that companies don't act ethically and will only maximize profit, yet the narrative is still stuck on that weird assumption they care about the future of society regarding ransomware.

[0] https://zendata.security/2025/07/08/ransomware-negotiator-sc...
by bigyabai | 2025-10-11 15:15:20+00:00
It's better off if I let Digital Foundry take it from here: https://youtu.be/BDvf1gsMgmY

TL:DW - it's not quite the full-fat CNN model but it's also not a uselessly pared-back upscaler. Seems to handle antialiasing and simple upscale well at super low TDPs (<10w).
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-11 15:16:26+00:00
it does not negate that it has matured in to a digital gold.

Even as "digital gold", Bitcoin is inferior to the real thing in many ways.

For investment purposes, real gold has been fully "digitized" as well.

You can easily buy, hold and sell it electronically without ever taking physical delivery. And typically with better security and lower overall transaction fees than with Bitcoin. For example, see "GLD".

And real gold does have some practical utility --- beyond just hope for more, bigger suckers to drive the price up.

Let's face the facts; outside of criminal activity, Bitcoin is mostly a pure sucker play. And the typical sucker is either a gambler or someone with limited grasp of existing financial instruments and alternatives. This is not to suggest that there aren't large numbers of these people out there.
by zimmund | 2025-10-11 15:17:02+00:00
> As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look

No, people are used to an UI language, which in the case of iOS is quite consistent across applications. You expect certain things to work (e.g. flicking in from the left edge means "go back"). There are platform-specific patterns and I'd rather have the app behave accordingly rather than being consistent with other OS' version. The real 0.1% here are probably the users of your app with active devices in both Android and iOS!
by gdulli | 2025-10-11 15:17:03+00:00
It's also possible to put in enough hours of real coding to get to the point where coding really isn't that hard anymore, at least not hard enough to justify switching from those stable/solid fundamental skills to a constantly revolving ecosystem of ephemeral tools, models, model versions, best practices, lessons from trial and error, etc. Then you could bypass all of this distraction.

Admittedly that stance is easiest to take if you were old enough, experienced enough already by the time this era hit.
by DaveZale | 2025-10-11 15:17:25+00:00
I am compiling a website on neocites.org ... for about two months now, and I won't be complete for another year. It's basically a place for photos, maps and descriptions of a local community xeriscape garden with about 400 specimens.

Others will take photos and videos of the place throughout the year, and post to social media, where they instantly get a couple dozen thumbs up, and gloat about it. That is not my intention. I want a coffee table book.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-11 15:17:28+00:00
It's neither, your outcomes are poorer because access is not uniform. If you can afford it, US healthcare is the best in the world, but if you can't you basically don't get it (or at least, you don't get it until the problems are bad enough it's an emergency and you get saddled with life-crushing debt for the bare minimum to stabilise you from the ER)
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 15:17:42+00:00
It was common to make tables and use them to assemble a bitmap, where each cell had zero border/margin/padding and an exact size, and contained a "slice" of the image. Web authoring tools (and Photoshop) even had explicit support for generating this sort of thing, as I recall. This was I guess simpler to automate than defining clickable regions of a single image, and it allowed for the individual pieces of the image to be requested in parallel on slow connections (adding another dimension of progressive loading).
by simpaticoder | 2025-10-11 15:17:59+00:00
I disagree. The primary threat model for unencrypted http connections is a MITM attack. A middle box (a proxy or router) modifies the response payload to inject malicious content or modify the content. For an ordinary blog or personal website an attacker can gain compute, violate privacy, acquire a (minor) DDOS source, on the blogs users by injecting a script.

Another type of attack would modify the content of the site to suit the attackers purpose - either to hurt the author and/or their message. Consider the damage an attacker can do if they injected CSAM onto a person's blog. The victim's life would be ruined long before the wheels of justice turned (if they turn at all). The one mitigating factor is that you'd need to have reliable control over a relatively stable middle-box to execute this attack, but that's quite feasible. Last but not least don't underestimate the way software grows. Sooner or later someone is going to implement HTTP basic authentication over plain HTTP and, needless to say, that's a bad idea.

Look, I don't like it either. I remember when you could telnet into a server and interact with it. That was good for pedagogy and building a mental model of the protocol. But we have to deal with how things are, not how we want them to be.
by bdcravens | 2025-10-11 15:19:30+00:00
The first language I used professionally, in the late 90s, was Allaire ColdFusion. I worked for a small regional ISP, doing tech support, basic sysops, and some web development (we used FrontPage, hah!). We installed ColdFusion on our server, and since no one else was really taking initiative, I took home the books that came with, as well as the disk, and just devoured the information, and in roughly a week, I "learned" the language.
by kcplate | 2025-10-11 15:19:52+00:00
> https://isportlandburning.com/

If the goal is to show how the government is exaggerating or lying why not set up webcams around federal facilities in Portland?

Seems to me that this is just the other side of the same coin. If the government is going to be dishonest and just point to where the “fires” are and pretend like there is no place that isn’t under siege…it’s just as dishonest to pretend like there are not places in Portland that are problematic.
by djoldman | 2025-10-11 15:20:10+00:00
> As humans, we care about forming true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. We want to know, understand, get things right. We want to avoid cognitive error and ignorance. These are our twin epistemic aims.

Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.

In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.
by seagnson | 2025-10-11 15:20:27+00:00
Thank you for your kind words, and especially for noticing my dedication to the coin designs on coin-flip.vip. I have always strived to infuse culture and history into each coin's imagery, aiming to offer users more than just a simple coin toss—but an experience where they can truly feel the richness of cultural and historical heritage. That is exactly what I set out to achieve.
by mallowdram | 2025-10-11 15:20:32+00:00
Article neglects that the WTC defied NYFD building codes on egress. If the code was applied as existing in 1966, it would require 8 or 9 fireproof staircases. Instead Rockefeller asked for and got a pass and the building instead had three staircases embedded in six layers of drywall, which is far else than the then standard fireproofing (brick encased). Not only that, they had non-standard transit corridors that wove egress routes around the two sky lobbies.
by hearsathought | 2025-10-11 15:20:44+00:00
> We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on.

Who is we? I nor anyone I know never lived in such a world. Maybe there was a time when I was naive and brainwashed enough to believe we lived in such a world. But such a world never really existed.

> Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative.

It's always been that way. The oldest newspaper in the US ( NY Post ) was created by Alexander Hamilton to push his political agenda. Nothing has changed since. Newspapers exist to push the narrative of the elites who control them.

> Those two worlds are not equivalent.

Agreed. One of those world is a fantasy and the other is reality.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-11 15:20:44+00:00
Anyone with an undergraduate CS background should be able to handle Dan Boneh's course:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto

Although there are continuums of teaching delivery from muddled to clear explanations of concepts, there are no student shortcuts to escape the irreducible mental exertion to acquire familiarity towards mastery. Uncurious people shouldn't be in the field (no pun intended).
by mojuba | 2025-10-11 15:20:59+00:00
Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if you want to continue the analogy.
by MountainTheme12 | 2025-10-11 15:21:04+00:00
It's not just popularity, Epic has been trying really hard to solve it in Unreal Engine.

The issue is that, because of monolithic pipelines, you have to provide the exact state the shaders will be used in. There's a lot of that, and a large part of it depends on user authored content, which makes it really hard to figure out in advance.

It's a fundamental design mistake in D3D12/Vulkan that is slowly being corrected, but it will take some time (and even more for game engines to catch up).
by toast0 | 2025-10-11 15:21:34+00:00
I can send you some of my DVDs that look like trash now. Of course, that's less of a codec problem and more of a bandwidth/encoder/mastering problem; plenty of DVDs look fine (if a little undetailed) on a larger screen.

I do wish ATSC1 would adopt a newer codec (and maybe they will), most of the broadcasters cram too many subchannels in their 20mbps and a better codec would help for a while. ATSC3 has a better video codec and more efficient physical encoding, but it also DRM and a new proprietary audio codec, so it's not helpful for me.
by gdubs | 2025-10-11 15:21:43+00:00
My parents worked and had most of their friends in Manhattan when I was a little kid — this was back in the 1980s. I have vivid memories to this day of passing the World Trade Center and being completely overwhelmed by the scale of it.

Most high rises taper, but these towers just went straight up as rectangles. And the effect was almost dizzying. They were just so tall.

I used to love drawing the NYC skyline as a kid — such an iconic thing. New York used to be much grittier, but I loved the energy of it as a kid. Was an incredible thing to experience.
by OJFord | 2025-10-11 15:21:44+00:00
Patch cables are meant for connections between equipment, e.g. in a networking cabinet. Cable for the runs between terminal points (like the cabinet's patch panel and a workstation, or your home TV, etc.) is less flexible - more shielded and I think solid core instead of multi-stranded (like twin & Earth vs. flex) - I'm not sure if it's available flat or skinny though.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-11 15:22:33+00:00
Another similar one is that we don't care for strong primes anymore and even though the standards for RSA specifically require it, it's not actually helpful at all, see https://eprint.iacr.org/2001/007

Strong primes are ones where the totient (both carmichael and euler totients) have large primes in them. This happens naturally for 2048 bit and above RSA keys in any-case, they'll statistically absolutely have primes that are larger than the bits needed to factor using elliptic curve methods (>256 bits). In general it's just not that helpful, similar to trying to require carmichael rather than Euler totient. Ok you've made the 2048 bit key 3 bits stronger, great, but let's not bother right?
by bee_rider | 2025-10-11 15:24:04+00:00
I dunno. Entertainment is sort of inherently selfish, right? It is an unproductive thing we engage in to make us happy.

I’d be somewhat interested in something like a git that generates movies, that my friends can push to.

Extremely widespread mass media fiction broadcast are sort of an aberration of the last 75 years or so. I mean, you’d have works in ancient times—the Odyssey—that are shared across a culture. But, that was still a story customize by each teller, and those sorts of stories were rare. Canon was mainly a concern of religions.

It’s just for fun, we give it far too much weight nowadays.
by circlefavshape | 2025-10-11 15:25:05+00:00
My dad is in the early stages of Alzheimer's and it's made me think of what I'll do if I find myself in the same situation

Assisted suicide sounds like a fine option until you think of its impact on your loved ones. Imagining putting my wife and kids through my deciding to die, and the process of them bringing me to the place where it happens - or imagining one of them doing the same thing - just fills me with horror
by ocrow | 2025-10-11 15:25:39+00:00
I think Alzheimer's is a particularly difficult case. Before diagnosis, many of us imagine that we wouldn't want to exist in a highly deteriorated state with no ability to care for ourselves. But as you start to decline, you still feel like yourself, just a very forgetful version of yourself. On which day do you decide that what remains of your mind isn't enough to make your available future days better than no future days?

The instinct for self preservation is strong. Knowing what will come requires foresight and clarity. You may lose the capacity for informed decision making before the point where it's clear that there's not much to live for.

Many of us lack the insight that Kahneman perhaps had that in order to take control of the end you may need to leave some good days on the table.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-11 15:26:15+00:00
Yes, duh. It's a console, resolution scaling is the #1 foremost tool in their arsenal for stabilizing the framerate. I can't think of a console game made in the past decade that doesn't "fake frames" at some part of the pipeline.

I'll also go a step further - not every machine-learning pass is frame generation. Nvidia uses AI for DLAA, a form of DLSS that works with 100% input resolution as a denoiser/antialiasing combined pass. It's absolutely excellent if your GPU can keep up with the displayed content.
by lb1lf | 2025-10-11 15:28:05+00:00
This is one of the most absurd facts there is.

Back in the eighties when CDs were introduced, they were NOK 165 a piece for a new release.

Last time I dropped by my friendly neighbourhood dealer (of music, that is), the CD rack said CDs were NOK 189.

165 1985-kroner equals nigh on 500 2025-kroner.

Incidentally, an LP back then was NOK 89, equivalent to NOK 270 today - whereas an LP today would set me back approx. NOK 399.

Good thing my employer pays me significantly better than my parents did in the eighties. I can still sustain my music habit.
by tallowen | 2025-10-11 15:28:05+00:00
> Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion?

I did some math and you're clearly right. I think I imagined that with driver-less vehicles leaving much more frequently (10s per minute) one could catch up to the capacity of a small light rail system but that's clearly not the case. I had imagined that _maybe_ it could be an approach for a lower capacity system in the future.

My math as someone who is not knowledgeable in how to get this data is as follows:

In Seattle is running 4 car trains at 8 minute headways at peak which works out to 7500 people per hour at crush load (4 cars, 250 people per car, 7.5 times per hour). This would require 125 vehicles with 5 seats leaving every minute which is clearly impossible.

Looking at Portland's MAX, it looks like they often run 2 car service with 160 passengers of capacity each with service every 15 minutes so 1280 people per hour (2 cars, 160 per car, 4 services per hour).

1280 people per hour could be served by a 5 seat vehicle leaving every ~15 seconds. This I suppose is what I had expected would happen when I tried to imagine the best case scenario for this service.
by jdpage | 2025-10-11 15:28:18+00:00
A reminder, RSA (the cryptosystem) is not a product of RSA (the security company); the cryptosystem predates the company by a decade and was also independently invented by a GCHQ researcher a few years before, but it remained classified there.

The only thing they really have in common is that the founders of RSA (the company) were the public inventors of RSA (the cryptosystem). The company didn't get into bed with the NSA until the turn of the century.
by itrummer | 2025-10-11 15:28:20+00:00
LlamaIndex relies heavily on RAG-style approaches, e.g., we're using items whose embedding vectors are close to the embedding vectors of the question (what you describe). RAG-style approaches work great if the answer depends only on a small part of the data, e.g., if the right answer can be extracted from a few top-N documents.

It's less applicable if the answer cannot be extracted from a small data subset. E.g., you want to count the number of pictures showing red cars in your database (rather than retrieving a few pictures of red cars). Or, let's say you want to tag beach holiday pictures with all the people who appear in them. That's another scenario where you cannot easily work with RAG. ThalamusDB supports such scenarios, e.g., you could use the query below in ThalamusDB:

SELECT H.pic FROM HolidayPictures H, ProfilePictures P as Tag WHERE NLFILTER(H.pic, 'this is a picture of the beach') AND NLJOIN(H.pic, P.pic, 'the same person appears in both pictures');

ThalamusDB handles scenarios where the LLM has to look at large data sets and uses a few techniques to make that more efficient. E.g., see here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08489) for the implementation of the semantic join algorithm.

A few other things to consider:

1) ThalamusDB supports SQL with semantic operators. Lay users may prefer the natural language query interfaces offered by other frameworks. But people who are familiar with SQL might prefer writing SQL-style queries for maximum precision.

2) ThalamusDB offers various ways to restrict the per-query processing overheads, e.g., time and token limits. If the limit is reached, it actually returns a partial result (e.g., lower and upper bounds for query aggregates, subsets of result rows ...). Other frameworks do not return anything useful if query processing is interrupted before it's complete.