MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2025-10-06 10:26:45+00:00
Understandable. Many many years ago I sat in front of a commercial code base for the very first time, a well-known large database company, and my first despair-level was reached quickly when I saw that everybody who ever submitted a patch seemed to have created their own version of very basic types such as 32 bit unsigned integers, making following the code and checking the types on the way very hard.

On the other hand, these kinds of types for different kinds of numbers are meant for higher-level checks. Not confusing some random number with a monetary amount, or, as in the example, miles with kilometers, sure helps. The latter might have prevented that Mars mission that failed due to such a unit error (Mars Climate Orbiter).

The problem, as so often, is that we only have one source code (level), but very different levels of abstraction. Similar when you try to add very low-level things like caching, that have to be concerned with implementation and hardware, and mix it with business logic (alternative: even more abstraction and code to try to separate the two, but then you will have more indirection and less knowledge of what is really going on when you need to debug something).

Sometimes you are interested in the low-level concepts, such as number of bytes, but other types you want some higher level ideas expressed in your types. Yet, we only have one type layer and have to put it all in there, or choose only one and then the other kind of view suffers.
by johanyc | 2025-10-06 10:27:06+00:00
> Google Books created a huge online index of books, OCRing, compressing them, and transforming them. That was copyright infringement.

No. It's a decided case. It's transformative and fair use. My understanding why it's transformative is that Google Books mainly offers a search interface for books and it also have measures to make sure only snippets of books are shown.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-06 10:27:30+00:00
>But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.

90% of everything most Americans buy is unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.

If I live in America (or a similarly developed country), then that definition of "prestige" is useless.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-10-06 10:28:36+00:00
> I'd hate to be the one who refused updating the libraries which caused the security breach and significant loss of data, reputation and money.

The trick is to be working on a different project when that happens. Then it's someone else's fault.

Basically, your career advancement can be slow (if you do the technical work that is necessary to prevent problems, but "has no business value" from the perspective of the management) or fast (if you outrun the problems), but there is no medium speed. If you want a career, you need to commit to it fully.
by panda-giddiness | 2025-10-06 10:28:48+00:00
Attached end-to-end, they'd extend almost from the Earth to the Sun [1].

Placed in a grid, they'd cover an area larger than Wales [2].

Piled on top of each other, they'd reach a tenth the distance to the moon [3].

---

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28leng...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28area...

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28thic...
by popcar2 | 2025-10-06 10:30:37+00:00
I absolutely love SRB2K but I think they overcooked Ring Racers. It's bloated with so many mechanics that the tutorial for how to play the game is literally almost an hour long. The controls are also harsher than the previous game, especially when it comes to slopes.

Version 2.4 which is almost out doubles down on it being a high skill racing game with even more mechanics... Gaining "amps" when dealing damage, going into overdrive, "ring bail" which is dropping all your coins for a boost and can cancel spinning out, "neutral drift" where you lose less speed when drifting without steering...

I don't know what's going on at this point. I just want to hold forward and drift.
by JW_00000 | 2025-10-06 10:30:54+00:00
It's a bit more fundamental in my opinion. Cryptographic techniques are supported by strong mathematics; while I believe hardware-based techniques will always be vulnerable against a sufficiently advanced hardware-based attack. In theory, there exists an unbreakable version of OpenSSL ("under standard cryptographic assumptions"), but it is not evident that there even is a way to implement the kind of guarantees confidential computing is trying to offer using hardware-based protection only.
by siva7 | 2025-10-06 10:32:55+00:00
That's true for any medication that treats symptoms (majority of all meds) and where there is no known cure for the underlying issue - in this case a neurochemical imbalance. The medication helps you to get a more neurotypical balance and will often have adverse effects on people without this imbalance (e.g. neurotypical students abusing such meds). There should be no shame attached to taking stimulants to treat a disorder yet we have a deep cultural moral issue here to lump such medications as "bad" because they are generally associated with drug addicts due to a lack of understanding.
by delichon | 2025-10-06 10:33:26+00:00
> As much as it would be nice to believe we lived in a world where people can discern truth from illusion, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

> And, given that, it seems like the wisest course of action would be to come up with some means of forcing mass media to adhere to fact and remove from public discourse anyone who refuses to acknowledge or espouse it...

How is it a wise course of action for people to force people to adhere to fact if we don't live in a world where people can discern truth? Don't you see the contradiction?
by qsort | 2025-10-06 10:33:58+00:00
> that's way beyond what's called basic math instruction, e. g. in schools

I'm not saying you're wrong, I know for a fact that you aren't: unfortunately most high-school students fall extremely short of that bar, but it's not necessarily that way. Many teenagers can and do develop that kind of mathematical maturity.

In this context "basic" means "it doesn't require knowledge in the field", and by and large this book can indeed be followed with no other requirement than the mathematical maturity it talks about. Many classic books self-describe in similar way.
by rodrigodlu | 2025-10-06 10:34:23+00:00
You can do what I do.

My doctor let me change my dosage whenever I feel. She trusts me for this. She is also an ADHDer herself.

I've found that depending on circumstances I can do well with 10~20mg of the cheapest generic methilfenidate, non LR/XR/whatever, so in my country is USD 10/20 per month. I went as high as 50mg of the USD 100/mo famous ones.

Over time with my other therapist (psych) I trained myself to have some discipline processing my feelings, etc. Understanding the routines that were lacking.

Here it's common to have regular meetings the psychiatrist/psychologist combo. So different perspectives.

My biggest issues were knowing what to do, but not getting it consistently, like:

- getting x minutes of sunlight during the morning, and be consistent almost everyday

- drink water even on hyper focus moments

- pay more attention to breathing even when I'm in the zone doing a lot of apparently rewarding tasks

- trying to stop on unproductive hyper focus moments, realizing when they come

But the medication is necessary, since changing habits, specially the bad ones is harder.

I use the meds as an opportunity to understand myself and having easier time relearning my habits, and getting rid of the bad ones.

good luck!
by irusensei | 2025-10-06 10:35:02+00:00
ZFS is not RAM hungry. The only official memory requirements that exist specify 768MB system RAM and thats the whole OS (Solaris 9) minimum requirement. Just like any other file system ZFS will use memory if available and release it when other parts of the system need it.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gitgn/index.ht...

Also ZFS is perfectly happy with USB connections. In fact it's the best type of FS to have if your storage is unreliable due to its self healing capabilities. Not that modern USB is unreliable nowadays and there are plenty of DAS solutions that rely on 3.x USB.
by 6581 | 2025-10-06 10:35:52+00:00
Claude Opus 4.1:

"I'll search for the current status of seahorse emoji to give you the most up-to-date information.

No, there is no seahorse emoji in the official Unicode standard, and there never has been one. The Unicode Consortium, which is responsible for approving and standardizing emojis, has not included a seahorse in any of its emoji releases.

Interestingly, this is a well-documented example of the "Mandela Effect" - a phenomenon where groups of people collectively misremember something that never actually existed. Many people are convinced they've seen or used a seahorse emoji before, but it's likely they're either experiencing a false memory or remembering seahorse stickers or emoji-style images from messaging apps that aren't part of the standard Unicode set.

A seahorse emoji was actually proposed to Unicode in 2018 but was declined, and there hasn't been a successful proposal since. If you'd like to see a seahorse emoji added in the future, you can submit a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, though the approval process is quite rigorous.

So while we have plenty of other sea creatures like tropical fish, octopus, crab, lobster, squid, and dolphin, the seahorse remains notably absent from our emoji keyboards!"
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-06 10:36:06+00:00
That is a pretty broad use of "it".

It could be having to accept working at a boba shop for a year during labor market fluctuations. It could even be having to choose a different career altogether if the demand in that market simply no longer exists.

It could also be losing one's home because their kid got sick and they had a job that didn't offer PTO. Or a mom not being able to breastfeed because their government doesn't offer paid parental leave.
by no_time | 2025-10-06 10:37:10+00:00
My 2017 bottom shelf lenovo has SGX whether I like it or not.

In current year you can't really buy new hardware without secure enclaves[0], be it a phone, a laptop or server. Best you can do is refuse to run software that requires it, but even that will become tough when goverments roll out mandatory software that depends on it.

[0]: unless you fancy buying nerd vanity hardware like a Talos POWER workstation with all the ups and downs that come with it.
by Xmd5a | 2025-10-06 10:37:12+00:00
And what can it mean when a slip of the tongue, a failed action, a blunder from the psychopathology of everyday life is repeated at least three times in the same five minutes? I don’t know why I tell you this, since it’s an example in which I reveal one of my patients. Not long ago, in fact, one of my patients — for five minutes, each time correcting himself and laughing, though it left him completely indifferent — called his mother “my wife.” “She’s not my wife,” he said (because my wife, etc.), and he went on for five minutes, repeating it some twenty times.

In what sense was that utterance a failure? — while I keep insisting that it is precisely a successful utterance. And it is so because his mother was, in a way, his wife. He called her as he ought to.

---

I must apologize for returning to such a basic point. Yet, since I am faced with objections as weighty as this one — and from qualified authorities, linguists no less — that my use of linguistics is said to be merely metaphorical, I must respond, whatever the circumstances.

I do so this morning because I expected to encounter a more challenging spirit here.

Can I, with any decency, say that I know? Know what, precisely? [...]

If I know where I stand, I must also confess [...] that I do not know what I am saying. In other words, what I know is exactly what I cannot say. That is the moment when Freud makes his entrance, with his introduction of the unconscious.

For the unconscious means nothing if not this: that whatever I say, and from whatever position I speak — even when I hold that position firmly — I do not know what I am saying. None of the discourses, as I defined them last year, offer the slightest hope that anyone might truly know what they are saying.

Even though I do not know what I am saying, I know at least that I do not know it — and I am far from being the first to speak under such conditions; such speech has been heard before. I maintain that the cause of this is to be sought in language itself, and nowhere else.

What I add to Freud — though it is already present in him, for whatever he uncovers of the unconscious is always made of the very substance of language — is this: the unconscious is structured like a language. Which language? That, I leave for you to determine.

Whether I speak in French or in Chinese, it would make no difference — or so I would wish. It is all too clear that what I am stirring up, on a certain level, provokes bitterness, especially among linguists. That alone suggests much about the current state of the university, whose position is made only too evident in the curious hybrid that linguistics has become.

That I should be denounced, my God, is of little consequence. That I am not debated — that too is hardly surprising, since it is not within the bounds of any university-defined domain that I take my stand, or can take it.

— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVIII: Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Pretence
by account42 | 2025-10-06 10:37:52+00:00
The DMCA doesn't require you do take down more than requested whether you have the means to easily do so or not. And it doesn't necessarily make sense to do so for services like Megaupload where the URL is a kind of authorization mechanism - one publicly shared URL pointing to copyrighted content might be infringing while one not shared publicly but pointing to identical data might be OK legally.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-06 10:38:08+00:00
As someone who codes in CUDA daily, putting out and maintaining so many different libraries implementing complex multi-stage GPU algorithms efficiently at many different levels of abstraction, without having a ton of edgecase bugs everywhere, alongside maintaining all of the tooling for debugging and profiling, and still having regular updates, is quite a bit beyond "barely passable". It's a feat only matched by a handful of other companies.
by DaSHacka | 2025-10-06 10:39:04+00:00
> What we need is a leak of a Flock database. Ideally, due to a security fuck-up by someone other than the jurisdiction that installed them. (Company itself, or another city doing Flock's warrantless search feature.)

With how poor Flock's own security is, using unauthenticated APIs for the vast majority of their service, and camera access points using hardcoded passwords, anyone who's even half motivated could have already done this.
by pembrook | 2025-10-06 10:40:28+00:00
It's clear that hackernews is a DIY crowd and loves this idea. I'm pro letting people do whatever they want and whatever makes them feel good.

HOWEVER, I have to point out how incredibly silly this is. There is a reason why historically we have pooled our resources under the government to produce and manage energy infrastructure centrally.

Let's say these 500,000 individuals instead pooled their 1,000 euro (including installation & time) and funded one industrial-scale solar development.

You could generate a renewable 600MW+ (a 4X factor on what these randomly placed individual units will ever deliver in reality) for that money. And efficient centralized battery storage also becomes an option there.

Then your fellow citizens can spend time creating surplus value in the field they are actually experts in and also you don't have a 3rd world hellscape of outdated balcony solar units to look at out your window for the next 30 years.
by thevivekshukla | 2025-10-06 10:42:29+00:00
In general I love the PaaS experience and I can see the value Flightcontrol can potentially provide to the companies that work mostly with AWS. The free starter plan for individual is tempting to try out Flightcontrol, BTW what is the service limit for free plan? I could not find it.

I am also working on similar tool[1] but it's bit more niche to batch jobs type functionality but not just limited to AWS rather it's cloud agnostic.

[1]: Daestro - https://daestro.com
by Findecanor | 2025-10-06 10:42:42+00:00
> often intrusive and breaking for memory unsafe languages whilst superfluous in practice for memory safe languages

The Fil-C project (discussed in [0],[1]) has ported many programs to an emulated CHERI-like capability runtime, and shown that capabilities aren't actually that breaking in practice [0].

Another way of using CHERI would be in "Hybrid mode" with most of a program under a single capability, and using other capabilities for compartmentalisation. In a system where you have only memory-safe languages, you'd still sometimes need to run older code from other languages, or code from external sources: and you can't always validate them 100%. A couple operating system projects based on Rust (such as Theseus [1]) solve this by running them in WASM instances. A CHERI capability would be fast hardware-support for bounds-checking access to such a compartment.

Also, there is the problem of fast inter-process communication: Copying bytes vs. modifying PTEs — each method with different trade-offs. With CHERI, you could potentially instead pass capabilities, and even share them by writing them in shared memory without involving the kernel.

0: https://fil-c.org/programs_that_work

1: https://www.theseus-os.com/2021/11/01/October-Update-WASM.ht...
by pjmlp | 2025-10-06 10:42:51+00:00
Worse, because after we left many of those countries to their own "freedom", the imperialism kept going by having big corporations sponsor the new goverments.

Our goverments could do better fixing the ways of the past, instead it is much easier to complain about immigration, from countries politians themselves would not freely chose to live on, other than on big monthly check from one of those corporations.
by Intermernet | 2025-10-06 10:44:26+00:00
While I understand what you're saying, you can extend this logic to such things as faster-than-light travel, over-unity devices, time travel etc. They're just "hard" math problems.

The current state of encryption is based on math problems many levels harder than the ones that existed a few decades ago. Most vulnerabilities have been due to implementation bugs, and not actual math bugs. Probably the highest profile "actual math" bug is the DUAL_EC_DRBG weakness which was (almost certainly) deliberately inserted by the NSA, and triggered a wave of distrust in not just NIST, but any committee designed encryption standards. This is why people prefer to trust DJB than NIST.

There are enough qualified eyes on most modern open encryption standards that I'd trust them to be as strong as any other assumptions we base huge infrastructure on. Tensile strengths of materials, force of gravity, resistance and heat output of conductive materials, etc, etc.

The material risk to South Korea was almost certainly orders of magnitude greater by not having encrypted backups, than by having encrypted backups, no matter where they were stored (as long as they weren't in the same physical location, obviously).
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-06 10:44:58+00:00
The comment I responded to said the article didn’t acknowledge that AI “might work.” I said the premise of the article was based on the assumption that to some extent, AI worked. You said AI didn’t work because its output is low quality, which is not something either me or the original commenter said anything about at all. I said that objective quality didn’t factor into the equation because if it satisfied people’s use cases, by their standards, it “worked.” Then you replied saying you never claimed that AI didn’t work for low-quality outputs. Aaannd here we are.
by slightwinder | 2025-10-06 10:47:05+00:00
Nuclear has no relevance in Germany, never really had. The plants barely added any value to the market. When Habeck became Minister, most Nuclear plants were already gone, and the last remaining were phasing out, lacking nuclear fuel and permits. Habeck even gave a permit for the last plants to run some more months, squeezing out even the last parts of fuel as much as they could, just so they could serve as an additional supply in a problematic winter, which turned out to be unnecessary in the end.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-10-06 10:48:12+00:00
> Generators can be fairly involved and feels like a mini language, one that is not as observable as macros.

I agree the syntax is awkward, but all it boils down to is concatenating code in strings and adding it as a file to your codebase.

And the syntax will 100% get cleaner (it;s already happening with stuff like ForAttributeWithMetadataName
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-06 10:48:16+00:00
Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80.

For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that).

The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
by Terretta | 2025-10-06 10:48:54+00:00
>> Buy a high quality, comfortable yet cheap office chair

> ...is anyone really doing this???

To get this right is much harder than it should be given the optimization of selling not-good chairs. Our office returned literally dozens before landing on a couple $80-$120 chairs that beat $600-$800 range leaders. I doubt perplexity is really succeeding here.
by dist-epoch | 2025-10-06 10:49:31+00:00
Proof of existence does exist. Some Xbox variant has now been unbroken (jailbroken) for more than 10 years. And not for lack of trying.

Credit/debit cards with chips (EMV) are another proof of existence that hardware-based protection can exist.

> It is not evident that there even is a way to implement the kind of guarantees confidential computing is trying to offer using hardware-based protection only.

Not in the absolute, but in the more than $10 mil required to break it (atomic microscopes to extract keys from CPU gates, ...), and that to break a single specific device, not the whole class.
by haunter | 2025-10-06 10:49:45+00:00
There are actually three

The press release https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2025/press-releas...

The popular science article https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2025/popular-info...

And an advanced scientific paper usually written by the members of the commitee https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/advanced-medicine...