MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-11-29 18:29:34+00:00
Of course there is undefined behavior that isn't security critical. Hell, most bugs aren't security critical. In fact, most software isn't security critical, at all. If you are writing software which is security critical, then I can understand this confusion; but you have to remember that most people don't.

The author of TFA actually makes another related assumption:

> A crash from a detected memory-safety bug is not a new failure. It is the early, safe, and high-fidelity detection of a failure that was already present and silently undermining the system.

Not at all? Most memory-safety issues will never even show up in the radar, while with "Hardening" you've converted all of them into crashes that for sure will, annoying customers. Surely there must be a middle ground, which leads us back to the "debug mode" that the article is failing to criticize.
by crop_rotation | 2025-11-29 18:29:35+00:00
I don't understand such comments. Obviously the people having trouble serving HN traffic have no clue what inetd is. Most of them might not even know about using varnish/nginx and that too is fine. It is good that internet is so accessible that you don't need to write shell script from inetd to express your opinions on your own domain and website. A random php running blog will be able to serve far less than 5M hits/day and that too is fine. Most people can't run curlftpfs too and it turned out to be fine
by swores | 2025-11-29 18:29:44+00:00
From an ethical point of view I completely agree that it's predatory, I just don't believe any EU laws exist that mean anyone would have a chance of success trying to sue over that, I don't believe it to be illegal. And while I'm not all-knowing, nor am I someone who knows every single relevant law like the back of my hand, my opinion is somewhat backed up by the fact that I'm not aware of anyone with actual legal knowledge having ever suggested this behaviour of Microsoft's could be considered illegal the way you want it to be, it's only ever people who are users who think it should be considered breach of contract. (And considering how much money it would be worth if you could sue MS for this and win, if it were even a 50/50 question you'd get lawyers trying.)
by betaby | 2025-11-29 18:30:42+00:00
> It's evident that people use bicycles

They do. Also people who use bicycles in Montreal are disproportionately males and mostly of the certain age group. That's very apparent if you stay for ~10 minutes near Grande Bibliothèque for example or any other relatively busy piste cyclable. If you call it a 'mobility culture' it a very niche one. Bicycling is a thing for very specific demographics in Montreal in comparison with Amsterdam and even with Eastern European cities.

Interestingly that high schoolers are not biking that much in Montreal, again in comparison. Biking to school was/is an exception where I live(d) in Montreal, i.e. Le Sud-Ouest, NDG.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-29 18:30:43+00:00
Not OP, but I recall Tauri greatly overstating their memory usage claims. It is ultimately a browser running your "app", but just because it's not bundled with your app, doesn't make it consume any lesser RAM. And they even admitted that their benchmarks were wrong[1].

A lot of claims were also made about how Tauri is magically more performant than Electron apps and feels like a native app, but not only is this not true, on some platforms like Linux, Tauri apps are actually slower than Electron because the system webview it uses (generally WebKitGTK) is often slower and less optimised than the Chromium build that Electron ships with[2].

There's a bunch more claims due to it being "Rust" and all the memes that comes with that territory, but all that is basically irrelevant since your "app" is basically shitty javascript in the end. It's like putting lipstick and dressing up a pig, doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig.

[1] https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_f...
Ask HN: Streaming a Bittorent Video from a Webpage?
by trinsic2 | 2025-11-29 18:31:51+00:00
I'm wondering if there is a way to stream a video uploaded to Bit torrent from a web page.

I am working on a video essay that I feel might get censored by our current administration. I looked into PeerTube and i'm hesitant to get into decentralization because the point of censorship can be at the node with Activity Pub.

Is there a way to stream videos off of BitTorrent with a tool that is completely web based? The goal is to host videos on my site that can be streamed by visitors with out relying on Video Platforms that can censor the content.
by btown | 2025-11-29 18:31:55+00:00
One of the most interesting things to me about CRDTs, and something that a skim of the article (with its focus on low-level CRDTs) might give the wrong impression on... is that things like https://automerge.org/ are not just "libraries" that "throw together" low-level CRDTs. They are themselves full CRDTs, with strong proofs about their characteristics under stress.

Per the Automerge website:

> We are driven to build high performance, reliable software you can bet your project on. We develop rigorous academic proofs of our designs using theorem proving tools like Isabelle, and implement them using cutting edge performance techniques adopted from the database world. Our standard is to be both fast and correct.

While the time and storage-space performance of these new-generation CRDTs may not be ideal for all projects, their convergence characteristics are formalized, proven, and predictable.

If you're building a SaaS that benefits from team members editing structured and unstructured data, and seeing each others' changes in real time (as one would expect of Notion or Figma), you can reach for CRDTs that give you actionable "collaborative deep data structures" today, without understanding the entire history of the space that the article walks through. All you need for the backend is key-value storage with range/prefix queries; all you need for the frontend is a library and a dream.
by criemen | 2025-11-29 18:31:56+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about that lately, and I agree. I used to be hard in the "You can't solve social problems with technical solutions", but that's not the whole truth. If people aren't using your thing, sure, you can brand that as social problem (lack of buy-in on the process, people not being heard during rollout, ...). However one way of getting people to use your thing/process is to make it easier to use. Integrate it well into the workflow they're already familiar with, bring the tooling close, reduce friction, provide some extra value to your users with features etc. That's technical solutions, but if you choose them based on knowledge of the "social problem" they can be quite effective.
by Johnny555 | 2025-11-29 18:31:58+00:00
A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.

>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though

But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.
by Schiendelman | 2025-11-29 18:32:10+00:00
First you have to pick one thing to work on. Just one. Then you have to find all the people who agree with you that ONE thing is the most important thing to pick, and get help on crafting a message that will stick, develop a theory of change, and work backwards from that theory to actionable efforts the people you recruit can do.

It's hard work. I've done it. I am happy to help you do it. Let me know.
by WoodenChair | 2025-11-29 18:32:15+00:00
I use a mSATA to IDE adapter that I buy in bulk. This is the Amazon available equivalent of it: https://amzn.to/48qEaOm

I use only 128 GB mSATA cards from reputable brands.

I always do the following:

- Boot from the Mac OS 9 Lives 9.2.2 image (v9 of the image) by CD

- Wipe the SSD using Disk Utilities 2.1

- Restore from the CD

I will say this fails perhaps 1 out of 20 times. Hard to say how often this is an actual hardware failure versus some kind of incompatibility with the mSATA SSD since I do use a range of brands. I am always using the same adapters.
by swores | 2025-11-29 18:32:53+00:00
One could argue that, and like I just wrote in my reply to your sibing comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087142) I would agree with you with regards to ethics, but it's not a valid argument from an actual legal perspective.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this, because I'm not blowing smoke up your ass I really do agree with you in that I wish MS could and would be sued over this, and lose, and have to stop making Windows shit like this. But I'm fairly confident that the only possibility would be for EU (or individual nations) to write new legislation addressing it.
by Teever | 2025-11-29 18:33:50+00:00
We live in the atomic age. The idea that calamity could befall one part of the world and the others will be fine just isn't possible.

Here's a plausible scenario -- European countries decide that they will just power through the cold Frostpunk style by burning massive amounts of hydrocarbons and some other societies in regions suffering from the heat due to climate change decide that this course of action is unacceptable and war breaks out.

The theme of climate change is feedback loops and one way checkpoints. The increasing rates of change from these feedback loops and how societies respond may doom the plant and life as we know it.

This isn't hyperbole.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 18:33:54+00:00
I have been either part of or opted out of well over a dozen - I have a policy of never leading “lift and shifts” (and never staff augmentation).

Once you actually sit down and come up with a project plan with your PMO, a cloud migration is hardly ever worth the effort unless the destination cloud provider is backing up a shit ton of money for not only operational credits but also for internal AWS Professional Services (where I worked when I was inside AWS) or an outside partner to help (current employer).

Hell even certain departments at Amazon would never go through the effort of migrating to AWS from the legacy CDO infrastructure.

The risk of regressions, the refactoring, the retraining, the politics, etc are hardly ever worth it.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-29 18:34:18+00:00
CRDTs are something you still have to write by hand, I finished creating a custom sequence based CRDT engine about 2 months ago (inspired by diamond types) and it was hilarious to ask Ai for assistance.

It's interesting when you are working on something that:

1. Is essentially a logic problem.

2. That LLMs aren't trained on.

3. That can have dense character sequences when testing.

4. To see how completely useless an LLM is outside of pre-trained areas.

There needs to be some blackbox test based on pure but niche logic to see if an LLM model is capable of understanding and even noticing exposure to new logics.
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-29 18:34:31+00:00
The silhouette software is proprietary but I am using Linux + inkscape + https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette which works perfectly (except I can't get the Bluetooth to work but that's probably a me issue). It's less user-friendly (but more power-user friendly) than the official software and doesn't have all the templates and ready-made designs but that isn't a problem for me.

I would like to get a laser cutter at some point but that's a completely different beast. Don't get a cheap ali-express one that is not enclosed if you value your eyes. You will also need ventilation for a lot of materials if you value your lungs. In comparison, my silhouette is a simple thing I can move around easily. It's also able to plotting, engraving, embossing and foiling with the right add-ons
by dathinab | 2025-11-29 18:35:17+00:00
it's both true and misleading in what conclusions people might take from it

e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).

This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.

And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).

So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.

Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-29 18:35:44+00:00
You have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that this paper is basically “Stone Age people aren’t less sophisticated” is a relatively new idea since levi strauss reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s

Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.

Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
by anonymousiam | 2025-11-29 18:36:12+00:00
Electronics in high-radiation environments benefit from a large feature size with regard to SEU reduction, but you're correct that the larger parts degrade faster in such environments, so they've created "rad-hard" components to mitigate that issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

It's interesting to me that triple-voting wasn't as necessary on the older (rad-hard) processors. Every foundry in the world is steering toward CPUs with smaller and smaller feature sizes, because they are faster and consume less power, but the (very small) market for space-based processors wants large feature sizes. Because those aren't available anymore, TMR is the work-around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

Most modern space processing systems use a combination of rad-hard CPUs and TMR.
by maxi-k | 2025-11-29 18:36:27+00:00
I didn't know Quarto, it looks interesting, thanks for sharing!

cloudspecs encodes the entire state (sql code, R code, view state) in the URL compressed and base64 encoded, since we wanted to be able to send links around to share interesting plots/tables with each other and revisit old plots if the data changes, e.g., if new EC2 instances come out.

The PDF is produced by good old latex, and the state-in-URL mechanism allows us to just use regular hyperlinks for the clickable plot. The limit is the max URL length browsers allow, but we haven't hit it.

Since we use R+ggplot for research anyway in the local environment (emacs+RSS), we just copied the code into cloudspecs, then copied the resulting link into latex. So a bit of manual work if we want to change the plots in the paper.

Let me know if you're curious about specific things or want to collaborate. Cheers!
by tforcram | 2025-11-29 18:36:58+00:00
Similar experience with a 2010 Honda Odyssey, drove it for 10 years and never saw a crack even though I'm sure it took a beating.

Then we got a 2022 Passport and I swear every single trip has a new crack or chip. I was surprisingly fortunate to be talked into the windshield warranty as the sales guy has been through this exact thing and replacing these windshields with assistive tech is expensive. That warranty has already paid for itself and more including once full windshield replacement.
by desertrider12 | 2025-11-29 18:37:40+00:00
We know angle EBD equals BAC, since the sum of triangle ABC's interior angles is 180 degrees and the sum of the 3 angles at B are also 180 degrees. We also know angle DEB is 90 degrees since DE was constructed to be perpendicular to CB. Finally, D was placed at a distance c from B. The two triangles have the same angles and the same side lengths opposite the right angles, so they must be congruent.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-29 18:38:30+00:00
Essentially that the idea that people can hold 7 + 2 things in their head simultaneously is basically true such that when your tools make a demand on your attention it subtracts from the attention you can put on other things.

There are many sorts of struggle. There is struggle managing essential complexity and also the struggle, especially in the pre-product phase, of getting consensus over what is "essential" [1] When it comes to accidental complexity you can just struggle following the process or struggle to struggle less in the future by some combination of technical and social innovations which themselves can backfire into increased complexity.

Google can afford to use management techniques that would be impossible elsewhere because of the scale and profitability of their operations. Many a young person goes there thinking they'll learn something transferable but the market monopolies are the one thing that they can't walk out with.

[1] Ashby's law https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 best exemplified by the Wright flyer which could fly without tumbling because it controlled roll, pitch and yaw.
Health Billing SaaS – Co-Founder/CTO – Hamburg, Germany
by bentinck | 2025-11-29 18:38:37+00:00
Health Billing (Hamburg, Germany) | Co-Founder/CTO | 10% equity + salary

We're automating private health insurance billing in Germany – solving real pain for 400K+ patients drowning in paperwork.

Traction: 100 paying customers, 91% retention, manual proof-of-concept validated.

Next step: Build the SaaS platform (OCR, AI workflows, API integrations).

You: Full-stack dev ready to own the tech, weekly presence in Hamburg (remote-friendly), excited about HealthTech + regulated environments.

Us: Experienced founder, deep domain knowledge, clear path to exit.

Contact: info@dietrichwienecke.de
by maxspero | 2025-11-29 18:38:47+00:00
There are dozens of first generation AI detectors and they all suck. I'm not going to defend them. Most of them use perplexity based methods, which is a decent separators of AI and human text (80-90%) but has flaws that can't be overcome and high FPRs on ESL text.

https://www.pangram.com/blog/why-perplexity-and-burstiness-f...

Pangram is fundamentally different technology, it's a large deep learning based model that is trained on hundreds of millions of human and AI examples. Some people see a dozen failed attempts at a problem as proof that the problem is impossible, but I would like to remind you that basically every major and minor technology was preceded by failed attempts.
by burky | 2025-11-29 18:39:18+00:00
I installed CachyOS (KDE) about 2 years ago and I’m obsessed with it, it’s so satisfying to tinker with. I also game on it every day. Recently invested in a AMD GPU just because it has a better driver story in Linux. I can’t imagine going back to Windows.

Edit: Shout out to SteamOS for getting Linux to where it is for gaming, incredible.
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-29 18:40:03+00:00
> "The fantasy being peddled by the toolmakers is: You will crash, remain conscious, find that your car has burst into flame or is slowly sinking in water, find that you cannot undo your seatbelt, yet are still able to reach for this specialty tool, slice through your seatbelt, then smash the window open and climb free to safety."

Uh huh... Now consider this scenario; you lose control and crash into a tree. You are out and your car catches fire. Who gets to the scene first? Firefighters, or probably just whichever randos happened to be right there when it happened? Probably the later. Probably for the best if one of them is able to break your window and pull you out.
by dathinab | 2025-11-29 18:41:15+00:00
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual

every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)

so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
by not_your_vase | 2025-11-29 18:43:32+00:00
So you want to host it yourself, or you want to use bittorrent? The former is how people distributed cat videos before the Youtube era.

The latter is not hosted by you, but by all users participating the swarm. The first page for "bitternt stream online" (sic) keywords in your favorite search engine should should give some ideas about that (I use ecosia now, which gives at least usable results for this).
by jay_kyburz | 2025-11-29 18:44:13+00:00
Who cares what tool was used to write the work? The important question is what percentage of reviews found errors or provided valuable feedback. The important metric is whether or not it did the job, not how it was produced.

I think there is a far more interesting discussion to be had here about how useful the 21% percent were. How well does an AI execute a peer review?
by celticninja | 2025-11-29 18:44:48+00:00
That will be why the doc tells you it's too expensive, because over the counter is cheap. It's not that they can't afford it, but in the UK there is a standard prescription price. It's under £10 per prescription for any drug that prescribed, but it's a flat fee. So if they prescribe something that costs less than the prescription charge it makes no sense for the patient.
by apwheele | 2025-11-29 18:45:01+00:00
When you want to run stuff client side instead of your server is one question to determine.

For R specifically, it is focused on stats/graphing. So if you wanted an app where someone could upload data and fit a complicated regression model, this would be a good use case. (There are probably javascript libraries for regression, but if willing to live with the bit of start up lag, worth it for anything mildly complicated -- factors in R for example would not like to worry about writing my own code in javascript to make the design matrix.)

In the case where you run the server, the data has to travel to your server, your computer estimates the model, and it sends it back. WASM apps this all happens client side.

It is a good use case for dynamic graphs/dashboards as well. If the data is small enough to entirely fit in memory, can basically have a local interactive session with the data and everything will be quite snappy (do not need to continually go back and forth with your server to query data).