MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alex43578 | 2025-11-11 01:57:02+00:00
The US military didn't lose. They had overwhelming tactical and technological superiority, 20:1 kill ratios, and consistently inflicted heavy casualties whenever they engaged the enemy directly.

Now that didn't translate into accomplishing the political war goals of nation-building, changing cultures, and counter-insurgency without massive troop presence; but that wasn't a failure of the armed forces.

What's that line: the US doesn't lose wars, it gets tired of them?
by firefax | 2025-11-11 01:57:07+00:00
>How much useful combat skills can be taught in only a week?

You'd be surprised how even a small amount of training can make you deadly with a rifle. Combine that with actually having thrown a grenade, been given training in laying of mines etc.

Also, a huge chunk of "the military" is logistics -- the measure of a soldier is not always whether they can snipe someone from afar.
by creatonez | 2025-11-11 01:57:16+00:00
It's already been completely shut down in large swaths of the world.

> mainly because a 2G connection is more tolerant to low signal and noise

Huh? Everything I've heard about 2G indicates that it is an incredibly noisy protocol with horrible congestion characteristics, and that it craps out even when there's only a few devices. Maybe it's only winning because it has nearly completely disappeared?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-11 01:57:23+00:00
> Yes, LLMs are literally just matmul. How can anything useful, much less intelligent, emerge from multiplying numbers really fast? But then again, how can anything intelligent emerge from a wet mass of brain cells? After all, we're just meat. How can meat think?

LLMs actually hint at an answer to that, but most people seem to be focusing too much on matmuls or (on the other end) specific training inputs to pay attention to where the interesting things happen.

Training an LLM builds up a structure in high-dimensional space, and inference is a way to query the shape of that structure. That's literally the "quality of quantity", reified. This is what all those matmuls are doing.

How can anything useful, much less intelligent, emerge from a bunch of matmuls or wet mass of brain cells? That's the wrong level of abstraction. How can a general-purpose quasi-intelligence emerge from a stupidly high-dimensional latent space that embeds rich information about the world? That's the interesting question to ponder, and it starts with an important realization: it's not obvious why it couldn't.
by kragen | 2025-11-11 01:58:05+00:00
Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones. Of course the US has a far larger air force if you count by dollars rather than by airframe count, but if that's because they're buying US$10k milspec chips when US$1 parking meter chips would work just as well, that and a fiver will get you a cup of coffee.

An F-16 costs US$200 million and can be destroyed by a US$500 FPV drone with a grenade attached, as Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.

Surely you are correct that commanders would happily trade one FPV drone for one properly equipped F-16, even without the mortars. But it isn't clear that they would trade 400,000 FPV drones for the F-16, and that's the trade actually on offer.

The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war, probably because they don't work very well yet; that's why the Ukrainians are dinking around with FPV. The US Army has never faced even the kind of FPV drone war we're seeing in Ukraine. Their materiel has, though, since they shipped a lot of it to the Ukrainians, and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are trying to keep their tanks off the front lines when they can, and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-11 01:58:23+00:00
I'd like to say that the people who championed them realized that if fedcops can basically arrest their landscaper over what amounts to a civil infraction then it has implications for them. Unfortunately I don't think the people who championed the cameras in the first place have that kind of self awareness and what we're seeing is instead the typically silent majority saying "no, I akshually agree with the privacy people those are bad".
by theamk | 2025-11-11 01:59:00+00:00
Sure, as a single person who does not want to interact with lawyers, there is not much can do to prevent malicious actor from using your code.

But what your license affects is large companies. If you declare your project as AGPL, then you can be pretty sure neither Google nor Amazon would use it. They might re-implement it using their resources, but they won't use code directly.
Ask HN: How to grow and become more employable when working with outdated tech?
by mattfrommars | 2025-11-11 01:59:28+00:00
What can I legitimately do when my day job operates within legacy technologies and I have no interest getting another job within this space - think legacy .Net framework desktop application and monolithic Java application.

My goal is simple — to get or be in a position where I am employable. But to make myself employable, I don't have clear path which to take to leverage what I already know. I feel I can either start from scratch - say dive in Machine Learning path or say pick up React and begin to prototype React full stack app. But for both, I will have zero use in my day job since there isn't any 'real' growth happening in my company. Its mostly minor fixes and perhaps writing powershell script here and there.

A bit into my background, I started my career late - I got true programming job at 28. Since then, I’ve been with my current employer doing Java and legacy C# development for six years. Sure, first four years or so, I learned a lot. But now, I feel I'm not learning that much at all. I started to casually apply for job last year or so which, now looking back has been a wake up call to really be proactive and figure out where to go from here. I don't make that much which is a major motivation to get myself on the right track.

I refuse to believe, 'do a start-up' is the way to get myself out of my situation. There has to be something better I can do to leverage what I have done. I have done my best to upskill, e.g. got AWS practitioner certificate. Again, no real use in my day job. Also, I have done leetcode ~150 problems but I am not that gifted to crack FAANG interview. I'm okay with system design.

For more experience professional here who have navigated out of this situation, what can I realistically do right now? What should I prioritize as short-term and long-term goals? What kind of goals should I have for next month, second, month, third month, etc? Are my options the following?

1) go machine learning path or ML-OPS path? If so, how do I show potential employer, "hi, i know this but my day job has no use for this"

2) get comfortable with react - my gut feeling tells me perhaps I can use this to build full stack application to show employers of 'builder' personality?

3) pursue advance cloud certification? say AWS intermediate certificate?

Transferring within org is not an option right now since promo cycle starts in April.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-11-11 01:59:57+00:00
> True Scotsman's "on your own" means working in assembly language, in which you have to carefully manage even just calling a function and returning from it: not leaving stray arguments on the stack, saving and restoring all callee-saved register that are used in the function and so on.

I've actually been trying to figure out if it's practical to write assembly but then use a proof assistant to guarantee that it maintains safety. Weirdly feels easier than C insofar as that you don't have (C's) undefined behavior to contend with. But formal methods are a whole thing and I'm very very new to them so it remains to be seen whether this is actually a good idea, or awful and stupid:) (Edit: ...or merely impractical, for that matter)
by jjk166 | 2025-11-11 02:00:01+00:00
There is some nuance. Wikipedia is a tertiary source for the subjects of its articles. However, it is a primary source for what is on wikipedia. You can cite an encyclopedia the same way you would cite the dictionary (which is also a tertiary source) as a way of establishing that information is in circulation.

Likewise, primary sources for some claims may be tertiary sources for others. If you read the memoirs of a soldier in WW1 who is comparing his exploits to those of a roman general from antiquity, he is a primary source for the WW1 history and a tertiary source for the roman history.

Survey articles and textbooks are generally tertiary. They may include analysis which is secondary and citable, but even then only the parts which are original are citable.

As a more general rule, you can't cite a piece of information from a work which is itself citing that piece of information (or ought to be).
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-11 02:00:22+00:00
>Wonder why people would take issue with the unqualified, armed, masked thugs abducting innocent people off the street and deporting them without recourse or due process.

Congress can whip up a law making immigration infractions more serious crimes (which comes with better process) and day it chooses.

ICE can send better qualified better trained agents any time it chooses.

They can likewise be more fastidious about who they choose to go after such that far fewer innocents are caught up in it.

Would that make it ok?
by bigyabai | 2025-11-11 02:01:08+00:00
Yes? Apple does not document their GPUs or provide any avenue for low-level API design. They cut ties with Khronos, refuse to implement open GPU standards and deliberately funnel developers into a proprietary and non-portable raster API.

Nvidia cooperates with Khronos, implements open-source and proprietary APIs simultaneously, documents their GPU hardware, and directly supports community reverse-engineering projects like nouveau and NOVA with their salaried engineers.

Pretty much the only proprietary part is CUDA, and Nvidia emphatically supports the CUDA alternatives. Apple doesn't even let you run them.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-11 02:01:11+00:00
I truly wish more people understood this.

The entire cry of "corporations aren't people!" is based and a complete misunderstanding of what a legal person is. You've done a great job at explaining.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who willfully propagate these misunderstandings. Because by saying "of course corporations aren't people, and everybody knows this except those dumb <other side>", it's an easy way to try to vilify the other side as dumb/evil. When the reality is that it's simply a tried-and-true necessary and useful legal concept, that virtually nobody but lawyers would even be familiar with in the first place, if it weren't for activists who thought it sounded scandalous.
by nippoo | 2025-11-11 02:02:27+00:00
Preview on Mac does automatic OCR. I'm sure other tools exist that are similarly friction-free on other platforms, but it took me under 5 seconds (drag the image from the webpage into my downloads folder, click on it, and then select the relevant snippet and CMD+C to copy it).

I imagine I'd have similar frustrations if I couldn't copy-paste the text easily though!
by hitekker | 2025-11-11 02:03:12+00:00
I was looking for a credible source, which you have not supplied.

The threads you've waved at do not show Tim to be the "racist, sexist or creep" that you've insinuated. Rather, they show a committee that can't handle questions, abuses its own rules, and hides behind HR & secret "complaints".

Of course, that's just my opinion from skimming. It'd be better to have someone credible give honest evidence, instead of someone defaming & blaming while projecting their bigotry onto others.
by convolvatron | 2025-11-11 02:03:25+00:00
there were at least two renderers written for the CM2 that used strips. at least one of them used scans and general communication, most likely both.

1) for the given processor set, where each process holds an object 'spawn' a processor in a new set, one processor for each span. (a) spawn operation consists of the source processor setting the number of nodes in the new domain, then performing an add-scan, then sending the total allocation back to the front end the front end then allocates a new power-of-2 shape than can hold those the object-set then uses general communication to send scan information to the first of these in the strip-set (the address is left over from the scan) (b) in the strip-set, use a mask-copy-scan to get all the parameters to all the the elements of the scan set. (c) each of these elements of the strip set determine the pixel location of the leftmost element (d) use a general send to seed the strip with the parameters of the strip (e) scan those using a mask-copy-scan in the pixel-set (f) apply the shader or the interpolation in the pixel-set

note that steps (d) and (e) also depend on encoding the depth information in the high bits and using a max combiner to perform z-buffering.

Edit: there must have been an additional span/scan in a pixel space that is then sent to image space with z buffering, otherwise strip seeds could collide, and be sorted by z which may miss pixels from the losing strip
by system2 | 2025-11-11 02:03:43+00:00
I started building Dactyl and got bored very quickly, then went back to my Logitech Ergo K860. K860 is $40-50 brand-new (classic eBay auctions), and I got the MX Ergo Plus mouse next to it. This is a proper working combo. I have 20+ keyboards collecting dust in my wardrobe, and this combo was the only one to win. All under $150 combined. I also got razer wireless control hub to make sound control easier ($50).

TLDR; these small split keyboards are so expensive. $190-500 range. Weird.
by jesse__ | 2025-11-11 02:03:45+00:00
So, you're saying it's outside the scope of an LSP to return information about a dependent type because it's .. not a concrete type? That sounds wrong.

I can make literally any language support dependent types that have struct, enum, switch, and assert. You make a boxed type (tagged union, algebraic datatype, variant, discriminated union, fucking, whatever), and just assert whenever you pack/unpack it on function entry/exit. I do this all the time.

In plain English, my quip boils down to 'why do we tolerate network requests in our syntax highlighters, when we don't tolerate them in our compiler frontends?'
by bnj | 2025-11-11 02:04:07+00:00
I agree that screenshots of text that are cut off from essential context are enough to make me pull my hair out, it creates so much extra work— but the modern feature of automatic text recognition in screenshots and images that allows for copy and paste has been incredible. Along with indexing that allows it to be searched, regular screenshots have become one of the most robust and future proof ways for me to preserve context from my workspace. When I look back into archived screenshots it helps me to recapture all kinds of things that I wouldn’t have thought to explicitly record.
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-11 02:05:17+00:00
It was a really fun project. We basically made these disaster kits, with small MFPs, tools, laptops, cell radios and INMARSAT terminals hooked to Cisco switches (this was circa 2002-3) and a little server. We had a deal that let us stow them in unusual places like highway rest stops.

We’d deploy them to help respond to floods or other disasters.

One of the techs cooked up a great idea — use Knoppix or something like it to let us use random computers if needed. Bandwidth was tight, but enough for terminal emulators and things like registration software that ran off the little server. So that’s where we got into the CD/DVD game. We had way more media problems than we expected!
by gonzo41 | 2025-11-11 02:06:18+00:00
Think about mortars more. If you can be close enough for a drone 1-2km, then mortars should be what you're thinking about.

Mix a targeting drone with a vehicle mounted mortar team and they can have faster rounds on target and get of the X quicker than drone teams. And nets don't stop mortars.

200M will by a lot of that and can be fielded in a very flexible way.
by konsumer | 2025-11-11 02:06:36+00:00
you should read more about it here, it's fascinating stuff: https://reticulum.network/manual/understanding.html

It works great with lora, but each interface is it's own thing. It's not exactly like meshtastic/meshcore/etc (for better or worse) but also fulfills totally different roles. You can connect 1 interface to another, and only forward messages for particular addresses, if you want, or addresses that have announced on a specific interface, and you can control what you want to propagate/route.

You can set it up tons of different ways, so just imagine this is what you want:

- 20 ESP32 lora devices around my house, that respond with sensor-data or something - a pizero connected to the internet (via a huge TCP testnet) and lora (via a SPI device connected to some GPIO.) - These are not "secret" anyone can ask a sensor for it's data. the messages are encrypted, but they are intentionally public

If any of the 20 lora devices want to to be available to talk to someone on the internet, they can, and their announcements are forwarded, so people on the testnet know the address.

I can set it up so only messages directly to those 20 devices is forwarded, but otherwise announces are recorded (and replayed) on the pi.

Additionally, I can setup propagation for just my 20 devices, so even if they are out of range or turned off, they will get the message (from the pi) when they get back in range or turn on.

In this example, the structure of the network forms a kind of tree-like thing. Each tier of the network is scaled to the amount of traffic it can deal with: pi can deal with a ton, and is connected to internet, the ESP32s only need to deal with 1-to-1 traffic (announces don't really matter to them) and only compete with traffic from 20 devices (on the same lora network.)

These messages are pretty small (an announce is ~160 bytes, message proof is ~115 bytes.) For larger messages, you string them together over a link (a 1-to-1 encrypted tunnel.) I think a key thing though, is that not every tier of the network needs to send all the same packets. For example, not even 1000th of the "testnet firehose" gets sent over the local lora net of 20 devices, based on how it's setup here.

So, the usage-flow of this would like this:

- each sensor announces on lora, pi forwards that to internet ("hey my address/pubkey is X, and I have these cool capabilities as a sensor") - a user on internet sends a data-message to the address "hey give me your sensor data" - the pi routes that from internet to lora, and propagates (replays periodically if the lora is not around) - if the esp32 has not seen that peer, it can request an announce (and the pi will forward that both ways) - the esp32 responds "oh hey internet user with X address, my sensor data is X" - the message is sent over lora to the pi, which forwards on to internet

for very small data, if you don't care about P2P encryption, you could even put the sensor-data directly in the initial announce. "hey I have this address/pubkey and the current temperature is X" since announce "app data" is great for a very small amount of data.
by jabbywocker | 2025-11-11 02:07:41+00:00
It was a major expansion, based solely on the reuse of the term. It’s why I used it as an example.

The main arguments boils down to that since corporations are people and have free speech, and that a natural persons financial activity is considered protected speech, that a corporate person should have the same freedom as there should be no distinctions about the rights afforded to a person.

The entire argument would have been moot if we used distinct terminology
by crazygringo | 2025-11-11 02:07:48+00:00
I disagree. I use screenshots all the time, because it:

- Preserves the full 80 character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability

- Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned

- Preserves a good coding font, so it doesn't come out as some hairline-width Courier on the other end

- Preserves syntax highlighting, very helpful

Obviously if somebody needs a whole file or whole log, then send the whole thing as an attachment. But very often I'll still include a screenshot of the relevant part. With line numbers, it's not difficult to jump to the right part of the attached file.

Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-11 02:08:15+00:00
"It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving"

This has nothing to do with keeping up with the intel from the conflict. This is entirely the product of our manufacturing issues. Manufacturing drove our success in WW2. Now we can't even manufacture low cost low(ish) tech drones at 1/10th the volume of potential adversaries.
by gonzo41 | 2025-11-11 02:09:31+00:00
Flak cannons are also really cheap to produce and use. But downing a modern fast jet with one is still hard to do. Especially when they can fire over the horizon.

The war in Ukraine looks like it does because Ukraine has had to fight with constant equipment shortages. It's not really the future of warfare that modern militaries are prepping for.
by jesse__ | 2025-11-11 02:09:51+00:00
My point is "why do we tolerate network requests in LSPs, but not compiler frontends"?

If you think about it, the LSP is a way of doing libraries, which is dramatically worse than just inventing a binary interface and doing actual dynamic libraries.

If you follow the LSP model to it's natural conclusion, everything becomes this horrible, disconnected morass of servers talking to each other on your local machine..
by moron4hire | 2025-11-11 02:10:00+00:00
I think a big problem with Git is that it's not opinionated enough. Every team has their own Git flow because Git makes it possible to do so and most developers love nothing more than micro optimizing every minute aspect of any work that is not the task they've been assigned this sprint (myself included), or avoiding learning anything at all (half of my coworkers) thereby leaving the decisions to people like me. I'd much prefer a tool that has one way to do things and everyone just had to "get with the program." Instead, we have this Swiss Army knife that can do anything but requires arcane knowledge of how to do things that are just slightly off the beaten path.

I'm very comfortable with Git and have saved coworkers in just a few minutes from what they thought was going to be missing days of work. But I'd much rather if they had never gotten into that situation or could easily fix it themselves. I don't like the idea of every software team needing a Git expert in easy reach just in case something goes awry.
by sergiomattei | 2025-11-11 02:10:07+00:00
I’m so glad you mention “going up Pike towards Capitol Hill” because I live right on the section where Cap Hill & First Hill starts.

My lived experience is that I could walk the length of Pike from Bellevue Ave towards the waterfront and see two-three tents at most. Homeless yes, but encampments? “Overrun”? “Tent city”?

It’s so easy to make hyperbolic statements and a pain to prove them wrong. I can see how you get away with spouting this nonsense—and people believe it.

Let me know if anyone wants a YouTube video or something, I’ll be glad to take a fun evening stroll and prove you wrong.