MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jraph | 2025-11-25 09:20:54+00:00
> This shows a lack of understanding.

I would say your comment either shows a lack of understanding, or that you completely missed the point.

> The example of "writing your own script" is no different to a non-systemd system. Why would a script work or not work based on systemd?

Of course, you can write the service itself in Python or Ruby or whatever regardless the service manager. The point is that with systemd, or upstart, or other service managers like this that make things more declarative (launchd?), you don't have to write a script to manage the service at all.

On systemd, you declare which services yours depend on, how to run it, which user should be used to run your service, and many things are handled for you, including many security mechanisms you don't need to think about and provide further config for this stuff that would be a mess to handle with the traditional way of writing a custom rc script per service.

The problem is not being able to write in languages like ruby or python. It's to have to write something at all.

systemd makes many things declarative that were historically procedural, potentially painful to debug, code.

This eases distro maintenance and I suppose is one of the top reasons most distros adopted it.

wrt the Unix philosophy, discussions about it related to systemd are often (always?) too abstract to be useful, I'd suggest talking about specific problematic points.
by graemep | 2025-11-25 09:21:01+00:00
> Because before long it's a push for full-on communism, and even owning £100k is too much.

Why? It does not follow at all.

> And unless you can destroy capitalism on a global scale, there'll always be countries eager to take in very wealthy people.

So what? Let them take them. There are few consequences of that because non-financial assets are mostly not portable.
by pedalpete | 2025-11-25 09:21:42+00:00
That is such a great analogy!

Another I heard is that measuring EEG is like standing outside a stadium during a match and listening to the roar of the crowd.

Reading thoughts through EEG is like standing outside the stadium, listening for the roar of the crowd, and based on what you hear, knowing what the umpire's mother-in-law had for breakfast.
by yason | 2025-11-25 09:22:17+00:00
YouTube has the best content that you absolutely can't and won't find in commercial productions, and exactly because they aren't producing anything, they're just a platform. I think the sub-$10 premium without music was in the right price range but even at $20+ it proposes much, much more value than your random streaming service.

However, what they're not clear about is how the Premium fees actually land on the YT channels which is an irksome point. Premium views generate more income than unpaid views, that much I know. But I don't know if my subscription fees will benefit only the channels I watch or whether I my subscription is helping the big, popular shows that I never watch.
by businessmate | 2025-11-25 09:22:48+00:00
A recent multi-model test produced a result that would have been unthinkable in the search era. One major assistant described a listed company as having discontinued a revenue segment that represents more than a quarter of its business. Another model, queried minutes later, presented the same segment as the core driver of growth. Both answers were confident. Neither reflected the company’s filings.

This is not a marketing issue. It is a governance issue. AI assistants are no longer indexing documents. They are reconstructing narratives. And those narratives are already used by analysts, journalists, insurers, and regulators as first-pass inputs before any human reads the underlying disclosures.

This is why treating AI visibility as an extension of SEO is a strategic error. Visibility is no longer the goal. Accuracy is.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-25 09:22:50+00:00
Yes, it's uncomfortable to have it get "ridiculously" bright.

But there's a level that is comfortable that is higher than what you set for FFFFFF.

And the comfortable level for 1% of the screen is even higher.

HDR could take advantage of that to make more realistic scenes without making you uncomfortable. If it was coded right to respect your limits. Which is probably isn't right now. But it could be.
by jlengrand | 2025-11-25 09:23:26+00:00
And worse, when you search they KNOW what you want to watch and will show you EVERYTHING they have that is NOT what you want. Infuriating, I reverted back to the old ways a year back and haven't regretted it.

Same with Spotify, who has a solid catalog that I was happy to pay for. Now I pay double, for podcasts, shows, and now even freaking videos that I have never wanted or asked for and have no choice to not take.

And now they also the audacity to show me ads on PAID PLANS.

They don't deserve our money, customer focus is long gone.
Breaking AI Context Silos: A Proposal for a Portable Memory Protocol (PMX)
by sravanth_thota | 2025-11-25 09:24:05+00:00
I have been exploring how AI tools could share and reuse “memories” instead of locking them inside their own apps. Today, context is fragmented - if you switch assistants or LLMs, your history does not follow you.

This post outlines a proposal for PMX - Protocol for Memory Exchange, a neutral JSON-based schema for portable, user-owned context. It aims to standardize how memories, embeddings, attachments and source provenance can move between different AI tools and apps.

I built a small reference implementation to test it, but I am mainly looking for feedbackk on the protocol design and any missing pieces.

Full write-up: https://www.memside.com/blog/breaking-ai-context-silos-pmx-protocol
by sshine | 2025-11-25 09:24:57+00:00
I've been very happy with nixos-generators:

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

They let you produce SD-card images with custom NixOS'es.

Very useful when you want an exact software layout, and exact system settings, like what user accounts and SSH keys to include, what systemd services should run, what directories should be tmpfs, and how to interact with the local network using avahi.
by oblio | 2025-11-25 09:24:57+00:00
> Of course, this all assumes an effective pre-K reading program in the first place.

Pre-k is preschool aka kindergarten?

Is this really needed? It's really stressful for kids under 5 or 6 to read and is there a big enough statistical difference in outcome enough to rob them of some of their early youth?

I started reading around 6 years old and I was probably ahead of the vast majority of kids within 6 months.

Kids starting around 6 years old have much better focus and also greatly enhanced mental abilities overall.
by gspr | 2025-11-25 09:26:33+00:00
From where I sit (in Norway), it seems to have become standard corporate-speak in any company where English is widely used. They've even started using the directly translated noun "læring" in Norwegian, too. It's equally silly. Both variants are usually spoken by the type of manager who sets out all future directions based on whatever their LinkedIn circle is talking about. It's thus a very valuable word, because the rash it elicits lets me know what people to avoid working with.

I'm not sure if the people who use this word think it's proper English. They rarely seem to care what words mean anyway.
by joshtbradley | 2025-11-25 09:26:42+00:00
Fair point. I actually wish Altman/Amodei/Hassabis would stop overhyping the technology and also focus on the broader humanitarian mission.

Development coupled to DAUs… I’m not sure I agree that’s the problem. I would argue AI adoption is more due to utility than addictiveness. Unlike social media companies, they provide direct value to many consumers and professionals across many domains. Just today it helped me write 2k lines of code, think through how my family can negotiate a lawsuit, and plan for Christmas shopping. That’s not doom scrolling, that’s getting sh*t done.
by pedalpete | 2025-11-25 09:27:13+00:00
It's some of the lower hanging fruit that is complex enough that we don't understand, but we don't have to question thoughts, or consciousness.

What I'm saying isn't that if you stimulate pain, you won't remember it.

False memories would be a challenge. How would you input a memory of going up a tree to rescue a cat. Where would you even begin?
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 09:27:16+00:00
I severely doubt that I could ever be comfortable with 10% of my screen getting much brighter than the value I set as max brightness.

But say you're right. Now you've achieved images looking completely out of place. You've achieved making the surrounding GUI look grey instead of white. And the screen looks broken when it suddenly dims after switching tabs away from one with an HDR video. What's the point? Even ignoring the painful aspects (which is a big thing to ignore, since my laptop currently physically hurts me at night with no setting to make it not hurt me, which I don't appreciate), you're just making the experience of browsing the web worse. Why?
by hagbard_c | 2025-11-25 09:27:54+00:00
Macrokernel or microkernel or a grain of salt, whatever kernel you use does not matter when it comes to seeing the advantages of 'the *nix philosophy'. As to the 'useless uses of cat' these often make the pipe easier to grasp because the first step is always the same:

cat something|filter step 1|filter step 2|filter step 3

instead of

filter step 1 something|filter step 2|filter step 3

especially when confronted with filters which need their input to be fed in different ways

filter step 1 < something filter step 1 -i something filter something step 1 cat something|filter step 1

It may be less 'pure' to use cat as the first step in a pipe but who cares?
by sandbags | 2025-11-25 09:28:46+00:00
After implementing a behaviour tree library and realising the power of select & sequence I found myself wondering why they aren’t used more widely.

I’ve never done anything in crypto but watched in horror as people created immutable contracts with essentially Javascript programs. Surely it would be much easier to reason about/verify scripts written as a behaviour tree with a library of queries and actions. Even being able to limit the scope of modifications would be a win.
by nottorp | 2025-11-25 09:29:02+00:00
I'm an old fart :)

Intel tried to scale frequency up with the Pentium 4 in the name of performance, and it ended up extremely hot and power hungry. Just like some high end CPUs now, but then it applied to every model from Intel.

I suppose you don't remember when a Raspberry Pi could run fine even without a heatsink, let alone active cooling. That's more recent than the Pentium 4.
by dotancohen | 2025-11-25 09:29:14+00:00
> The state needs to make some changes to how content is licensed to prevent monopoly.

Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.

Now you could argue that some (much) older works are part of culture, and being exposed to that culture is necessary to function in society. But that then becomes an issue of how long copyright is necessary or reasonable. New works most certainly should be allowed to be monopolized by their creators - even if that means that some potential consumers are priced out of experiencing them.

You don't need to see every Disney movie. In fact, not seeing some of them will raise the bar to make better movies and will cause competition to emerge.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-11-25 09:29:41+00:00
Hi @nmil - Thanks for the awesome shout out! It's great to see that you've been enjoying the server. You mentioned reddit in your text. If you're active on reddit, and if you haven't done so already, maybe stop by the unofficial r/hetzner subreddit. There are a lot of long-time users there. --Katie
by bjoli | 2025-11-25 09:29:42+00:00
I was never an AI guy. I have always had a healthy dose of suspicion towards it. A week ago I decided to try it. I had ported the lovely c-rrb library, and was pretty satisfied with the result. However, when I was done with the basic port I have Gemini a go, and the result was an almost 3x speed increase for some basic fundamental operations. And a lot less memory use.

It did introduce bugs that it couldnt solve, but with a debugger it wasnt that hard to pin it down.
by spaceducks | 2025-11-25 09:31:18+00:00
The names and extensions of JPEG XL files aren't specified, except that the IANA media type is `image/jxl`. I think an argument could be made to use the double extension convention when the encoder performs lossless JPEG recompression, so image.jpg becomes image.jpg.jxl (while not entirely semantically correct, since it's not an additional layer of compression around the JPEG, it's a reimplementation of the image using identical coding features as JPEG, in JXL).

But like I said in my other comment (which got hidden for some reason), it should be noted that a recompressed JPEG is also a valid JXL on its own. If you have the means to turn a recompressed JPEG into the original, you also have the means to view native JXLs.

Hopefully adoption is widespread and we won't really have to worry about it. JPEG XL is a much more appealing format than WebP, and unlike WebP there are great arguments for software to support it other than "Google started using them, so they're everywhere now."
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-11-25 09:31:31+00:00
>So you advocate for executing all homeless? Thats more then 800,000 people.. What about homeless adjacent to? If you dont earn more then the median income what we get to enter you into some sort of hunger games elimination match?

Absolutely! But don't stop there! There are billions of useless subhumans out there who require a final solution[0] .

Kill those subhuman scum dead! Hell we should just set up gas chambers, that would be even cheaper than bullets, guns and people to shoot them!

That's a great suggestion, westpfelia!

Yes. We should kill every undesirable. The real trick is figuring out who decides which people are undesirable. You wouldn't want to be considered "undesirable" would you? That could be dangerous and unhealthy (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

[0] Poe's Law[1] strikes again, eh? I'm tripling down on it as you seem pretty gullible. It's almost a shame I'm copping to the satire. Heck you might start foaming at the mouth and try to doxx me. Calm down, chief! You're gonna give yourself an MI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law[2]

[2] Text of Poe's Law for your perusal:

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
by javcasas | 2025-11-25 09:32:34+00:00
Not everything can be associated to a single entity. Many operations work on two or more entities where none of them are the "master". Otherwise you end up with "coordinators".

Users.create(...) is the easy case. Try transfer_permissions(user1, user2, entity) while retaining transactionality and the ability of either user to cancel the transfer.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-25 09:33:26+00:00
I, for one, would be on-board with erasing coconut trees from the planet.

Why, one might ask?

Well, simple: Nobody really needs them, do they? And I, for one, don't enjoy the flavor of a coconut: I find that the taste lingers in my mouth in ways that others do not, such that it becomes a distraction to me inside of my little pea brain.

I find them to be ridiculously easy to detect in any dish, snack, or meal. My taste buds would be happier in a world where there were no coconuts to bother with.

Besides: The trees kill about 150 people every year.

(But then: While I'd actually be pretty fine with the elimination of the coconut, I also recognize that I live in a society with others who really do enjoy and find purpose with that particular fruit. So while it's certainly within my wheelhouse to dismiss it completely from my own existence, it's also really not my duty at all to tell others whether or not they're permitted to benefit in some way from one of those deadly blood coconuts.

I mean: It's just a coconut.)
by jibal | 2025-11-25 09:34:30+00:00
I was a UNIX developer (kernel, as well as userland programs like troff) for 7 years, working for the first company to provide commercial support. (Our founder, the former head of the Cornell CompSci department, while at RAND, had them make legal arrangements for Western Electric to provide RAND with a commercial license for $20,000 for the no-support tape that they provided to universities for $300 ... from there the commercial UNIX world took off.) Later I started my Linux life with the Yggdrasil distro, my first of many. Nowadays, in retirement, I do development on WSL on Windows. (Getting a working and convenient emacs environment on it was a bit of effort but now it's how I do all of my editing.)
by datenyan | 2025-11-25 09:35:53+00:00
To preface this, I'm not a Japanese speaker, so perhaps my fears are misplaced, but learning from anime seems like it'd present users with a very particular flavour of Japanese (i.e. one that is much more hyperactive or exaggerated than how the language might be used in day-to-day conversations between native speakers).

That being said, if this is meant to be an alternative to Duolingo, which is insistent that you absolutely need to know that the bear wants a cup of tea, then I guess this is infinitely better in that regard.
by BoppreH | 2025-11-25 09:35:54+00:00
I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly.

In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves
by gwd | 2025-11-25 09:36:08+00:00
> The author may be unduly harsh on her father. He got to be publicly married and have a private gay life.

If his wife had been content in a low-intimacy marriage, then that would be one thing. Some people are -- they have security, they have children, they have approval of their family, they're fine.

But his wife wasn't -- she wanted to end the marriage, to try to find romantic, sexual, and relational intimacy elsewhere. And he actively guilt-tripped her into staying with him, multiple times.

He got to experience romantic and sexual intimacy the way he wanted, while preventing his wife from doing the same. He stole decades of the prime of her life from her. There is simply no justification for that.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-25 09:36:25+00:00
There are programs with which you can add any desired amount of redundancy to your backup archives, so that they would survive corruption that does not affect a greater amount of data than the added redundancy.

For instance, on Linux there is par2cmdline. For all my backups, I create pax archives, which are then compressed, then encrypted, then expanded with par2create, then aggregated again in a single pax file (the legacy tar file formats are not good for faithfully storing all metadata of modern file systems and each kind of tar program may have proprietary non-portable extensions to handle this, therefore I use only the pax file format).

Besides that, important data should be replicated and stored on 2 or even 3 SSDs/HDDs/tapes, which should preferably be stored themselves in different locations.
by mort96 | 2025-11-25 09:36:49+00:00
Do they? Do people report that an HDR image on a web page that takes up roughly 10% of the screen looks more realistic? Do they report that an HDR YouTube video, which mostly consists of a screen recording with the recorded SDR FFF being mapped to the brightness of the sun, looks pretty? Do people like when their light-mode GUI suddenly turns grey as a part of it becomes 10x the brightness of what used to be white? (see e.g https://floss.social/@mort/115147174361502259)

Because that's what HDR web content is.

HDR movies playing on a livingroom TV? Sure, nothing against that. I mean it's stupid that it tries to achieve some kind of absolute brightness, but in principle, some form of "brighter than SDR FFF" could make sense there. But for web content, surrounded by an SDR GUI?
by lvl155 | 2025-11-25 09:37:06+00:00
80-90% of the teachers are not equipped to handle AI in the classrooms. You can’t expect teachers to know the SOTA that’s rapidly changing. And at the same time punish students from using available tools. Especially in public schools, teaching quality has plummeted in the past decade. This also applies to lower tier colleges. The whole point of education is to learn. Not to weed out talent. If students want to use AI tools to take shortcuts then it’s entirely on them. It will catch up to them at some point.
by questioner8216 | 2025-11-25 09:37:10+00:00
Good points. I have also heard others say the same in the past regarding Go. I know very little about Go or its language development, however.

I wonder if Go could easily add some features regarding that. There are different ways to go about it. 'final' in Java is different from 'const' in C++, for example, and Rust has borrow checking and 'const'. I think the language developers of the OCaml language has experimented with something inspired by Rust regarding concurrency.
by kennethh | 2025-11-25 09:37:21+00:00
The wealth tax is mostly and envy tax, it does not increase total tax revenue and leads to people do overinvest in property (house and cabin) to reduce the taxable wealth. For people starting a business you have to move if you get VC money as you have to pay tax on unrealized gains.

The Ministry of Finance has calculated that expatriates took NOK 142 billion in deferred income out of the country in 2022 and 2023. Given the current tax rate of 38 percent, this means that we will lose more than NOK 50 billion in tax if we are unable to get them back home before 2027. On the other hand, we lose around NOK 0.77 billion in tax each year because expatriates are exempt from the high and uniquely Norwegian wealth tax. https://www.nhh.no/nhh-bulletin/artikkelarkiv/2025/april/lyt...

The wealth tax increase has lead to less total tax income due to the income tax not being paid to Norway any longer.

As usual the upper middle class pays most of the wealth tax, 12% of the population paid wealth tax. If you have wealth beyond 170.000$ (1.76 million NOK) you pay 1% of the amount above. Private home and second house (cabin) has reduced value. Average salary in Norway is around 700.000 NOK.
by nicce | 2025-11-25 09:39:44+00:00
> Maybe it would be possible to design labs with LLM's in such a way that you teach them how to evaluate the LLM's answer? This would require them to have knowledge of the underlying topic. That's probably possible with specialized tools / LLM prompts but is not going to help against them using a generic LLM like ChatGPT or a cheating tool that feeds into a generic model.

What you are desribing is that they should use LLM just after they know the topic. A dilemma.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-11-25 09:40:34+00:00
> Except silicon, power, and water (and a tiny amount of plastic/paper for packaging), what else does a fab need that only produces DRAM? If true, then power is far and away the most variable input cost.

Borrowing costs can be wildly variable and are the main cost of making silicon. All the "inputs" over the lifecycle of a fab are so completely dwarfed by the initial capital costs that you can pretty much ignore them in any economic analysis. The cost of making chips is the cost of borrowing money to pay for capital costs, and the depreciation of the value of that capital.