MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2025-11-30 23:41:54+00:00
> Culture matters too. One reason I stepped away from Linux was the noise, the debates that drowned out the joy of building.

No clue what he is babbling about. LFS/BLFS is active. FreeBSD doesn't have that. I am sorry but Linux is the better tinker-toy. I understand this upsets the BSD folks, but it is simply how it is. Granted, systemd and the corporatification took a huge toll into the Linux ecosystem but even now as it is in some ruins (KDE devs recently decreed that xorg will die and they will aid in the process of killing off xorg, by forcing everyone into wayland), it is still much more active as a tinker-toy. That's simply how it is.

I recall many years ago NetBSD on the mailing list pointed out that Linux now runs on more toasters than NetBSD. This is simply the power of tinkerification.

> Please keep FreeBSD the kind of place where thoughtful engineering is welcome without ego battles

K - for the three or four users worldwide.

> There’s also the practical side: keep the doors open with hardware vendors like Dell and HPE, so FreeBSD remains a first-class citizen.

Except that Linux supports more hardware. I am sorry FreeBSD people - there is reality. We can't offset and ignore it.

> My hope is simple: that you stay different. Not in the way that shouts for attention, but in the way that earns trust.

TempleOS also exists.

I think it is much more different than any of the BSDs.

> If someone wants hype or the latest shiny thing every month, they have Linux.

Right - and you don't have to go that route either. Imagine there is choice on Linux. I can run Linux without systemd - there is no problem with that. I don't need GNOME or KDE asking-for-donation begging devs killing xorg either. (Admittedly GTK and QT seem to be the only really surviving oldschool desktop GUIs and GTK is really unusuable nowadays.)

> the way the best of Unix always did, they should know they can find it here.

Yeah ok ... 500 out of 500 supercomputers running Linux ...

> And maybe, one day, someone will walk past a rack of servers, hear the steady, unhurried rhythm of a FreeBSD system still running

I used FreeBSD for a while until a certain event made me go back to Linux - my computer was shut off when I returned home. When I left, it was still turned on. It ran FreeBSD. This is of course episodical, but I never had that problem with Linux.

I think FreeBSD folks need to realise that Linux did some things better.
by tptacek | 2025-11-30 23:42:02+00:00
The piece is explicitly about retiring outdated security advice and doesn't claim to provide a complete, coherent defensive posture (that posture would have to depend on who you are and what your threat model is!). I don't like that they included the "recommendations for the public" section, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to read it as intending to be a complete action plan.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-11-30 23:42:13+00:00
It's a CDN, not an IP router. CDNs usually terminate TCP+TLS as close to the client as possible. This used to be done right at the edge - within the NIC for a long time, but CPUs have been more than capable for the last decade+

Few guesses:

1) CDN connects to backend server over TLS, using the national I.R. Iran root CA

2) CDN connects to backend server over HTTP

3) Backend server is running a nationally blessed Linux OS

For 1 & 2, the National Information Network would be implementing this DigiNotar style but they already own the root keys. For #3, the backend does so itself. These are the people who p0wned DigiNotar after all.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-30 23:42:51+00:00
That's fine. The thing is: I am different with Linux too. So I don't quite understand that FreeBSD focus.

From the BSDs, I think only OpenBSD has a really unique selling point with its focus on security. People ask "why pick FreeBSD rather than Linux" and most will not find compelling arguments in favour of FreeBSD there.
by endgame | 2025-11-30 23:43:07+00:00
I've used Nix for at least seven years, and I firmly believe that the language is a large part of the problem. Yes, the Nix language is "just another lazily-evaluated pure FP language in the ML tradition" and "it's like a lazily-evaluated JSON", but it has several large footguns. The biggest one is that spaces are use to separate elements in list literals as well as for function application. The second is the lack of a usable type system, in the sense that the programmer cannot assert the types of values in a useful way. Instead, you have to rely on comments and convention to know what a function's arguments are.

These two design warts also interact with each other really badly: If you try to put a function application into a list and forget to enclose it in parentheses, you instead insert the function as one element in the list and its arguments as successive elements. The usual result is "expected an X but got a function" error in some completely unrelated part of the code.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-30 23:43:16+00:00
> Russia especially

Russia is in no position to help Maduro, they're currently being bailed out by Tehran and Pyongyang. China could, and it's genuinely interesting to see them sitting it out so far [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/why-russia-and-china-are-...
by estearum | 2025-11-30 23:43:18+00:00
No argument about the enforceability of it. US law actually isn't even sufficient. The US body politic has to do it.

> Real debate happening around whether war crimes were committed

But the debate isn't about whether war crimes were committed. The debate is whether war crime law is relevant. And that debate is endless for the reason I just explained: the Trump admin will play the shell game of defining the relevant legal framework as X when it suits them, then Y when it suits them, then Z when it suits them, despite the fact that X Y and Z are mutually exclusive of each other.

Are they a stateless vessel? Are they narco-terrorists? Are they drug smugglers? Are they foreign invaders? Are they agents of the Venezuelan government?

Well, all and none of the above, depending on who is asking for what reason.

This is legal nihilism and Schmittian Decisionism. The administration has declared itself unbound by law altogether. All that matters is calling it a violation, collecting evidence, and when political powers shift, holding the relevant parties to account. Under a non-nihilistic/decisionist legal framework, there will be no shortage of chargeable offenses.
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-11-30 23:43:32+00:00
The stateless nature of Claude code is what annoys me so much. Like it has to spend so much time doing repetitious bootstraps. And how much it “picks up and propagates” random shit it finds in some document it wrote. It will echo back something it wrote that “stood out” and I’ll forget where it got that and ask “find where you found that info so we can remove it.” And it will do so but somehow mysteriously pick it up again and it will be because of some git commit message or something. It’s like a tune stuck in its head or something only it’s sticky for LLMs not humans.

And that describes the issues I had with “automatic memories” features things like ChatGPT had. Turns out it is an awful judge of things to remember. Like it would make memories like “cruffle is trying to make pepper soup with chicken stock”! Which it would then parrot back to me at some point 4 months later and I’d be like “WTF I figured it out”. The “# remember this” is much more powerful because know how sticky this stuff gets and id rather have it over index on my own forceful memories than random shit it decided.

I dunno. All I’m saying is you are right. The future is in having these things do a better job of remembering. And I don’t know if LLMs are the right tool for that. Keyword search isn’t either though. And vector search might not be either—I think it suffers from the same kinds of “catchy tune attack” an LLM might.

Somebody will figure it out somehow.
by tlubinski | 2025-11-30 23:43:41+00:00
The CCC had a nice talk last year about the data VW collects and what can be learned from it (all the data was unencrypted accessible): https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...

(unfortunately it's in German - but there is an english live translation available)
by sizzzzlerz | 2025-11-30 23:43:57+00:00
I had never heard of this before I saw something announcing this years adventure. It looked interesting so I gave it a try, doing 2024. I had a blast. In concept, its very similar to the Euler Project but oriented more towards programming rather than being heavily mathematical. Like Euler, the first part is typically trivial while part 2 can put the hammer down and make you think to devise an approach that can arrive at a solution in milliseconds rather than the death of the universe.
by GermanJablo | 2025-11-30 23:44:16+00:00
It's funny you mention that, because 4 days ago I wrote a blog post about exactly that: https://docnode.dev/blog/text-conflicts

You need OT or CRDT because otherwise you'd have LWW over the entire document. However, I agree that resolving conflicts at the character/letter level isn't the best idea. Doing it at the node level is a more reasonable balance.
by mindslight | 2025-11-30 23:44:22+00:00
It takes real time to get out a pressure gauge and check the pressure on each wheel, no? Furthermore, attention itself is a limited resource.

For example, power windows were always handy when getting on/off the highway and coming up to a toll booth where I'd have to give/take a ticket. It's much easier to hold a button (or even have a latching button) while spending my attention on actually driving.

I have one car with TPMS that's entirely done through the ABS controller measuring the relative diameters of the wheels. That's not a privacy or cost problem. Furthermore the privacy problem where wireless TPMS sensors are interrogatable is better framed as a security vulnerability in their design, rather than something intrinsic.

Weight is a red herring as I'd guess the fuel savings from having properly inflated tires outweighs the fuel spent on the extra mass.
by wavemode | 2025-11-30 23:44:38+00:00
> even though it's nearly akin to "use one password for everything"

It's not at all akin to that.

Firstly, every respectable password manager requires multi-factor authentication to log in to. Someone finding out the password to your manager is almost never sufficient. They would probably need to find it out as well as gain physical access to a device of yours which has the manager installed.

Secondly, the whole issue of "use one password for everything" is that if one site gets hacked and they store passwords insecurely (or, indeed, if the people who run the site are themselves malicious), then someone can use that same password to access all of your other accounts. So you have to trust the security of every single site you make an account with.

Using a password manager doesn't have that problem, since each site is being provided with a different password. So then you don't have to trust any website, you only have to trust the password manager itself. And you don't have to use a big cloud-hosted one if you distrust them - there are many password managers that you can just run locally on your computer (though without the cloud benefits of backup / disaster recovery). You can also just use a notebook with a padlock or something - frankly it doesn't really matter how you track your passwords, as long as nobody can get to it but you, and you use a different password for everything, and you have some plan for disaster recovery. That's the idea.
by hosh | 2025-11-30 23:45:26+00:00
It is not so black and white.

The BEAM ecosystem (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc) can do distributed microservices within a monolith.

A single monolith can be deployed in different ways to handle different scalability requirements. For example, a distinct set of pods responding to endpoints for reports, another set for just websocket connections, and the remaining ones for the rest of the endpoints. Those can be independently scaled but released on the same cadence.

There was a long form article I once read that reasoned through this. Given M number of code sources, there are N number of deployables. It is the delivery system’s job to transform M -> N. M is based on how the engineering team(s) work on code, whether that is a monorepo, multiple repos, shared libraries, etc. N is what makes sense operationally . By making it the delivery system’s job to transform M -> N, then you can decouple M and N. I don’t remember the title of that article anymore. (Maybe someone on the internet remembers).
by talys_cat | 2025-11-30 23:45:37+00:00
*torture screaming at the background

ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!

___

seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.

If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.

it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
by Dwedit | 2025-11-30 23:45:44+00:00
I don't think it works that way, the actual drive letter is a UTF-16 Unicode path. The application must be able to provide an "ANSI" string that encodes to that UTF-16 value if it uses an "ANSI" function to open the file. It's not like 8-bit systems where they just want the same 8-bit value.
CPU-only PPO solving TSPLIB lin318 in 20 mins (0.08% gap)
by jivaprime | 2025-11-30 23:45:46+00:00
Hi all

I’ve put together a repo demonstrating how to train PPO directly on a single TSPLIB instance (lin318) from scratch—without pre-training or GPUs.

Repo:https://github.com/jivaprime/TSP

1. Experiment Setup

Problem: TSPLIB lin318 (Opt: 42,029) & rd400

Hardware: Google Colab (CPU only)

Model: Single-instance PPO policy + Value network. Starts from random initialization.

Local Search: Light 2-opt during training, Numba-accelerated 3-opt for evaluation.

Core Concept: Instead of a "stable average-error minimizer," this policy is designed as a high-variance explorer. The goal isn't to keep the average gap low, but to occasionally "spike" very low-error tours that local search can polish.

2. Results: lin318

Best Shot: 42,064 (Gap ≈ +0.08%)

Time: Reached within ~20 minutes on Colab CPU.

According to the logs (included in the repo), the sub-0.1% shot appeared around elapsed=0:19:49. While the average error oscillates around 3–4%, the policy successfully locates a deep basin that 3-opt can exploit.

3. Extended Experiment: Smart ILS & rd400

I extended the pipeline with "Smart ILS" (Iterated Local Search) post-processing to see if we could hit the exact optimum.

A. lin318 + ILS

Took the PPO-generated tour (0.08% gap) as a seed.

Ran Smart ILS for ~20 mins.

Result: Reached the exact optimal (42,029).

B. rd400 + ILS

PPO Phase: ~2 hours on CPU. Produced tours with ~1.9% gap.

ILS Phase: Used PPO tours as seeds. Ran for ~40 mins.

Result: Reached 0.079% gap (Cost 15,293 vs Opt 15,281).

Summary

The workflow separates concerns effectively:

PPO: Drives the search into a high-quality basin (1–2% gap).

ILS: Digs deep within that basin to find the optimum.

If you are interested in instance-wise RL, CPU-based optimization, or comparing against ML-TSP baselines (POMO, AM, NeuroLKH), feel free to check out the code.

Constructive feedback is welcome!
by saint_fiasco | 2025-11-30 23:45:51+00:00
What if you fail for whatever reason and don't finish college? Then you spent a bunch of time and money for essentially no benefit.

College will always be worth it for people who are smart and driven and hard working. But a lot of people who are not like that are nevertheless encouraged to go to college because that's what everyone does.

The change in attitude towards college by the new generation is probably a reaction to the excesses of the previous one, when even mediocre students were encouraged to take a risk they were not prepared to even evaluate, let alone take.
by tomhow | 2025-11-30 23:46:02+00:00
Buried as a dupe for now, until a release post is published. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46101669 for more.

Previous discussion:

Ty: A fast Python type checker and language server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43918484 - May 2025 (287 comments)
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-30 23:46:18+00:00
I wasn't on IRC much in those days but yeah IRC was a subculture that wasn't great. A lot of people messing around with scripts too to harass people. Agreed.

I was thinking more about Usenet which was very helpful in my experience. When it was still a discussion forum and not a place for warez.

Though it goes for society as a whole. It's very hostile and confrontational now. I tend to avoid most mainstream situations now. I only frequent a few websites that are still ok (like this one), some fediverse, some cosplay and when going out I only go to specific LGBT-positive parties where a "rave culture" still exists (think the love everybody kinda thing). I'm done with this tough guy act that most males think is normal now.
by seizethecheese | 2025-11-30 23:47:44+00:00
> Right now, the frantic pace of deployment isn't about utility; it's about liquidity. It’s being shoved down our throats because some billionaires need to make some more billions before they die.

> We see the hallucinations. We see the errors. Let's pick the things which work and slowly integrate it into our lives. We don't need to do it this quarter just because some startup has to do an earnings call.

Citation needed?

To me this is a contentless rant. AI is about old billionaires getting richer before they die? It’s at least a lot more than that.

Seems like some people tried AI in 2023, got negative affinity for it, then just never update with new information. In my personal use, hallucinations are way down, and it’s just getting more and more useful.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-30 23:47:53+00:00
> US body politic has to do it

That body politic remains, for now, grounded in voters. The number of calls Congressmen receive in the coming days about this issue will determine whether it's taken seriously.

> the debate isn't about whether war crimes were committed. The debate is whether war crime law is relevant

First step in any court opinion is the establishment of juridiction. That's important here.

Even in this thread, we have folks arguing war crime statute doesn't apply. That appears to be false. It's an example of why debating and establishing that this law is relevant in the popular discourse is important.

> Are they a stateless vessel? Are they narco-terrorists? Are they drug smugglers? Are they foreign invaders? Are they agents of the Venezuelan government?

Another reason to focus on U.S. law. I don't believe these distinctions matter under it.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-30 23:47:56+00:00
>We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn

Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.

There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
by literalAardvark | 2025-11-30 23:48:10+00:00
All of modern web design is about removing as much freedom from html as possible. It's infuriating.

We had zoomable, downloadable images in the 90s, with bandwidth as the only constraint.

Now I've got 50x as many pixels and I'm forced to use a bookmarklet and 2 menus to be able to see it larger than my fingernail.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-30 23:48:11+00:00
That's where Linux fails too IMO. Both GNOME and KDE really suck in my opinion. Or perhaps suck is too strong a word. I find both to be hugely problematic.

That does not mean they do not work, mind you - GNOME succeeds in dumbing things down that even 60 years old grandmas could use it (until they misclick and then are presented with 20 windows all put side to side). And KDE gives a lot of flexibility in tweaking it how you may want it (if we ignore Nate's donation widget). But it just is still waaaaaaay too complicated and convoluted to use. I am better off just describing my system in .yml files and then have ruby autogenerate any configuration value than struggle through annoying widgets to find some semi-random semi-new setting (or none such setting existing such as is the case in GNOME). I'd wish we could liberate these DEs from upstream developers and their dictatorship. I mean, we, can, e. g. patch out the code that shouldn't exist (like Nate's Robin Hood widget), but I mean on a global basis as-is. We as users should be in full control of EVERYTHING - every widget. Everything these widgets do, too. And everything they don't do right now but should do. Like in evince, I hate that I can't have tabs. That annoys me. I am aware that libpapers changes this, but boy ... just try to discuss this with GNOMEy devs. That's just a waste of time. I want to decide on everything here - upstream must not be able to cripple my system or influence it in no way I approve of.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-11-30 23:48:12+00:00
>>I believe that success Linux has had is because of copyleft, and *BSD are riding on the coat tails of that.

Apparently many here are unaware of the history and story as to what stalled FreeBSD in a long lawsuit involving ATT. You need to read up on that. Copyleft had nothing to do with it.
by mc32 | 2025-11-30 23:48:24+00:00
Does anyone down there even like Maduro? As far as I can tell even “sympathetic” regimes down there are not fond of how he’s running the place. Given that, any public sentiment supporting him would be counterfeit.

Maduro has created an ongoing migrant crisis for a decade. Colombia, Chile, etc., are up to their gills in Venezuelan migrants already. Pretty sure lots of them would love to go back home if even a barely mediocre government replaced him.

They said, it’s their mess. They should fix it by themselves —we don’t need to go in there. Let them figure it out.
by kortilla | 2025-11-30 23:48:56+00:00
If you’re in any western democracy you should worry about propaganda bots from Iran, DPRK, Russia, and China.

They have well known active operations of helping fuel the flames of political division by amplifying both sides of extremely divisive topics.

If you’ve ever engaged in flame wars about abortion, brexit, Scottish independence, the Ukraine war, the Gaza war, etc, there is a really good chance there were many participants from one of those parties.