MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ianso | 2025-11-20 19:51:26+00:00
Very good question!

SDR + something like Reticulum or Yggdrasil would definitely provide the infra or network fabric for the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

However, a normal Android, e.g. a Pixel 7, can't to my knowledge be turned into a web server or a podman host for containers. (I know of people hosting websites on old Androids that are flashed or hacked).

Given phones already have a WiFi/WLAN radio chip, it's a shame to need extra kit for connectivity.

It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently and so you provoked me into writing down a series of scenarios in story format that illustrates what SHOULD be possible using current hardware, were it not, as dlcarrier says, locked down like a games console.

Here you go:

https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html
by zen928 | 2025-11-20 19:51:41+00:00
As long as we're reciting unrelated anecdotes to attempt emotional appeal over anything of substance, "Chat" has also driven young children to suicide. No one in their lives would have paid as much detail into reaffirming every negative thought pattern they had until they ended their own lives as much as an emotionless token predictor LLM running 24/7. They got their nihilism and idealization pushed back at them in a clear, cold tone they would have never gotten from docs, reading papers, reading textbooks. I dont think their outcomes were as amazing. Their mental condition wasnt even as rare of a circumstance to properly handle and treat, yet it failed at a fatal level.

I dont know why asking to not have LLMs shoved in your face in every facet of society always has to be rebutted by a subjective miracle experience akin to openai PR statements. You can have these conversations with chatgp- oh, your friend "Chat" without it being proliferated to education platforms. These concepts aren't in conflict with eachother, yet by coming to defense of their use as a mandated platform you want to brush away critique for reasons that are unknown to anybody else. Go ahead and keep talking to "Chat", maybe let the people suffering at the hands of low quality slop have their voice and chance to speak?
by ted_dunning | 2025-11-20 19:51:41+00:00
I don't read it that way.

The author is saying that those special purpose machines will age out quickly when the task of advanced computing shifts (again).

You seem to be making the assumption that "the huge neural networks they were designed for" are the only way to build AI. Things could shift under our feet again.

The author (and I) have seen too many people say that only to be proved very wrong shortly thereafter. This means that it doesn't quite have the logical force that one might think to assert that this time we have the approach right (ignore the previous 7 times somebody else said just the same thing).
by troupo | 2025-11-20 19:51:47+00:00
(long time no reply due to hitting HN's rate limit)

> Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.

Strange that you then spew absolute bullshit about GDPR.

> How about you?

I've worked in large multinational corporations (banking, streaming) that were "hit" with GDPR and spent several years making sure they are compliant. Not because GDPR is bad, but because no one really cared about the data collected, and where it ended up. [1]

Startups had it and have it easy since they can just not siphon all the data. Especially now, when you have all the tools to handle data properly. Hell, a decade ago you couldn't even get privacy-preserving analytics. Now you're drowning in them.

We're also preparing to launch a few (admittedly small scale) projects with friends, and what do you know? GDPR is the absolute last thing that even bothers us. You know why? We know what data to collect and for how long to store it, and we're not sending that data to thousands of "privacy-preserving partners".

"Company-destroying fines" boogeyman or whatever other "chilling effect" bullshit belongs in the mind of children and morons. Hell, I've seen banking regulators come, list issues, and give a deadline to fix them. Much less GDPR.

[1] That's not entirely true. Payment and payment-adjacent regulations are significantly more stringent than GDPR, so everything related to that was and is extremely serious. As anything related to things like "data of persons under state protection". It's never black and white.

However, in big companies, especially at the time, you would eventually end up with a lot of data duplicated across many systems, often barely connected. 10 years ago cleaning up that mess required companies to reverse engineer and document 10-15 years of bad/hasty/adhoc decisions and assumptions. Surprisingly often that resulted in just retiring certain internal microservices wholesale (they just were no longer needed) and/or significantly reducing bandwidth and storage requirements in certain cases (because you no longer cary and store heavy duplicate objects around).

So the main opposition to GDPR came not from "poor chilled startups", but from companies like Facebook and Google who rely on 24/7 surveillance exclusively, ad industry, and large corporations who didn't want to deal with cleaning up internal messes.
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-20 19:52:31+00:00
I'll politely disagree. I propose that Java and things like Tomcat or Weblogic Server killed Perl. Perl wasn't a language that let a lot of moderately skilled people work on the same project. Perl didn't have "the server" to deploy to.

Java allowed an army to work on the same project and gave managers "the server" that they could control. Java had doctrines and best practices and ant. TMTOWTDI means that the senior engineer can't bully people with best practices.
by cyberax | 2025-11-20 19:53:05+00:00
Well, yes. See above about the urbanism death spiral. Large cities suck the life away from smaller cities.

This is the direct consequence of allowing dense housing, and it's made _worse_ by allowing abominations like SROs or "microapartments". And then bunk beds (already happening in Singapore).

The correct action here is to STOP doing this. Prohibit building dense housing and, more importantly, dense office space. Provide tax incentives for remote work and for offices outside of city cores. Ideally, start un-densifying cities by creating more park spaces in place of dense housing.
by drabbiticus | 2025-11-20 19:54:12+00:00
> being dead is quite a good alibi

Maybe I'm misreading either TFA or your comment, but both Picasso and Apollinaire were alive in 1911?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire

Some more details from the Apollinaire wikipedia page:

> On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed Apollinaire on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later. The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal. Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa, but he was also exonerated. In fact, the theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.
by lazide | 2025-11-20 19:54:56+00:00
Sure, but if the engine grenades it can take it’s mounts with it and not shoot off like a bottle rocket in front of and over the plane, dropping down and under the plane instead (or even just sit there). Same with a compressor stall, or whatever.

It’s clear from the photos this wasn’t the engine failing at all, and in fact the engine kept producing a ton of thrust (probably until it ran out of fuel as it pulled it’s fuel line apart while departing the wing), and instead the thing that is supposed to be so incredibly strong that it restrains all this chaos failed.

Which is a pattern in this family of aircraft, but definitely not a common or normal thing in general eh?

Most aircraft, the engine stays with the airframe even if it turns into a giant burning pile of shrapnel and dead hopes and dreams.
by epolanski | 2025-11-20 19:55:16+00:00
> Look at the bottom

Also look at the top ;)

> Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash

That's beyond false, US provided little non-military help, the money mostly stayed in US and went to US contractors.

I don't need to tell you that those figures are also insanely inflated by crazy costs.

Zelenski himself has stated that he proposed multiple times to, e.g., send its navy to US ports to take the weapons so US taxpayers wouldn't have to bear the costs, but instead tens of billions went into that expense. Why? Because US support to Ukraine is a welfare machine for US contractors.

In total EU has provided around 3 times more between military and non-military.

https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/ukraine-support-tra...
by smaudet | 2025-11-20 19:55:33+00:00
> inconvenient, it is not a security risk

Mmm...not exactly. When security is difficult, the default fix is to turn it off, workaround, etc. Security should be relatively simple.

Increasing the difficulty of correctly configuring additional directories increases the chance something "bad" may happen. As a theorical example, for ssh say that config is not protected the same way keys are (on the file system or by policy). Pair this with some option that, when configured, exposes the contents of the keys.

Increasing the complexity required to secure something makes it inherently less secure.
by retrochameleon | 2025-11-20 19:56:07+00:00
I think you are trying to make the point that there is the ethical argument to consider the impact of a decision if your project has grown large enough that there is major dependence on it.

I do agree there is an ethical obligation to make some effort to consider impacts like that, and make an attempt to inform users of your intent, but that's all it is. No one is obligated to be ethical, either, when it comes to a personal project with volunteered time and effort.

I think the argument of obligation becomes a stronger if your project has taken on a lot of contributions from other parties. And yet, those contributors must acknowledge that they are willingly doing so with no promises except the posted license terms.
by bawolff | 2025-11-20 19:56:14+00:00
> The problem is that viewing this as justice relies on an assumption that the legal system fully resolves, as if everyone who is wronged can be made whole.

Are you suggesting being the victim of a crime should give you the right to hurt other people? Unrelated people at that?

Two wrongs do not make a right. I think it is entirely just to punish wrongdoers even if some other unknown party has also wronged the wrong doer at some point in the past.

> But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0])

How could entirely unsupported speech ever be in good faith?
by cyberax | 2025-11-20 19:56:38+00:00
> EDIT: It seems there was damage to the engine in the tail, even though this was not specified in the preliminary report, likely because it has not been sufficiently confirmed yet.

Yes, the initial videos were showing the tail engine flaming out. And in the 1979 crash, the engine also severed hydraulic lines that hold the slats extended. So they folded in due to the aerodynamic pressure, essentially stalling the wing.
by tucaz | 2025-11-20 19:57:03+00:00
All of the above and none at the same time.

Companies will run multiple things in parallel. Some will work. Some won’t.

Even the stuff that works, might work for a little time instead of the long run.

A lot will go to waste. A lot gets duplicated. A lot will be redone in the future.

My suggestion is: go as slow as you can but not slower. Do as little as possible but not less.
by whichquestion | 2025-11-20 19:57:22+00:00
LLMs have definitely helped me reduce my social anxiety when writing, especially in a technical work setting. I don’t use it like the respondent in the article though, I would feel really embarassed to not edit an llm’s output to be in my own voice. But I feel it helps provide me with some structure in whatever I’m trying to write when I don’t have the mental energy or wherewithal to provide it myself.
by loeg | 2025-11-20 19:57:32+00:00
Yeah, but DC-10 based tankers for wildfire fighting were still flying until the recent grounding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-10_Air_Tanker

(Blancolirio points out that the DC-10 tanker is what they modernized to relatively recently -- before that they were flying even more dangerous WW2 airframes for firefighting.)
Ask HN: Universal testing machines OEM software needed?
by DrNuke | 2025-11-20 19:58:04+00:00
Is anything resembling the Android (for mobile) and the ROS (for robotics) o.s. still needed for legacy and especially new universal testing machines, the likes you use for tensile, compression and a lot more tests of materials? With new and cheap materials being tentatively produced all the time these days, entry level and mid-tier universal testing machines of any form are popping up weekly but software is just... meh.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 19:58:20+00:00
> How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it.

I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.

Gone.

Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.

I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.

The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.

Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?

It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.
by Bender | 2025-11-20 19:59:02+00:00
That was just an example. There are a plethora of variations in comments, only some alluding to the script being a last minute work around. Some are about dependencies so people have some troubleshooting clues to save them time in a 3am outage. Some give history and context to specific values or settings so people do not just blindly say "oh, cargo cult" and back them out. It would take all day to list all the types of comments. Most comments are JIRA issue numbers or confluence pages but those were not optional.
by jfalcon | 2025-11-20 19:59:12+00:00
CUDA isn't all that and a bag of chips. It just is the Facebook/Twitter of the data science and from that LLM space. There are Tensor processors and other ASIC processing for specific compute functions that can give Nvidia a challenge but it's not unknown to every gamer that there has always been a performance difference between Nvidia and AMD/ATI.

Ok, point made Nvidia. Kudos.

ATI had their moment in the sun before ASIC ate their cryptocurrency lunch. So both still had/have relevance outside gaming. But, I see Intel is starting to take GPU space seriously and they shouldn't be ruled out.

And as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, there is Vulkan. There is also this idea of virtualized GPU as now the bottleneck isn't CPU... it's now GPU. As I mentioned there are Tensors, Moore's Law thresholds coming back again with 1 nanometer manufacturing, there is going to be a point where we hit a threshold again with current chips and we will have a change in technology - again.

So while Nvidia is living the life - unless they have a crystal ball of how tensors are going to go that they can move CUDA towards, there is going to be a "co-processor" future coming up and with that the next step towards NPUs will be taken. This is where Apple is aligning itself because, after all, they had the money and just said "Nope, we'll license this round out..."

AMD isn't out yet. They, along with Intel and others, just need to figure out where the next bottlenecks are and build those toll bridges.
by scotty79 | 2025-11-20 19:59:31+00:00
> This article provides a rigorous ontology of CUDA components: a systematic description of what exists in the CUDA ecosystem, how components relate to each other, their versioning semantics, compatibility rules, and failure modes.

That's the first instance in my life when somebody coherently described what the word 'ontology' means. I'm sure this explanation is wrong, but still...
by foobarian | 2025-11-20 19:59:52+00:00
There was a game I remember from the 80s that had such a (to me) tasteful background of still images to go with the text adventure; Time and Magik trilogy on Atari ST. [1]

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/28812/time-and-magik-the-tril...
by psychoslave | 2025-11-20 19:59:54+00:00
> You'll find that the resulting output becomes incoherent garbage.

I also do that kind of things with LLM. The other day, I don't remember the prompt (something casual really, not trying to trigger any issue) but le chat mistral started to regurgitate "the the the the the...".

And this morning I was trying a some local models, trying to see if they could output some Esperanto. Well, that was really a mess of random morphs thrown together. Not syntactically wrong, but so out of touch with any possible meaningful sentence.
by jjice | 2025-11-20 20:00:35+00:00
It wasn't anything special, but one I took a lot of personal enjoyment in was refactoring a god awful mess of untested, poorly written PHP that was at the core of the company's product. It was to the point that no one one the team wanted to touch it in case they'd break something. The CEO had written it and _hated_ any features being added (but always requested them) because it was so fragile.

I refactored it (on Director of Engineering's request) into discrete classes and functions that read well and were easily tested. Tested all our cases and even found existing bugs that were resolved in the move. This wasn't an incredible amount of code to begin with either. The initial file was probably 400-500 lines of code. This was not the feat of an incredible dev, it was just taking a minute to think and build it out. Most of the team could've also done the same in a day.

And then the CEO didn't like the idea of merging it, despite it being fully unit and integration test, along with a staging and canary testing plan.

I've heard they _still_ don't like to touch that file. The company isn't doing well. I don't think those two are correlated, but I do think the general mindset of the leadership does.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-11-20 20:00:56+00:00
> It's been many years since I wrote any Go for a living, but does Go seriously lack a way to say "foo is probably 32 bytes, give me the 32 byte array, and if I'm wrong about how big foo is, let me handle that" ?

Not in the static type signature, but you can do that as a runtime check either by casting and handling the potential panic (as described above) or by checking the size and returning an error if it's not as expected, which is what the library does.
by drob518 | 2025-11-20 20:01:24+00:00
When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly language on our Apple IIs, we would have been lost making a game with ZIL. That’s to say that Infocom made the right call. Still, it said something about the company that they treated a couple kids with respect and didn’t laugh in our faces. I wish I still had the letter.
by PotatoPancakes | 2025-11-20 20:01:53+00:00
Bach's most approachable music might be his cello suites.

But also, I think there are two camps of fans of "classical music" (by which I mean music in the styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, etc). There are those who listen to the music, and those who play it.

For the most part, those who only listen to music often prefer Romantic and Impressionist styles. From the moody and dramatic to the gentle and contemplative, these styles are very approachable to the untrained ear.

But those who play an instrument (or sing in a choir) spend lots of time practicing and rehearsing and interpreting the music as it's written on the page. This extra time makes all of the little nuances of Baroque music truly come to life. The classic example is Bach's Crab Canon, which is a fine little piece of music... but once you realize that the whole thing is a palindrome, and you can actively appreciate how the same parts work in a forward and backward context, it becomes really interesting and pleasant.

So if Bach doesn't do it for you, and you play an instrument, try diving into playing it yourself.
by kccqzy | 2025-11-20 20:01:56+00:00
> Airlines don’t collect most passenger information — travel agents do. Most passengers never deal with the airline until they check in for their flight at the airport. And standard travel agency procedures make them function, in practice, as quite effective “anonymizing proxies” for travellers.

So my takeaway is that for enhanced privacy I should try to book flights with travel agencies instead of directly with airlines. Is the advice still applicable or is it nowadays futile?
by dpark | 2025-11-20 20:03:06+00:00
I could suspend my disbelief for a moment and imagine that you are capable of reading 46 words per second. Sure. You happen to read about 10x faster than the average person at 250-300 words per minute. Congrats.

What I cannot believe is that you would in any way imagine that this is normal. Speed readers know that they read faster than other people and do not casually assume others could read The Hobbit in 34 minutes.

So no, I don’t actually believe you read this in 20 minutes, at >4 pages per minute, >46 words per second, and 10x faster than an average reader. Generously I would say you perhaps skimmed the doc in that time.

On the off chance that this is true, again congrats. You should know for the future that your experience reading does not map to the typical person who literally reads about 10x slower than you.
by tremon | 2025-11-20 20:03:20+00:00
> On the aft lug, on both the inboard and outboard fracture surfaces, a fatigue crack was observed where the aft lug bore met the aft lug forward face. For the forward lug's inboard fracture surface, fatigue cracks were observed along the lug bore. For the forward lug's outboard fracture surface, the fracture consisted entirely of overstress with no indications of fatigue cracking

If I'm parsing this correctly, they're saying that fatigue cracks should have been visible in the aft pylon mount, and that the forward mount was similarly fatigued but showed no damage on the outside?