MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-19 22:57:48+00:00
> Ordering bias. Early prompts listed market data newest→oldest. Even with explicit notes, several models still read it as oldest → newest, inferring the wrong state. Switching to oldest → newest fixed the immediate error and suggests a formatting prior in current LLMs.

This kind of error just feels comical to me, and really makes it hard for me to believe that AGI is anywhere near. LLM's struggle to understand the order of datasets, when explicitly told. This is like showing a coin trick to a child, except perhaps even simpler.
by creer | 2025-11-19 22:57:52+00:00
> getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned

Yes! There was a lesson in that and we all missed it. That was probably one of the failings of perl. It ran into a generation of people who never knew about "man pages", or couldn't read (jk - but only somewhat: for some people reading is very hard because various flavors of ADHD, dyslexia, executive disfunction, whatever) and the man page is then useless, or they go to google first and '$|++' failed (because google was raised on python).

Better marketing of the documentation would have helped.

I would say "we'll do better next time" but then perl 6... I'm not happy with perl 6 documentation. There is a lot of it - no problem there. But it insists on living online which necessitates a hosted search function. Which is always broken. And there is still no "local doc" solution.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-19 22:58:18+00:00
You misunderstand. The customer is the government, which pays for student education through 'student loans'. The government is an absentee farmer who pays a farm labourer to produce a crop many years in the future. The labourer would rather take the money and plant nothing, so the absentee landlord farmer wants him to send photos of the seed being planted.

But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-11-19 22:59:15+00:00
Do not buy into the hype, AWS and all the other cloud providers are extremely over priced.

If you don't have a specific need for a specific service they are offering stay away, it's a giant ripoff.

If you need generic stuff like VMs, data storage, etc. You are much better of using Hetzner, OVH, etc, and some standalone CDN if you need one.
by juancn | 2025-11-19 22:59:36+00:00
Does anyone care about RCS?

I mean, most of the world just uses WhatsApp (with the notable exception of the US which for some reason likes iMessage).

RCS is as crappy as SMS or MMS because it give carriers a say in the matter.

Interoperability should have just used plain old IP based protocols, having carriers in the mix is just asking for trouble.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-19 22:59:43+00:00
Ah, but I can assure you, it is just that simple.

If a number is not prime, then it is the product of at least two numbers smaller than itself.

If any of them are larger than its square root, all others must be smaller, or their product would be larger than the candidate prime.

Ergo, just check that the candidate is not evenly divisible by any number equal or lower than its square root.

This reasoning holds, independent of scale.

QED. Check mate. Shazam.
by mbivert | 2025-11-19 23:00:21+00:00
In addition to people believing weird things, such views are often highly tied to an environment.

Levitation is pure non-sense for people "in-doctrinated" (literally: ~ to have a doctrine within) by the contemporary, science-oriented environment.

Similarly, dismissing the existence of God(s) − or thinking about it, of levitation[0] − would have been unthinkable for people genuinely "in-doctrinated" by many (all?) historical religions.

Amusingly, contemporary science, which is often defined in opposition to blind religious ways, essentially operates like your garden-variety religion: faith practically required (among others, who can reproduce/prove (beyond a doubt) well-established results), hierarchy(ies)/rating system(s), esteemed texts, key public figures, etc.

Usually, the deeper people understand their own in-doctrination, the more prudent they are regarding what they may consider true or not.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitation_(paranormal)#Religi...
by rapnie | 2025-11-19 23:00:57+00:00
> sliding into a backwater in this space and an open air museum

Or a place that follows a different approach than "break it to make it" mad dash, that fosters a different - perhaps richer - culture with tech more aligned to people's needs, and overall healthier to live in. If there is a good set of regulations in place. And that is where EU is not consistent, and this backtracking not helpful.
by mfrye0 | 2025-11-19 23:01:02+00:00
I was looking for a version of a proxy that could maximize throughput to each LLM based on its limits. Basically max requests and input/output tokens per second.

I couldn't find something, so I rolled a version together based on redis and job queues. It works decently well, but I'd prefer to use something better if it exists.

Does anyone know of something like this that isn't completely over engineered / abstracted?
by mrandish | 2025-11-19 23:01:14+00:00
AmigaVision is very nice. One thing that's especially great for emulation users with modern hi-res flat screens is they've already done the work to set up proper integer scaling, cropping and scanline/shadow mask pixel shaders.

Many of the Amiga's legendary games and graphics were specifically hand-crafted to look best on high-quality analog RGB CRTs. It's shocking how much better they look when properly displayed. The hard-edged, square block pixels on so many retro Youtube channels is not just technically incorrect - it's not what the original developers and artists created or ever intended their users to see.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-19 23:01:55+00:00
No it doesn't. A website's own preferences fall under the 'necessary for site functionality" exception.

Besides how many sites actually have this as the only reason for cookies? Every time I get a new cookie banner I check it and there's always lots of data shared with "trusted partners". Even sites of companies that purely make money off their own products and services and shouldn't need to sell data. Businesses are just addicted to it.

The only provision I like is that they may only ask once every 6 months. However personally I wish that they'd make it a requirement to honour the do not track flag and never ask anything in that case. The common argument that browsers turn it on by default doesn't matter in the EU because tracking should be opt-in here anyway so this is expected behaviour. The browsers would quickly bring the flag back if it actually serves a purpose.

I'll keep blocking all ads and tracking anyway.
by erikpukinskis | 2025-11-19 23:02:12+00:00
If I build and my own CDN, it will go down. And I will have to fix it at 2am.

If I use CloudFlare, it will also go down, but probably for less time, and someone else has to be up at 2am fixing it.

> Build what delivers your value.

Like Hershey builds grocery stores?

Like Budweiser builds bars?

This can’t be serious.

We live in a society.
by pksebben | 2025-11-19 23:02:31+00:00
Some things in sci fi have become simply sci - megacorps that behave like nation states, the internet, jetpacks, robots... I feel like the trope that we will see realized going forward is "Humanists versus Transhumanists". We have these mores and morality and it's largely been able to chug along on the strength of collective identity and the expansion thereof - we are humans, so we try to do good by humans. There are shades in all directions (like animal rights - consciousness is valuable no matter who has it) but by and large we've been able to identify that if something appears to feel pain or trauma, that's a thing to have a moral stance about.

But the machines have done this already. There are well documented instances of these things mimicing those affects. Now, we are pretty sure that those examples were not doing what they appeared to - just probablistically combining a series of words where the topic was pain or anguish etc, but once you get into chain-of-thought and persistent memory things begin to get a lot more nuanced and difficult to define.

We need to have a real sit-down with our collective selves and figure out what it is about ourselves that we find valuable. For myself, the best I've come up with is that I value diversity of thought, robust cellular systems of independent actors, and contribution to the corpus of (not necessarily human) achievement.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-11-19 23:03:34+00:00
I am 100% not willing to put that much effort into it.

Actually I am not willing to spend that much time reading "cloud" provider docs and best practices.

What I care about is hosting services and getting the mission done. I value predictable and reasonable costs much more than "flexibility".

In general whatever host I have ever used typically have "cloud" offerings too. So real services go to dedicated hosts, experiments go into 5 buck a month vms.
by underscoremark | 2025-11-19 23:03:36+00:00
No sarcasm. Thanks for asking (no sarcasm, again).

You asked the right questions, IMO, and I think they are self evident.

> do they fill the exact same space?

No.

> is Blender adopted by different types of companies?

Yes.

A company or institution that has money to burn will opt for more "professional" suites (Maya, Microsoft, ...). Smaller entities will use the cheaper alternatives (Blender, Linux, ...).
by nyrikki | 2025-11-19 23:04:21+00:00
There is a bit of a problem with polysemy here.

While the input for qemu is called a "pve-cpuset" for affinity[0], it is using explicitly the taskset[1][3] command.

This is different than cpuset[2], or how libvirt allows the creation of partitions[3] using systemd slices in your case.

The huge advantage is that setting up basic slices can be done when provisioning the hypervisor, and you don't have the hard code cpu pinning numbers as you would in taskset, plus in theory it could be dynamic.

From the libvirt page[4]

... <resource> <partition>/machine/production</partition> </resource> ...

As cpusets are hierarchical, one could use various namespace schemes, which change per hypervisor, not exposing that implementation detail to the guest configuration. Think migrating from an old 16 core CPU to something more modern, and how all those guests will be pinned to a fraction of the new cores without user interaction.

Unfortunately I am deep into podman right now and don't have a proxmox at the moment or I would try to submit a bug.

This page[5] covers how even inter CCD traffic even on Ryzen is ~5x compared to local. That is something that would break the normal affinity if you move to a chip with more cores on a CCD as an example. And you can't see CCD placement in the normal numa-ish tools.

To be honest most of what I do wouldn't generalize, but you could use cpusets, with a hierarchy and open the choice to try and improve latency without requiring each person launching a self service VM to hard code the core ID's.

I do wish I had the time and resources to document this well, but hopefully that helps explain more about at least the cpuset part, not even applying the hard partitioning you could do to ensure say ceph is still running when you start to thrash etc...

[0] https://git.proxmox.com/?p=qemu-server.git;a=blob;f=src/PVE/...

[1] https://git.proxmox.com/?p=qemu-server.git;a=blob;f=src/PVE/...

[2] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.html#cpuset

[3] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/taskset.1.html

[4] https://libvirt.org/cgroups.html#using-custom-partitions

[5] https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote/proxmox-tuning-low-laten...
by ddtaylor | 2025-11-19 23:04:23+00:00
What's the problem with that?

I'm not in that field of study and I'm not going to attempt to perform all of that science. That has been delegated to other scientists. They produced a comprehensive study, which summarizes to layman terms as "short form bad."

You're not required to understand the nuts and bolts of why. Hell, if you want you can just blindly accept whatever you want, but I think accepting highly peer reviewed studies to do the research for you.
by evanelias | 2025-11-19 23:04:39+00:00
The purpose of any software license is to permit you to do things that, in the absence of a license, would otherwise violate the authors' copyright. This is unrelated to whether or not the author chooses to accept contributions. No FOSS license requires the copyright holder to accept third-party contributions upstream, nor do they directly discuss this topic at all.

Licenses are not invitations to collaborate. That simply isn't their purpose. This is why CONTRIBUTING.md is a completely separate document.

Most of the popular "OSI-approved" licenses predate the OSI's existence, so there's no plausible argument that adopters of these licenses are opting-in to a collaborative social movement with an "unwritten social contract" en masse.

For example, the original motivation for the MIT license was simply avoiding legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History
by spuz | 2025-11-19 23:04:54+00:00
> So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?

I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.

There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.
by neilv | 2025-11-19 23:05:17+00:00
The root problem is that a lot of higher education is nurturing a culture of cheaters right now.

Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters.

Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling students that they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task.

Schools with any integrity should be bending over backwards to find, nurture, and support students of integrity.

And to save those who only got admitted by being sketchy, but first semester is a chance to unlearn the bad lessons from before.

Not by treating them as criminals to be monitored, but by treating them like the respectable people they should aspire to be, and which the school expects and requires that they be.

And, for any hopelessly shitty students, who fail to honor this first semester extension of trust, the school should smack them to the curb. Lost tuition income, lost named buildings/chairs, and expensive lawsuits from helicopter parents, be damned.
by creer | 2025-11-19 23:05:41+00:00
> It has a logic but it's its own logic.

Which is covered in the very first section of the course book? Yes it has its own logic. So do lots of programming languages.

How far do we need to take "not reading the doc"? That the very first chapter is too far? People who gave up on perl because of that... really would not have survived the rest of the course anyway?
by vacuity | 2025-11-19 23:05:49+00:00
In fairness, I think reading abstracts is a good way to 1) quickly gain information and 2) figure out if the paper is worth the time to read. Especially for paywalled papers, and when I'm trying to get a broad sense of different ideas, consuming a few tens of abstracts is a nice way to get a feel for the research.

On a somewhat different note, I also tend to only read the comments of HN threads and Youtube videos...
by mojoe | 2025-11-19 23:06:00+00:00
That's really cool! Yes, it's always been amazing to me how many people will respond helpfully to a random cold email.

And well-known authors are similar to other artists in the fact that they have steep rates for commissions. For instance, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com pays a flat reasonable rate of 14 cents per word ($840 for a 6k word story). I've talked to well-known authors who would charge $5/word for that same story on commission ($30k)
by bitwize | 2025-11-19 23:06:29+00:00
Open source sickos: Yes... hahaha... YES!

Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are realizing that Microsoft (any proprietary vendor really) is NOT their friend, and looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-11-19 23:06:36+00:00
It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.

Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.

Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.

Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
by tombert | 2025-11-19 23:06:39+00:00
Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).

In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.

Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.
by dijit | 2025-11-19 23:06:43+00:00
Hear hear.

My company had consultants come in to help with GDPR, I left after months of them being hired: more confused than I went in.

So I went to the source, and I found it surprisingly easy to read and quite clear.

I think theres a lot of bad faith discussion about the GDPR being complex by people who have a financial interest in people disliking it (or, parroting what someone else said).

Heres the full text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

87 pages and nearly every edge case is carved out. Takes 20 minutes to read.
by imiric | 2025-11-19 23:07:27+00:00
Whether they're directly doing business with data brokers or not is not the point. They're indirectly profiting from the profiles they build by selling access to them via their advertising platform. It's just a roundabout way of doing business, as is common in advertising.

Besides, even if they're not selling these profiles, they will end up on data broker markets one way or another. Whether their lack of security allows companies to export it, as in Meta's case, or simply by using their tools to gather as much information about people as possible.

The reality is that nobody outside of these companies, and likely only people in executive positions, knows how they operate internally. They have an army of PR and legal people to do their bidding. Whatever practices the public thinks these companies are or aren't involved with is mere guesswork, but one thing is certain: they don't maintain their size and power by keeping their hands clean. But then again, I'm probably on the wrong forum for this line of thinking.
by abixb | 2025-11-19 23:07:45+00:00
Insightful paper. Policy/lawmakers needs to take much more input from high-quality, publicly funded (aka unbiased) research and make informed decisions on restricting content type. The social media companies rn are akin to tobacco companies selling products/services to kids (and adults!) with zero meaningful restriction or warnings. There's a mountain of research showing cognitive performance impacts from content consumed through smartphone, especially fluffy, low quality "algorithmic feed" content.

BTW, I still need to use YouTube and this one extension has protected my YouTube experience from being TikTok-ified -- "ShortsBlocker - Remove Shorts from YouTube" [0]

When people do send me random Shorts, I use another browser (consciously) to watch that particular video and shut it back down. You can also pair that with "Block YouTube Feed - Homepage, Sidebar Videos" [1] for another layer of YouTube cruft removal.

Finally, I've also installed "Turn Off YouTube Comments & Live Chat" [2] which keeps me from scrolling down to comments and letting that 'color' my perception of the video -- has restored my own ability to judge the value of a video.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-remov...

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/block-youtube-feed-...

[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turn-off-youtube-co...
by salawat | 2025-11-19 23:08:00+00:00
Note: Insurers like United Healthcare have been caught creating incentive programs whereby elder care facilities are essentially rewarded for minimizing referrals of seniors to medical care. If you don't think that there are perverse forces at work in the American Healthcare payment system, it is my extreme privilege to bring these types of things to your awareness.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-t...

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/unitedhealth-secretly-p...

Health insurers/private equity are not your friends!
by sothatsit | 2025-11-19 23:08:09+00:00
I despise these laws! Australia made Google pay the big news websites for linking to them, which is just insane to me. It inevitably favours the big news providers that can negotiate directly with Google, and the laws even stop tech companies from just removing the news companies from their search results as well. It very much feels like taking from one big company to prop up other big companies... Who benefits again?!
by Izkata | 2025-11-19 23:08:28+00:00
> A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life.

Planning a route through an amusement park or mall to reach the most things in the least time...

There's a lot we don't need mathematical perfection on so it never registers as math, but improved intuition can unconsciously help in completely unexpected ways. Like an understanding of latency for why a line at a convention was set up badly.
by quickthrowman | 2025-11-19 23:08:43+00:00
If you’re a contractor or tradesperson, chances are you’re having sheet goods delivered to the job site by a supply house, unless it’s a tiny project/service call.

My electricians have pipe racks on their work vans, but if they’re buying 5,000 feet of 3/4” conduit (10’ sticks), you better believe a box truck will deliver it. If they need 40 feet for a quick service call, that’s what the pipe racks are for.

I agree with you though, the ability to move sheet goods flat in a truck bed is almost completely unnecessary.

If you really want to do this in a 5’ bed pickup, you can get a rack for above the cab and a crossbar with two posts that installs into the topper mounting holes near the tailgate to provide a 4’x8’ plane to carry sheet goods on. Here’s a universal example for $200, a nicer one meant for a specific truck is probably 3-4x more: https://wmastore.com/product/universal-drywall-plywood-mattr...