MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kotaKat | 2025-12-10 10:09:27+00:00
zScaler is a load of shit, especially with some of its absolutely dumb policies like “malicious TLDs”.

Because the Framework laptop site at frame.work is malicious, of course.

God, I love CURLing crap from my workstation and not getting the files I needed but instead a bunch of mangled HTML telling me zScaler was going to scan what I was going to download.

Bonus points that it puts me in the wrong country because I’m closer to Montreal than any American locations so half the time I’m stuck in French Canadian on the web from my New York office.

Triple bonus points that I’m required to test speed at client sites and zScaler completely mangles our presentable results.

Quadruple bonus points that I put in "because I feel like it" into every elevation request I make on my corporate machine and our "cyber team" has literally never looked at elevation reports to ask what the hell I'm doing...
by robot_jesus | 2025-12-10 10:09:39+00:00
Steve Jobs famously said, "If you do the right things on the top line, the bottom line will follow.”

Paraphrased: if you do things with the explicit goal to optimize revenue, it harms your business success. If you do things that optimize user experience and delight customers, it will provide more value long-term.

Voice assistants are in that latter camp, I believe. (And I think of this quote constantly as Tim Cook crams more ads into the ecosystem)
by pjmlp | 2025-12-10 10:09:47+00:00
GNU/Linux isn't the only system out there, POSIX last update was in 2024 (when C requirement got upgraded to C17), and yes some parts of it are outdated in modern platforms, especially Apple, Google, Microsoft OSes and Cloud infrastructure.

Still, who supports POSIX is expected to have a C compiler available if applying for the OpenGroup stamp.
by apexalpha | 2025-12-10 10:10:24+00:00
I'm not sure if you're serious but in case you are (or other people):

TLS inspection is for EVERYTHING in your network, not just your publicly reachable URLs.

Putting Cloudflare anti-DDoS in front of your website is not the same as breaking all encryption on your internal networks.

Google can already see the content of this site since it's hosted... on the internet.
by nandomrumber | 2025-12-10 10:10:38+00:00
Yes, you can run a turbine 24/7, just not 365 days a year.

For gas turbines, n+1 is probably good enough for up to n=10, then n+2 and so on.

If one breaks down or is undergoing maintenance you have a spare.

Solar can’t work like this. Even if you build 2n solar capacity, you still have a not insignificant fraction of each day with no power.

Meanwhile a gas turbine can be running continuously for week to months between service intervals.

Just add batteries? Ok, but that’s no longer solar, and comes with not insignificant additional costs and maintenance etc.
by tarsinge | 2025-12-10 10:11:06+00:00
> “The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.” Schools forgot and flipped that.

That’s a nice premise, but it seems the author imply the school has to come up with some idealized activity that would magically kids teach kid reading, writing or doing maths problems without really doing it, because it’s supposedly boring.

But in reality at one point kids have to acquire the love for these, that they are worth doing and rewarding for the sake of it.

So my (maybe unpopular) opinion is that the author is part of the problem. Because the root cause is that it’s parents, not school and teachers, that forgot it’s their role to nurture their kids into this. I’m not blaming parents for the multiple complex reasons they aren’t doing it, but it’s time we stop putting everything on teachers.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-10 10:11:07+00:00
There are software workarounds for some of those and very simple hardware workarounds for the others. In a stack-based architecture there should also be some directly-addressable registers for storing long-lived temporary variables. Most stack-based architectures included some set of stack shuffling operations that solved the problem of common subexpression elimination.

The real disadvantage is that the stack operations share the output operand, which introduces a resource dependency between otherwise independent operations, which prevents their concurrent execution.

There are hardware workarounds even for this, but the hardware would become much more complex, which is unlikely to be worthwhile.
by hallvaaw | 2025-12-10 10:11:30+00:00
UkulelExplorer https://github.com/hallvaaw/UkulelExplorer - An app for exploring the ukulele fretboard with custom tunings. Because of its small body size and having four strings, people often think of ukulele as a toy rather than an instrument. I believe that by exploring and finding custom tunings, the ukulele can be a quite versatile instrument.
by rdsubhas | 2025-12-10 10:11:46+00:00
20 years ago, I used to consult with Fortune 500 companies that run Oracle and IBM products (web servers and Java frameworks).

These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support.

Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?

Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.

In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.

The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.

Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.

If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.
by defrost | 2025-12-10 10:12:23+00:00
There are way more things to worry about than sharks, placement, wave mass, reef suck, if you go down will you come up again, etc.

The Right, going well: https://youtu.be/cYb9HOuhBrc?t=299

The Right, a bit wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjHaFOGBPzk

More on that location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X03-6lTxFTg
by orwin | 2025-12-10 10:13:44+00:00
So about ionising radiation: UNSCEAR recommendation is to act as if no threshold effect exist at low doses for indeterministic effects (even though effectively we act as if a 100mSv threshold exists), but the medical literature isn't as clear cut. Precautionary principle should be respected in any cases.

The most recent epidemiology studies (studies on _very_ large cohort) do seems to favour a linear model without threshold (or, if the threshold exists, it is so low ambient radiation is enough to go past it), so I think you're right, but I wanted to nitpick because you wrote it like it was settled science and it's not yet, so I had to look up the PM 2.5 stuff too.
by dcminter | 2025-12-10 10:13:46+00:00
Yeah, and Java has its nice cacerts file so that should have been easy, but then we were using Bazel which does the "hermetic builds" thing so that had to be told about it separately, and on and on with all the other special-snowflake tools.

It added huge amounts of friction which was one reason I decided to move on from that gig.
by TwoFx | 2025-12-10 10:13:47+00:00
I highly recommend watching the relevant section of that video (4:38 to 8:59) and then implementing it yourself in whatever system you know that can draw lines and circles (I did it in Godot; it took only a few minutes to learn enough Godot to start on the algorithm).

It's absolutely mind-blowing that so little code can produce such a beautiful result. It's also fun to play with the parameters and see how they affect how the cloth feels.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-10 10:14:20+00:00
The whole point of The Three Musketeers is that they are men out of their time, in an end-of-epoch story, surely.

Nobody drinks and carouses like they do, nobody has their sense of chivalry, artistry and old-fashioned justice. The world has lost its colour, its joy and its sense of fairness, and they are loyal to an institution which is itself corrupted and whose time is clearly ending. And so they are lost: they have no cause and they are slowly destroying themselves.

This is why they are portrayed as musketeers who think muskets (representing callous modernity) are clumsy and uncouth. It underscores that the three don't even feel they really fit with the rest of the musketeers. They know muskets have their place. It's just not with them. So there's no reason to explain them away logically. It's a literary device.

The second point is that D'Artagnan is there to remind them of who they were and could be again. D'Artagnan is the hero of the story because he has not been corrupted by life experience.

The third layer is he's also a proxy for the reader who wishes they were there. He is there to get life lessons on the reader's behalf: that stories don't tell the whole truth, that people begin to confuse themselves with their own personal mythologies, that fame isn't reality, that there are risks in meeting your heroes, that adults will let you down, that no institution is better than its people, etc.

This trope has been parodied in various ways since, not least I think in the form of "person who confuses actors for the people they play and convinces them they know as much about the job as the characters they play". Which has itself been parodied in Three Amigos! and also in Galaxy Quest.

And the trope of guns being impersonal compared to swords and knives turns up everywhere.
by mchaver | 2025-12-10 10:15:11+00:00
I've been working on a digital math workbook. Currently the demo covers fourth grade math. There is a practice mode where you can select the skills you to want practice. There is also a customizable dashboard where you can setup your own tasks. There is still a lot of work to do with improving the UI, but I think it is a good start.

I am currently working on fifth grade math. My plan is to cover first grade math up to Calculus and High School Physics. I envision it as a companion tool for Khan Academy/Math Class/Math Books. It is inspired by Chris McMullen's math workbooks.

Check out the demo. No signup required. Progress is only stored locally. https://demo.numerikos.com/
by DeusExMachina | 2025-12-10 10:15:52+00:00
> why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man?

Because that is not a given, as shown by the entirety of human history. Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal.

> Do you need god in your life to want to love your children?

Most people don't need God to love their children, and the ones that don't might not be convinced otherwise by God.

That said, what do you do exactly for that love? Do you cheat and steal to guarantee their future over others? If not because of some "benefit to society" logical argument that would convince no-one, why would one even care about that and not exploit society for their own benefit?

Almost everyone loves themselves and their family above all others. Only God can tell you to love your neighbors and even your enemies.

There are still many societies around the world where most people are mostly self centered and you can see the results. You are taking for granted many values you have, as if you arrived to them logically and indipendently instead of learning them from your parents and a society that derived them from God for centuries.
by ben_w | 2025-12-10 10:15:59+00:00
I found myself losing interest but for different reasons. A different magic tool besides LLMs that promised to solve problems I never had, but which has become necessary as most job adverts called for it.

Reactive.

Not just React itself, but the paradigm, so also SwiftUI.

I never had a problem with "massive ViewControllers", the magic that's supposed to glue it all together is just a little bit fragile and hard to debug when it does break, and the syntactic sugar (at least for SwiftUI) is just self-similar enough for me to keep mixing it up.

But learning new languages? Nah, I'm currently learning/getting experience with JavaScript and ruby by code-reviewing LLM output.
by cornonthecobra | 2025-12-10 10:15:59+00:00
Three of the banks I use have their websites/apps go through CloudFlare. So does the electronic records and messaging system used by my doctor. A lawyer friend uses a secure documents transfer service that is protect by guess who.

Who needs to let CF directly onto their network when they already sit between client and provider for critically-private, privileged communications and records access?
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-10 10:16:28+00:00
> For example, it can be compiled on basically any platform that contains a CPU.

It will be pretty hard to find a platform which doesn't have at least a C99 compiler.

For instance even SDCC has uptodate C standard support (better than MSVC actually), and that covers most 8-bit CPUs all the way back to the 70's:

https://sdcc.sourceforge.net/

Also let's not forget that C99 is a quarter century old by now. That's about as old as K&R C was in 1999 ;)

> I'll use Zig or Rust or something.

I like Zig a lot (Rust not so much), but both Zig and Rust still have feature gaps compared to C99 which often makes me prefer C99 for day-to-day coding. Most importantly struct initalization both in Zig and Rust is very rudimentary compared to C99's designated init feature set - and somehow the authors of modern languages often don't see the benefits of having powerful data initialization features in the language. There are also lots of little paper cuts where both Zig and Rust balance convenience versus safety just a little too much away from convenience.
by preisschild | 2025-12-10 10:16:50+00:00
While that is certainly better, the original point still stands. If the company goes bust the latest source code will only be open source after 4 years. By that time other software has likely taken over the need in the first place, because not having that need fulfilled for 4 years is mostly not reasonable. And older versions often don't have compatibility with new versions either.
by godelski | 2025-12-10 10:17:19+00:00
Both definitely contribute. But at the same time the people who stay wizards (and the people you realize are wizards but didn't previously) only appear to be more magical than ever.

Some magic tricks are unimpressive when you know how they are done. But that's not true for all of them. Some of them only become more and more impressive, only truly being able to be appreciated by other masters. The best magic tricks don't just impress an audience, they impress an audience of magicians.
by KronisLV | 2025-12-10 10:18:16+00:00
> Are any of them integrated with git?

All of the models that can do tool calls are typically good enough to use Git.

Just this week I used both Claude Code and Codex to look at unstaged/staged changes and to review them multiple times, even do comparison between a feature branch and the main branch to identify why a particular feature might have broken in the feature branch.
by piaste | 2025-12-10 10:18:21+00:00
> I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. [..] There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing.

Don't need to make PRs to benefit from the source being available. Running software whose source code has been under public eyeballs, and that I have compiled myself (or that a trusted third-party has compiled) is far more secure than running a binary blob that may or may not do what the developer's marketing page promises.

> If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license.

Closed-source apps have had source-code escrow clauses for a long time, exactly to avoid that problem. "If my company shuts down, you get all the source code and can do whatever you want with it."

Such clauses can, and should, be brought over to source-available licenses, where they would also be trivial since you don't even need a physical escrow.
by pfortuny | 2025-12-10 10:18:32+00:00
Hi, I guess you have already tried.

My Uni also made it difficult but I succeeded in setting up a working davmail, using the exchange protocol.

Mail my username at gmail.com if you think I can help.

Gateway: Exchange Protocol: O365Interactive OWA or EWS (Exchange) URL: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx

(follow the instructions at https://davmail.sourceforge.net/faq.html)
by spwa4 | 2025-12-10 10:20:26+00:00
> I don't understand what you mean, most models aren't anywhere near big in terms of code complexity, once you have the efficient primitives to build on (like you have an efficient hardware-accerated matmul, backprop, flash attention, etc.) these models are in the sub-thousand LoC territory and you can even vibe-convert from one environment to another.

You're right but that doesn't work. Transformers won't perform well without an endless series of tricks. So endless you can't write that series of tricks. You can't initialize the network correctly when starting from scratch. You can't do the basic training that makes the models good (ie. the trillions of tokens). Flash attention, well that's 2022, it's cuda assembly, and only works on nVidia. Now there's 6 versions of flash attention, all of which are written in Cuda Assembly. It's also only fast on nvidia.

So what do you do? Well you, as they say "start with a backbone". That used to always be a llama model, but Qwen is making serious inroads.

The scary part is that this is what you do for everything now. After all, llama and Qwen are text transformers. They answer "where is Paris?". They don't do text-speech, speech recognition, object tracking, classification, time series, image-in or out, OCR, ... and yet all SOTA approaches to all of these can be only slightly inaccurately described as "llama/qwen with a different encoder at the start".

That even has the big advantage that mixing becomes easy. All encoders produce a stream of tokens. The same tokens. So you can "just" have a text encoder, a sound encoder, an image encoder, a time series encoder and just concatenate (it's not quite that simple, but ...) the tokens together. That actually works!

So you need llama or Qwen to work, not just the inference but the training and finetuning, with all the tricks, not just flash attention, half of which are written in cuda assembly, because that's what you start from. Speech recognition? SOTA is taking sounds -> "encoding" into phonemes -> have Qwen correct it. Of course, you prefer to run the literal exact training code from ... well from either Facebook or Alibaba, with as little modifications as possible, which of course means nvidia.
by IanCal | 2025-12-10 10:21:13+00:00
> We are talking about both because he makes both points.

He does. I am talking about one of those points. The epistemology side is entirely unrelated to whether closed source things are good or bad.

> A) Stallman states it possesses inherently unreliable knowledge and judgment (hence gambling)

He says it does not contain knowlegde, not that it is simply unreliable. He happily says unreliable systems have knowledge.

> No. ChatGPT is not. It is marketed (being the operative term) as a wide solution;

A wide solution is nothing to do with things being called AI. This is true both in the field of AI and how RMS defines AI. You can argue that it doesn't meet some other bar that you have, I don't really care, I was responding to his line and why it does not make sense.

> The world wonders. Is this some sort of divine test of patience? Please provide an objective rubric for the proving the existence of the mind. Until then, I'll stick with Descartes.

You said we could prove we could think. I asked if we can do that *in a way we can test other things to see if they can think* because I do not think such a thing exists. You said yes, we do have a test. Now you're complaining that such a thing does not exist

> Now we reach the wall of discussing a closed-source LLM, which was my point.

Ok, it's nothing to do with what I'm talking about though (which should have been extremely clear from what I wrote originally, and given my explicit clarifications to you), so you can have that conversation with someone else.

> Must I really explain the purpose of an ellipsis to you? We both know what you said.

You need to explain how you're using them, because what you're doing to my sentences makes no sense. Here's what I said, and why, broken down for you:

> Can we? In a way we can test another thing? This is entirely distinct from everything else he's saying here

The question of thinking is entirely distinct from what he is saying. It is not at all related, it is a side thing I am responding to you about.

> as the threshold for him is not "can think and reason like a person"

This is key. We are not talking about comparisons to people. He does not talk about thinking or reasoning. He is talking about knowledge and understanding.

> but the barest version of knowledge or understanding

And not even a large amount, we are not comparing to humans, smart humans, animals, etc.

> which he attributes to exceptionally simpler systems.

He says trained yolov5 models have knowledge and are AI.

He says that xgboost models have it and are AI.

He says that transformer based and closed source models are AI.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-12-10 10:23:04+00:00
Now that people widely accept that LCOE of wind and solar are less than fossil alternatives, the same people who claimed without evidence that this wasn't true have moved on to baselessly claiming that grid integration costs mean they are still right.

AEMO in Australia has had to put out similar work to this to show that renewables grids continue to save money as they approach 100% clean power.

edit: I googled to find coverage of the recently released report and found this headline:

> AEMO's net zero grid estimates blow out by billions, with coal to endure until 2049 in draft Integrated System Plan

That coal is to remain only because an LNP (right-wing climate denier) state government has legislated that it will remain. The experts say that decision will drive costs up and reliability down, but the headline is trying to attach that to the net zero target they are undermining.

It would be hilariously ridiculous if it wasn't costing people their health, their energy security and billions in extra costs.

Accurate summary of latest draft:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/isp-warns-of-missed-targets-and-...
by Daneel_ | 2025-12-10 10:23:17+00:00
It’s my first language. Why is it funny to you? I’m dead serious when I say that “years” implies more than two in almost all contexts.

If someone said “that’s years ago” I’d assume 5+. If someone said “it’ll be years before that’s released” I would again assume 5+.

To be two I would expect “that’ll be out in a couple of years”, or “in a year or two”.

For this ring I would write “battery life is between 12-15 hours of use, which will typically last about two years under normal use”