MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LorenPechtel | 2025-12-06 20:20:32+00:00
Except that's a very bad idea.

In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.

Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.

Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.

(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.

And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)

But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.

We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)

That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.
by grantgallagher | 2025-12-06 20:21:01+00:00
I’m an OMSCS grad - the dedication to making higher education in CS more accessible is something that really sticks out to me from those in charge (shoutout to Dr. Joyner who heads the program). Although not every course is on the Open Courseware (nor course work), there’s still a lot of good material, and if you like it enough, the program is a nice little side quest in ones journey through computer science.
by fenazego | 2025-12-06 20:22:15+00:00
My first and only experience with Perl was like this: in 1997, just for fun, I tried to write a program in Perl to turn my Mozilla bookmarks into a website. After a week of not succeeding, in frustration I decided to try Python. In two days I had what I wanted, and programming it was a joy. That sealed my judgement that Perl (and all of its culture) was not for me, so I'm not surprised at all that others might feel the same. (To be fair, there's a single oneliner that does make life a lot easier: ... | perl -pe 's{...}{...}')
by monster_truck | 2025-12-06 20:22:16+00:00
I exclusively download av1 encodes from places like tbp. It has fantastic quality for the filesize, and AV1 also benefits the most from the trick of encoding sdr content in 10 bit (more accurate quantization at a smaller size). Crazy that we can fit ~two hours of 1080p video at better than netflix quality (they bias their psnr/etc a little low for my eyes) on a single CD.

I'm not sure it's fair to call reencodes expensive. Sure, its relatively expensive to using ffprobe, but any 4 series nvidia gpu with 2 nvenc engines can handle five? simultaneous realtime encodes, or will get up to near 180fps if it isn't being streamed. Our "we have aja at home" box with four of them churned through something like 20,000 hours of video in just under two weeks.
by Xmd5a | 2025-12-06 20:22:54+00:00
Last time I used OpenAI computer-use agent (Atlas iirc), I asked it to go on vast.ai and configure an instance template for me. It gave me back control to input my username and password, but alas, since I had used my google account to sign in, I had to go through Google login portal, which put an end to my experiment since it deemed the agent's browser wasn't trustworthy.

Mmmh.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-06 20:23:47+00:00
Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person.

> in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"
by simtel20 | 2025-12-06 20:24:24+00:00
I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.
by johnfn | 2025-12-06 20:24:54+00:00
Surely then people start using LLMs to obfuscate compiled source to the point that another LLM can’t deobfuscate it. I imagine it’s always easier to make something messy than clean. Something like a rule of thermodynamics or something :)

Though, that’s only for actively developer software. I can imagine a great future where all retro games are now source available.
by Neywiny | 2025-12-06 20:25:13+00:00
Figures 8 and 9 show that both volumetric and thermal efficiency can be improved with nonzero ethanol in the right circumstances. Increasing efficiency metrics, while combining figure 7's showing that you get more power with ethanol, means that you're getting more power and doing so with greater efficiency.

You mention fuel efficiency. Figure 6 shows that in some cases, looks like the threshold is between 60 and 80% load, the story flips such that adding ethanol to the mixture reduces sfc. In other words, less fuel is needed for the same amount of power. Meaning, if it takes X hp or kw to sustain whatever test speed you're measuring efficiency at, the amount of fuel you use is lowered. I think this is very important to understand. Figure 6 shows that if your engine is sufficiently loaded, nonzero ethanol can improve the amount of energy you get out of the same mass of fuel relative to pure gasoline, which I believe would be directly proportional to better fuel efficiency.

Now very notably, if less heavily loaded, it seems better to use 0 ethanol. The ability to choose lets it get the best of both worlds.
by ubavic | 2025-12-06 20:26:26+00:00
This is my third install fest and I planned to write some check list that I compiled in these years. I can share this:

- make sure bring extension chords, and make sure you have enough fast wifi for all participants

- bring enough USB-s. Installation on older laptops can take time

- ventoy is useful

- for beginners stick to Fedora/Debian. Popular distros come and go, but these two are constant and will be supported for a long time

- don't give options to beginners if they don't ask for it. You will induce paralysis of choice

- automatic dual boot setup by Debian installer works very well. Partition shrinking on Windows isn't scary as I thought before

- sometimes you can't install BIOS/UEFI drivers without windows (on older devices). You maybe want to do that before installing Linux

- i think it is good to have a windows installation ready. At least for windows boot loader recovery if anything goes bad

- bitLocker can be PITA. Don't lock users device

- after installation update system

- write some material, what-to-do-after-installation guide, and give to participants. Maybe create group on some social network or messaging app
by Theodores | 2025-12-06 20:27:06+00:00
I like Arxiv and what they are doing, however, do the auto-generated HTML files contain nothing more than a sea of divs dressed with a billion classes?

I would be delighted if they could do better than that, with figcaptions as well as figures, and sections 'scoped' with just one <h2-6> heading per section. They could specify how it really should be done, the HTML way, with a well defined way of doing the abstract and getting the cited sources to be in semantic markup yet not in some massive footer at the back.

There should also be a print stylesheet so that the paper prints out elegantly on A4 paper. Yes, I know you can 'print to PDF' but you can get all the typesetting needed in modern CSS stylesheets.

Furthermore, they need to write a whole new HTML editor that discards WYSIWYG in favour of semantic markup. WYSIWYG has held us back by decades as it is useless for creating a semantic document. We haven't moved on from typewriters and the conventions needed to get those antiques to work, with word processors just emulating what people were used to at the time. What we really need is a means to evolve the written word, so that our thinking is 'semantic' when we come to put together documents, with a 'document structure first' approach.

LaTeX is great, however, last time I used it was many decades ago, when the tools were 'vi' (so not even vim) and GhostScript, running on a Sun workstation with mono screen. Since then I have done a few different jobs and never have I had the need to do anything in LaTex or even open a LaTeX file. In the wild, LaTeX is rarer than hen's teeth. Yet we all read scientific papers from time to time, and Arxiv was founded on the availability of Tex files.

The lack of widespread adoption of semantic markup has been a huge bonus to Google and other gatekeepers that have the money to develop their own heuristics to make sense of 'seas of divs'. As it happens, Google have also been somewhat helpful with Chrome and advancing the web, even if it is for their gatekeeping purposes.

The whole world of gatekeeping is also atrocious in academia. Knowledge wants to be free, but it is also big business to the likes of Springer, who are already losing badly to open publishing.

As you say, in this instance, accessibility means screen readers, however, I hope that we can do better than that, to get back to the OG Tim Berners Lee vision of what the web should be like, as far as structuring information is concerned.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-06 20:27:28+00:00
"Proudly made without AI, Blockchain, PHP, Java, Perl, MySQL and Postgres"

He has good taste in software and has written some interesting programs of his own, including the httpd serving the blog (gatling/0.17) according the headers

https://www.fefe.de

https://web.archive.org/web/20250917103655if_/http://www.fef...
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-06 20:27:32+00:00
But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much.

- Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file?

- What is `$_`?

- This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work?

- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?

- What's going on with qx, qw, qq?

- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?
Show HN: Open-source proxy that keeps Claude's 5-minute cache alive forever
by tonyystef | 2025-12-06 20:28:37+00:00
I noticed that if I take >5 minutes to read and/or understand claude's response, Anthropic's prompt cache expires. The next message forces a full context rebuild, which costs ~1.25x (write) vs ~0.1x (read) and hits rate limits faster.

So I updated Grov, my open source tool to include a "heartbeat" mode, (--extended-cache) that sends a minimal token (just a .) every 4 minutes during idle time.

We also just shipped a Cloud Sync feature so your agent learns from your teammates' sessions (shared reasoning traces), but the cache keep-alive is the main "hack" in this release. It currently works only for claude code CLI.

Code is Apache 2.0. Let me know what you think of the proxy implementation.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-06 20:29:10+00:00
> It's interesting how that idea vanished and now it is just about monetizing convenience.

Safety is mostly a solved problem for garage doors, they’re required to open back up if they make contact with an obstruction and are also required to have a safety beam to reverse direction if something trips the beam. I assume they use some kind of current switch to detect overcurrent in the motor and open the door, a pressure switch across the bottom of the door seems expensive and finicky vs detecting motor overcurrent. I remember when we got a garage door with both safety features as a kid in the 90s.

And yes, the easiest way to integrate this into a building automation system would be a networked actuator that presses a physical button, lol. You could probably figure out which traces are for enabling the motor on the controller board, but I’d take the easy route ;) They could easily provide a terminal block, but you can’t monetize that. Commercial overhead door openers usually provide contacts for whatever integrations you want.

If you want to monitor open/closed and door_is_moving state with more granularity than a tilt sensor, two magnetic door position sensors and a current switch plus a controller can do it. That’s how commercial overhead doors do it, anyways.

Current switch detects door operation in progress, plus a door position sensor at the top and bottom of the track. Align the top sensor when the door is fully open and the bottom sensor while the door is fully closed. Three binary inputs to monitor. If both door sensors are ‘open’ and the current switch is off, the door is stuck between open and closed. You can get by with just one door sensor if you don’t need to know if it’s fully open.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-06 20:29:20+00:00
> One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.

First, It's a private company. You can't know that.

Second, even if true, massive investments were made into Starlink and paid into SpaceX, as I pointed out into my post. That counts as fundraising.

> Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.

Not really. Amazon pays a lot, and for IT Manager roles, so does Walmart.
by empressplay | 2025-12-06 20:30:54+00:00
It gets even more complicated when you add things like Williams Syndrome into the mix -- WS causes you to feel safer with 'friendly' people and so you're typically more social not less, but is often comorbid with autism and so can make diagnosing autism more challenging (in my case it was mostly because I had an abnormally high IQ and sensory challenges). But I am highly empathetic, have some talent for music and writing and was basically a TA for most of my school years, while still having most of the autism-related issues such as RSD, demand avoidance, meltdowns and so forth.
by bitwize | 2025-12-06 20:30:57+00:00
> I think it’s safe to say that if someone appears “weird” to the hive mind of a community, that person is more likely to be correctly diagnosed.

It's officially frowned upon, but doctors still use the term "FLK" (for "funny looking kid") to describe babies or children with nonspecific facial deformities, which are pretty reliable indicators of cognitive or learning disability even if the doctor can't put his finger on what the deformity actually is.

> This only applies to high-functioning categories of behaviors. But I’ve found that more often than not, it’s the social reaction of groups that is the problem for high-functioning autists, and less the autism itself. Maybe neurotypical behavior or neurotypical mindedness is the disease because I don’t understand why or how some people find it so hard to think differently. Are they not individuals, are they zombies?

It's the uncanny valley effect. I'm convinced that one of our primal atavistic fears, besides snakes, spiders, and so forth, is "something evil or hostile disguised as one of our own". In the EEA this fear would have protected a community against spies, as well as profoundly sick (e.g. rabies) individuals who risked spreading their disease throughout the whole village. Different cultures give different names to creatures of this sort: vampire, zombie, changeling, skinwalker, bakemono, etc.

Profoundly autistic people are clearly disabled, and so attract nurturing and care; "high functioning" autistic people resemble humans who can function independently, but their behavior is different enough to trigger what I call the Kendrick Lamar response ("they not like us, they not like us") and hence are viewed with fear and suspicion. It's a flaw in the neurotypical mindset born of a trait that helped preserve neurotypical communities against invasion or outbreak, but it's not very specific so others get caught in its dragnet.

That's my idea anyway. Maybe I'm just steelmanning the NT perspective. There has to be a reason why the poor blighters are the way they are...
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-06 20:31:10+00:00
> Exactly. Claims like "even without dealing with a single reference/borrow."

> When you have this stuff in "Hello World"

Might be worth reading simonask's comment more closely. They said (emphasis added):

> You can absolutely make _a_ complete, featureful program in Rust without naming a single lifetime, or even without dealing with a single reference/borrow.

That some programs require references/borrows/etc. doesn't mean that all programs require them.
by close04 | 2025-12-06 20:31:24+00:00
I don’t think too many of these devices will end up in server rooms as opposed to home labs. And the ones that do end up in a datacenter are very unlikely to be allowed to ever reach the internet.

If the microphone was used for exfiltrating data, it would work against random targets that happened to let the KVM connect to the internet, and who have a nearby machine infected with some malware. That kind of non-targeted attack can be damaging but is semi-useless to the attacker.
by beagle3 | 2025-12-06 20:31:46+00:00
The Amiga 500 had high res graphics (or high color graphics … but not on the same scanline), multitasking, 15 bit sound (with a lot of work - the hardware had 4 channels of 8 bit DACs but a 6-bit volume, so …)

In 1985, and with 512K of RAM. It was very usable for work.
by ssnola504 | 2025-12-06 20:31:49+00:00
The ML course is interesting. Some of the lectures are a bit chatty and the official course text book was written in 1997, but it’s a great survey of many different ML models, including Neural Networks. It’s a good segue into Deep Learning where you explore more advanced NN architectures, beyond Feed-Forward NNs.

For core CS, I found Graduate Intro to Operating Systems very rewarding.
by gavinray | 2025-12-06 20:32:18+00:00
To phrase my point another way, an analogy might be:

Would you shout away a man who dug through your trash to pull out things he could sell?

You've already binned the trash. At that point, nothing that happens to it matters to you.

Either:

A) You lose nothing, and nobody gains something

B) You lose nothing, and somebody gains something

Picking A) is, from a philosophical viewpoint, essentially malice for the sake of it.
by luca020400 | 2025-12-06 20:32:46+00:00
I don't think that's a fair comparison.

OEMs have quite a lot of extra steps before releasing any build to the public.

They have to pass xTS, the set of test suites required before getting certified by Google, possibly carrier certification, regulatory requirements and more depending on where the build will be released.

There are "quicker" release channels for security fixes, but I don't think it's common for OEMs to only ship those without any other change to the system.

I don't think Graphene does anything of sort, they take what's already certified in the Pixel builds and uses it. Not like they could do much aside testing on the public part of xTS.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-06 20:32:46+00:00
I mean, I'm pretty sure there was a long period where you could walk up 5 minutes before, and fly on a plane where you're not allowed to smoke. It's completely unrelated.

The TSA makes no sense as a safety intervention, it's theatre, it's supposed to look like we're trying hard to solve the problem, not be an attempt to solve the problem, and if there was an accident investigation for 9/11 I can't think why, that's not an accident.

As to your specific claim about enforcement, actually we don't even know whether we'd increase paperwork overhead in many cases. Rationalization driven by new regulation can actually reduce this instead.

For a non-regulatory (at least in the sense that there's no government regulators involved) example consider Let's Encrypt's ACME which was discussed here recently. ACME complies with the "Ten Blessed Methods". But prior to Let's Encrypt the most common processes weren't stricter, or more robust, they were much worse and much more labour intensive. Some of them were prohibited more or less immediately when the "Ten Blessed Methods" were required because they're just obviously unacceptable.

The Proof of Control records from ACME are much better than what had been the usual practice prior yet Let's Encrypt is $0 at point of use and even if we count the actual cost (borne by donations rather than subscribers) it's much cheaper than the prior commercial operators had been for much more value delivered.
by dns_snek | 2025-12-06 20:33:33+00:00
It feels like some people just say things these days. Research shows that autism and ADHD are highly comorbid, I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head but they're something like ~50% of autistic people having ADHD, and ~20% of people with ADHD having autism.

So then you grow up as autistic and/or ADHD person which creates a lot of social friction and conflict in your life, you're called lazy, careless, difficult, overly sensitive, and this is particularly bad if you're undiagnosed. You don't fit in socially so you develop social anxiety (this is par for the course), and after a while that can spiral into depression or even a personality disorder, you might start to self-medicate which can turn into a substance use disorder, and ultimately people afflicted by these disorders are taking their own lives at alarming rates. You should look up statistics for suicidal ideation among children and adults with autism for a reality check.

Most of this can be prevented if those affected were diagnosed and offered support as early in life as possible.

So no, having ADHD and autism, two very closely related neurodiversities, and then developing anxiety as a result of that is not at all unusual.