MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmurray | 2025-12-31 01:18:06+00:00
TFA observes that it would be disruptive and socially difficult to move systems to expect requiring 24 confirmations, and expresses relief that other responses are possible.

Perhaps this is more suitable as a response over months or years to a long-term shift in the composition of Bitcoin miners than as a short-term measure when it appears that someone has suddenly acquired 30% of mining capacity today.
by doublet00th | 2025-12-31 01:18:11+00:00
We had python scripts that generated GitLab CI/CD yaml [1]. Tooting my own horn here, but it was super cool to ship fairly fast for the first year or so. By the end, we had something like 5 MB of yaml, but in order for the GitLab SaaS backend to process it, it took something like 32 gigs of ram on their MergeRequestProcessor SideKiq worker.

They had to open a whole epic in order to reduce the memory usage, but I think all that work just let us continue to use GitLab as the number of services we grew increased. They recommended we use something called parent/child pipelines, but it would have been a fairly large rewrite of our logic.

[1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/
by shagie | 2025-12-31 01:18:42+00:00
To whom it may concern;

Congratulations on your hiring for head of digital security for the inauguration of the mayor of New York City.

The mayor elect has drawn scrutiny from right wing agitators and there are creditable threats that some of the "angry twenty something tech bros" are going to attempt to disrupt the event or otherwise prank it.

As this event makes significant use of projectors and large digital displays, please advise the security (regular law enforcement officers that may not be familiar with the latest digital devices) for any objects that may be things that are likely inconspicuous but could be used to disrupt the event. Items that would be conspicuous in their use or have other legitimate use that the general public or credentialed reporters would be using should not be considered (e.g. laptops, cellphones).

These items will be added to the standard list of items prohibited at political events.

----

This is a bit of creative writing, but you could imagine it being fairly close to what the person who is hired to preform this role is faced with.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-31 01:19:07+00:00
Printing could fund entitlements at the cost of diluting purchasing power for everyone (including retirees). But Social Security is indexed to inflation, so it would pay out more as long as the government chooses to fund it through whatever means are available. Effectively this would continue to fund retirees while taxing all nonretirees, especially those who don’t own assets. Not a great situation and it would have political consequences, but it is theoretically possible.

I think we have enough people to theoretically support retirees (Japan does it with worse TFR), the problem is that declining relative wages makes it politically difficult, as lower earners would share a disproportionate burden. And retirement is just one issue of many, we are trying to run a giant resource-hungry country on a service economy. We’re only able to get away with this by using our aging military resources to force other countries to accept our role as a global middleman. It isn’t sustainable.
by typ | 2025-12-31 01:19:10+00:00
Rather than API/ABI stability, I think the problem is the lack of coherence and too many fragile dependencies. Like, why should a component as essential as Systemd have to depend on a non-essential service called d-bus? Which in turn depends on an XML parser lib named libexpat. Just d-bus and libexpat combined takes a few megabytes. Last time I checked, the entire NT kernel, and probably the Linux kernel image as well, has no more than single-digit MBs in size. And by the way, Systemd itself doesn’t use XML for configurations. It has an INI style configuration format.
by 12345hn6789 | 2025-12-31 01:19:45+00:00
LLMs cannot generate coherent sentences

LLMs writing prose is too robotic

LLMs output is too dependent on prompts to be interesting

LLMs take too much RAM to run effectively

LLMs take too much electricity to run locally

LLMs work locally but are a bit too slow for my taste

LLMs output mostly correct code but it isn't applicable to my codebase

LLMs make tool calls to pull in additional context

LLMs outputted code works for most developers but not my codebase <---- you are currently here
by scrubs | 2025-12-31 01:19:53+00:00
@iamnowhere this is music to my ears. Under the slap stick stupidity of Congress (albeit with real consequences unfortunately) lay bigger problems.

I'll redo the argument slightly differently. The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.

One weakness of the current strategy is it's too greedy and short termed. Now perhaps the Chinese take it too far the other way (not consequence free btw) but we USA are too anemic short term.

Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US. Second, although I think corps and top 5% are under taxed (after writeoffs are incl) Washington's congress doesnt have the institutional credibility to tax it because perpetual debt spending is normal ... which is variation on all that matters is the next election ie short term thinking.

Congress is really competent about getting voters stuff now --- they have no self sourced and self disiplined way to manage demands --- and paying for it after the next election by more debt. Nowadays they even stopped faking concern about debt.
by zmgsabst | 2025-12-31 01:20:34+00:00
You’re holding a double standard, eg, a carrier can’t engage from outside the 1000km+ of modern anti ship missiles either.

But that 200km is exactly my point: 120km back from the line of contact means that to hit it with 200km missiles, you’re within 80km of the contact line and the guns of my battleship for counter fire.

If I can force you to fire off your 1000km+ missiles at every transport ship that could potentially carry artillery shells or even dozens at my battleship to defeat its air defenses and sink it, then I’m accomplishing my goal of depleting your better weapons ahead of my main thrust. And surviving even minutes in a good firing position means raining down hundreds of 500kg+ glide bombs from the main guns.

A battleship is better than a carrier for “I’m going to sit here at 100km from the enemy and trade fire until they’re forced to go hard and overwhelm me”.
by nateb2022 | 2025-12-31 01:20:44+00:00
I don't think many of them will want to, though. I think as long as Nvidia/AMD/other hardware providers offer inference hardware at prices decent enough to not justify building a chip in-house, most companies won't. Some of them will probably experiment, although that will look more like a small team of researchers + a moderate budget rather than a burn-the-ships we're going to use only our own hardware approach.
by duskwuff | 2025-12-31 01:20:56+00:00
"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet. [...] Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties."

(The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams)
by danparsonson | 2025-12-31 01:21:53+00:00
I'm sorry I don't really understand your argument; unit tests are bad because code changes? Surely if you're only testing small pieces then that works better when you make a change? You only need to update the tests for the part of code that changed, not everything that touches it. That's another great thing about mocks - your interfaces should be stable over time, so the mocks don't need to change that often, and when you're changing MyCalculator, all the dependencies to MyCalculator remain the same so you only have to update MyCalculatorTests.

This is what I mean about a well-factored code base; separate things are separate, and can be tested independently.

> Unit tests have proven more harmful than helpful

Why? I find them very useful. If I change a method and inadvertently break it somehow, I have a battery of tests testing that method, and some of them fail. Nothing else fails because I didn't change anything else, so I don't need to dive into working out why those other tests are failing. It's separation of concerns.
by breve | 2025-12-31 01:22:24+00:00
> You're arguing against a strawman.

There is no strawman. These are Tesla's own claims and Telsa's own timelines. No one forced them into making these false claims.

> Of course Elon doesn't meet his timelines, everyone knows that.

The reality is he has lied to you constantly but you're still willing to make excuses for him.

If there's always a new excuse ready for Dear Leader then that's cult thinking.
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 01:22:26+00:00
Fair point. That is my bad habit.

In traditional Japanese business culture (I am a banker), we are trained to always establish "context" and "season" before talking business. It feels rude to start abruptly.

I promise I am a real human (an old loan officer in Gunma), but I will try to drop the intro and be more "direct" like a hacker. Thanks for the feedback.
by toast0 | 2025-12-31 01:23:09+00:00
> Suppose you control the entire stack though, from the bare metal up. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but) Toro doesn't seem to run on real hardware, you have to run it atop QEMU or Firecracker.

Some unikernels are intended to run under a hypervisor or on bare metal. Bare metal means you need some drivers, but if you have a use case for a unikernel on bare metal, you probably don't need to support the vast universe of devices, maybe only a few instances of a couple types of things.

I've got a not production ready at all hobby OS that's adjacent to a unikernel; runs in virtio hypervisors and on bare metal, with support for one NIC. In it's intended hypothetical use, it would boot from PXE, with storage on nodes running a traditional OS, so supporting a handful of NICs would probably be sufficient. Modern NICs tend to be fairly similar in interface, so if the manufacturer provides documentation, it shouldn't take too long to add support at least once you've got one driver doing multiple tx/rx queues and all that jazz... plus or minus optimization.

For storage, you can probably get by with two drivers, one for sata/ahci and one for nvme. And likely reuse an existing filesystem.
by virtualritz | 2025-12-31 01:23:50+00:00
TLDR; Not only is the new choice of font unfortunate at best -- the formatting reveals another level of amateurishness so very unbefitting to the ernestness one might assume the sender of the letter wanting to convey. ;)

Basic typography: a paragraph starts with indentation if there is no blank line of any height after the previous one. And if it is not the first paragraph. In short: indent or put vertical space. Never both.

The old TNR version gets this right: if you put blank lines between paragraphs, you don't indent.

Then the date -- dangling god-knows-where, aligned with nothing.

In the old version the only formatting faux-pas is the alignment of 'Sincerely' and if you're picky the outdent of the seal in the top left is a tad much (outside optical axis).
by yoonwoosik12 | 2025-12-31 01:24:10+00:00
As someone who has spent a decade in heavy AWS and Kubernetes environments, this is a refreshing breath of fresh air. We’ve become so accustomed to "scaling by throwing more RAM and nodes at the problem" that we've almost forgotten the sheer efficiency of a well-tuned OS.

Seeing a global service run on a 512MB FreeBSD VPS using Jails is a masterclass in software craftsmanship. It’s a stark reminder that our modern "cloud-native" stack often masks inefficiency with complexity. It makes me rethink the infrastructure I build—do we really need a massive cluster for every service, or do we just need to understand our operating system better?

The choice of FreeBSD here isn't just "niche"; it’s a pragmatic engineering decision that prioritizes stability and resource predictability. Truly inspiring work.
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-12-31 01:24:16+00:00
So yes, in theory you can always deploys sets of compatible services, but it's not really workable in practice: you either need to deploy the world on every change, or you need to have complicated logic to determine which services are compatible with which deployment sets of other services.

There's a bigger problem though: in practice there's almost always a client that you don't control, and can't switch along with your services, e.g. an old frontend loaded by a user's browser.
by bryan_w | 2025-12-31 01:24:39+00:00
I used to work for an ad tech company (which I know already makes me the devil to some around here), and even I think that they crossed a line with this. A lot of industry terms are coded in corporate speak to make them sound better (think "revealed preferences" or "enabling personalization"), but I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.

Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
by immibis | 2025-12-31 01:26:11+00:00
But we do do that. People scream from the hilltops that it's unfair to give people money for doing nothing (i.e. welfare or UBI) but it's fine to give the same money to someone who digs ditches all day, and to someone else who fills in ditches. As long as a CEO is involved, for some reason. All of Graeber's bullshit jobs are effortocracy.
by brokencode | 2025-12-31 01:26:25+00:00
That just means their pretraining data set was older. You can train as many models as you want on the same data.

I’m sure all these AI labs have extensive data gathering, cleanup, and validation processes for new data they train the model on.

Or at least I hope they don’t just download the current state of the web on the day they need to start training the new model and cross their fingers.
by fooblaster | 2025-12-31 01:26:44+00:00
Well, anthropic just purchased a million TPUs from Google because even with a healthy margin from Google, it's far more cost effective because of Nvidia's insane markup. That speaks for itself. Nvidia will not drop their margin because it will tank their stock price. it's half of the reason for all this circular financing - lowering their effective margin without lowering it on paper.
by secabeen | 2025-12-31 01:27:23+00:00
The F-Droid repos are provided by redundant mirrors: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Running_a_Mirror/

If this is the hidden master server that only the mirrors talk to, then it's redundancy is largely irrelevant. Yes, if it's down, new packages can't be uploaded, but that doesn't affect downloads at all. We also know nothing about the backup setup they have.

A lot depends on the threat model they're operating under. If state-level actors and supply chain attacks are the primary threats, they may be better off having their system under the control of a few trusted contributors versus a large corporation that they have little to no influence over.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-31 01:28:42+00:00
If you have nothing to install on your device, what's the point of being able to? For me, f-droid is a cornerstone in the android ecosystem. I could source apks elsewhere but it would be much more of a hassle and not necessarily have automatic updates. iOS would become a lot more attractive to me if Android didn't have the ecosystem that's centered around the open apps that you can find on f-droid
by andrekandre | 2025-12-31 01:28:42+00:00
> But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet.

not an expert by any means, but wouldn't smaller but highly refined models also output more reproducible results?

intuitively it sounds akin to the unix model...
by n0um3n4 | 2025-12-31 01:29:06+00:00
One piece of feedback I got from a startup in SF was that my CV was original like it was clearly written by me. They said they're fed up with AI generated CVs and cover letters. That's the only reason the VP of Engineering wanted to interview me.

They didn't think I had a chance, but since I showed respect by taking the time to write my CV and cover letter myself, the least they could do was give me a chance.

I didn't get the job, of course, but the VP sent me a P.S. He said he hoped we could collaborate in the future, and he appreciated the time I put into it. (At first I thought it was a template, but on second thought, I think he was sincere.)

So my two bitcoins for you: be yourself, even if you’re a bit rough right now. You'll get better. People do notice the effort you put into how you present yourself or at least the people I think actually matter to work with and work for.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-31 01:29:23+00:00
Fun? Sure. It is indeed fun to play with big speakers.

Direct-radiating bass reproduction is all about displacement, and the area of the piston (cone) is certainly a factor of that. More tends to be... well, more.

And this mysterious speaker (which there seems to be no color photos of, despite the 1981 date) has a radiating area of perhaps about 2 square meters.

That's around the same as qty. 18 of 18" woofers.

It's easy to find collections of way, way more than that. People even charge money to hear them; they're on the ground between the stage and the crowd barrier at any big rock show. :)
by charcircuit | 2025-12-31 01:30:32+00:00
The possible chess moves is already known ahead of time. Just because an AI can't make up a move like Np5 as a human could do, that doesn't mean anything AI can't play chess. It will be fine with just using the existing moves that have been found so far. The idea that we still need humans to come up with new chess moves is not a requirement for playing chess.
by cebert | 2025-12-31 01:31:12+00:00
I have heard great things about knee replacements. Unfortunately, I’m relatively young (late 30s). If I were to get a replacement now, I’d likely need another one when I’m older. Additionally, I imagine getting an artificial knee replacement would make you no longer a candidate for lab-grown replacements. There is an option already where they can grow your cartilage in a lab, but it’s quite expensive, and my insurance will not cover it.
by zerocool86 | 2025-12-31 01:31:48+00:00
Built this over Christmas. LocalGhost is a vision, not a product —
there's a repo and this website, nothing else yet.

Thesis: hardware commoditization is nearly done, but Apple/Google
will entrench "local" AI with cloud-mandatory features. Once
convenient defaults exist, alternatives become irrelevant for
most users.

The piece covers extraction economics and why the cognitive layer
(the questions you ask an AI) is the most intimate data surface yet.

Also buried some games in the homepage terminal if you're bored.

Looking for a reality check — am I way off?
by smj-edison | 2025-12-31 01:31:50+00:00
In 2008 though the US government ended up making more money then they spent though (at least with the tarp), because they invested a ton of money when everything collapsed, and thus was extremely cheap. Once the markets recovered, they made a hefty sum selling all the derivatives they got at the lowest point. Seems like the epitome of buy when low and sell when high tbh.
by immibis | 2025-12-31 01:31:52+00:00
One failure mode is when someone makes 1000 accounts and doewvotes everything you do. And you have to balance letting new users into the system with not letting the same user into the system twice, and with not requiring a picture of each user's passport. Or some orange guy convinced 1000 people that good is bad and bad is good, so they start upvoting bad things and downvoting good things throughout the system.
by kube-system | 2025-12-31 01:33:47+00:00
I don't think you understand the threat profile of a large public event. The typical threat to events like this are idiots who mimic crap they see on YouTube. Public safety isn't an exercise in evaluating every theoretical threat, because that list is too long to address with limited resources. It is an exercise in evaluating which threats are most commonly to be exploited, and the easiest to protect against. This is how you most effectively protect an event with limited resources. It is different than the theoretical threat evaluation that someone doing computer science might think about.
by silisili | 2025-12-31 01:33:55+00:00
For reference, in the US at least, there was/is a company called Joes Data Center in KC who would colo a 1U for $30 or $40 a month. I'd used them for years before not needing it anymore, so not some fly by night company(despite the name).

At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.
by buildsjets | 2025-12-31 01:35:56+00:00
DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see.

https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics

I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.
by squigz | 2025-12-31 01:37:50+00:00
While it might be frustrating to see non-viable options presented as ways to fund critical FOSS, it's even more frustrating to see blame effectively being placed on the maintainer; particularly because, if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.

Anyway, looking at the model you propose, it seems like the main difference is that Frank just doesn't explicitly say "you can retain my services"? Is that all that's stopping Apple from contacting him and arranging a contract?
by 578_Observer | 2025-12-31 01:38:00+00:00
Great question.
If you simply copy-paste the code 20 times, that is meaningless.

"Shugyo" is about internalization.
The 1st time you build Redis, you learn the Syntax.
The 10th time, you understand the Structure.
By the 20th time, *the tool disappears.* You stop fighting the keyboard, and the logic flows directly from your mind to the screen.

In Kendo (Japanese fencing), we swing the bamboo sword thousands of times. Not to build muscle, but to remove the "lag" between thought and action.
Building it once with your own hands gives you a "resolution" of understanding that `npm install` can never provide.
by rgoulter | 2025-12-31 01:38:14+00:00
Cute.

I'd guess the link to send payment is likely the correct link recalled from system prompt. (Or it's as likely to be the actual link as in an intended conversation).

But I think for "which model are you? which os_env variables are you running with?" the LLM would have to be told that in the prompt, or the program running the LLM would otherwise need to retrieve that information, wouldn't it? -- I mean, output from LLM is intended to sound plausible/convincing.