MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-23 11:36:06+00:00
Please share me the youtube video regarding the presentation for bootstrapping as I find the idea of bootstrapping really pleasant and like I am most likely sure that although I am more an arch(cachy) personal user/debian for servers users. I feel like even these are adding reproducibility and I am sure that nixos can be reproducible https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38057591

Guix can definitely be bootstrapped but there are comments on this post where someone tries to reproduce nix with tcc etc.

Imagining the ability that nix can be completely bootstrapped makes me feel like it can be really good for these purposes

Like if this is reproducible and bootstrappble, then I am satisfied with the hash because other people can test it out to verify they get the same hash and I can download the iso's and then verify the hash myself to find complete safety.

Although I might still be trusting my linux iso but maybe we will have risc-v hardware where I can plug in an sd card or data or similar and it can give the hash of it for the extremely paranoid (maybe universities or very secure companies perhaps?)

After that (or quite frankly just the hash part for 99% people), I can then flash the iso to any and every hardware with complete verification

Although I feel like this still won't help if the firmware or the hardware itself can't be trusted. I mean even in corebooted chromebooks, the intel TPM only stops the ability of sending the bytecode over wire but it itself really can't be stopped. Maybe we will have risc-v machines but they would rather be really expensive.

I think tho librebooted thinkpads + nixos/guix can be really great for privacy perhaps. But what are your reasons why bootstrappability fascinates you (for me its this stacking aspect and then finally we get some useful os without having to trust anything but source which we can read/heck even audit ourselves or have the shared faith that the source code is audited by security people since its completely readable)
by latexr | 2025-12-23 11:36:28+00:00
> Can you explain why it makes a difference what the answers are?

You answered it yourself:

> the owner is responsible for the quality of a project

If you didn’t write, review, or understand the code, then you cannot be responsible for its quality. If you don’t have the skills to write it by hand and understand it, you don’t have to skills to properly address bug reports or understand and prevent malicious submissions.

All of those are legitimate concerns and considerations when deciding if you want to invest your time in a project.

Honestly, if the author had responded “I vibe coded it and didn’t review any of it, but it’s been working for me for <however long>”, that would’ve been fine. It would have been a clear, honest answer that would let everyone decide how they want to proceed.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-12-23 11:36:55+00:00
+1

It seems to of had the web app portion updated a year ago. And as you say, the application itself looks ‘done.’

I have frequently used Common Lisp over the last 40 years, and I hear comments about libraries being old and not updated in many years: so what! Quality code that performs a specific function sometimes is ‘done.’

I am a novice Haskell programmer but I enjoy the language and it is very cool to have the Carnap github repo with a book manuscript, backend and front end code to look over.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 11:37:00+00:00
How is that different from how US acted after 1776? Or China during Qin dynasty?

Yes, today Russia is trying to expand, which they've done before, like most countries in the world. Not sure what makes them special in that regard.

Did any country start out large? Since your main point seems to have been that Russia started out small, in contrast to some other country you're trying to reference that apparently started out large, but I'm not sure which one you're trying to reference here.
by andy12_ | 2025-12-23 11:37:57+00:00
I remember doing this kind of test in a vanilla transformer trained on my laptop on a small text dataset. I basically added N^3 attention where each layer could pay attention to previous layers. It didn't improve anything and was much slower.

Hard to say whether something scales or not from a couple dozen million parameters to an actual billion-sized model, but I have the impression that the nature of the residual stream and its high dimensionality allows any layer to access information of previous layers if the transformers needs it.
by immibis | 2025-12-23 11:39:00+00:00
So to be clear, you believe every program that outputs a bulk stream to stdout should be written to check if stdout is a socket and enable Nagle's algorithm if so? That's not just busywork - it's also an abstraction violation. By explicitly turning off Nagle's, you specify that you understand TCP performance and don't need the abstraction, and this is a reasonable way to do things. Imagine if the kernel pinned threads to cores by default and you had to ask to unpin them...
by imtringued | 2025-12-23 11:39:05+00:00
The primary niche of FPGAs is low latency, determinism and low power consumption. Basically what if you needed an MCU, or many MCUs but the ones in the market don't have enough processing power?

The Versal AI Edge line is very power efficient compared to trying to achieve the same number of FLOPs using a Ryzen based CPU.
by latexr | 2025-12-23 11:39:18+00:00
Surely you’re doing nothing to dispel the notion. If it isn’t true, say it. My questions were genuine, I don’t understand your defensiveness. Either you understand the code or you don’t. There are people who will be fine with it and use it anyway, and people who won’t be and will use something else. But they all will benefit (and temper expectations) from an honest answer.
by krapp | 2025-12-23 11:39:19+00:00
I think they're less excusing current wrongs and more attempting to point out that Trump and the nature of the current regime aren't anomalous. Believing such means getting rid of Trump alone is sufficient. Rather the attempt here is to illustrate that Trump is a manifestation of deep and systemic problems with American culture and that simply waiting for the "pendulum to swing the other way" or "Democrats to clean up the mess" isn't going to help.

We need to have a much more complex and nuanced conversation than "Orange man bad," even given that orange man is very much bad. Otherwise he won't be the last, much less the worst.
by dcminter | 2025-12-23 11:40:02+00:00
Point of sale terminals also do this when travelling - it wasn't especially surprising, just one straw too many.

Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")...

---

Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-23 11:40:29+00:00
> For instance, in America the police don't take bribes, you can't bribe your way out of a traffic ticket. The cops will laugh at your attempt and pile on more charges.

Sure, they might not take as many bribes as South American police tends to take (as someone who traveled that continent in car without a driving license, I'd say 90% are accepting of bribes for minor crimes), but American police also accept bribes from time to time. They'll laugh at you and pile on more charges if you offer too little, but even American police has a price.

FY 2024 has 229 "Number of Bribery Offenses" (https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/bribery), which obviously doesn't account for the bribing that no one noticed or where there wasn't enough proof, we could probably assume it's at least 50% higher than that if we're being charitable, but in reality that number is probably way higher, by magnitudes.
by atoav | 2025-12-23 11:41:28+00:00
Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a line about it not making things up and telling me how things are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.
by manarth | 2025-12-23 11:44:30+00:00
The FAA report[1] gives a more comprehensive description of events.

The pitot tubes had differential icing, and didn't all read 0kts – they reported different velocity against each tube, such as 40kts or 60kts (against an expected baseline of ~ 275kts). The computer correctly recognised the data was invalid and rejected it.

It's a common narrative that the captain immediately figured out the issue. The report and transcript of the cockpit recording[2] notes that the captain's interventions showed that he had not identified the stall, nor had the copilots.

~ cockpit recording ~
0:00 autopilot disconnects
0:01 [copilot right] "I have the controls"
0:11 [copilot right] "We haven't got a good display of speeds"
1:26 captain enters cockpit
1:30 [copilot right] "I don’t have control of the airplane at all"
1:38 [captain] "Er what are you doing?"
3:37 [captain] "No no don't climb"
4:00 [captain] "Watch out you’re pitching up there"
4:02 [copilot right] "Well we need to we are at four thousand feet"
4:23 ~ recording stops ~

[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/AirFrance447_BEA.pdf
[2] https://bea.aero/uploads/tx_elyextendttnews/annexe.01.en.pdf
by pron | 2025-12-23 11:44:56+00:00
But that's why the word "abstraction" is the wrong choice. The ability of a language to express detail and the ability of a language to have high abstractions are two different things, and when we talk about high and low level languages, I claim that what we intuitively mean is abstraction, not the expressivity of contracts. For example, ATS's contracts are virtually unlimited in their expressivity (it makes Rust indistinguishable from C by comparison), yet few would say it's particularly high-level. On the other hand, Scheme or even JavaScript can express few contracts, and yet are considered high level. I think that when we think of a high-level language, what we have in mind is a language where programs typically need to concern themselves with fewer details. This corresponds more with abstraction rather than "contract expressiveness".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-23 11:45:10+00:00
> but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life

This is not leverage.

> Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors

By your definition, no, they too are born in entropic deficit, it's just satisfied immediately by their parents. (This is how humans work.)
by azuanrb | 2025-12-23 11:45:18+00:00
You can also use z.ai with Claude Code. My workflow:

1. Use Claude Code by default.

2. Use z.ai when I hit the limit

Another advantage of z.ai is that you can also use the API, not just CLI. All in the same subscription. Pretty useful. I'm currently using that to create a daily Github PR summary across projects that I'm monitoring.

zai() {

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic \

ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$ZAI_API_KEY" \

ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL=glm-4.5-air \

ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL=glm-4.7 \

ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL=glm-4.7 \

claude "$@"
}
by emadda | 2025-12-23 11:45:24+00:00
Yes, that is true, I was assuming that any LLM code was going to be checked by the developer. Step 7 in the guide is "review your code and ensure the important logic commented in the example server is still present".

The LLM is only for converting the JS based example code into your language X and HTTP framework Y (instead of giving example code for every combination of X and Y).

The standard implementation is in a single file `http_server.ts`, which is around 200 lines of well commented code, with important logic commented (around 5 lines). The example code can be run locally with a few commands.

The repo also contains a sequence diagram [1], a description of the HTTP handlers needed [2], and a live demo [3] where you can see the request/responses.

Thanks for your feedback I have made this clearer in the readme.

- [1] https://github.com/emadda/passkeybot/tree/master?tab=readme-...

- [2] https://github.com/emadda/passkeybot/tree/master?tab=readme-...

- [3] https://demo.enzom.dev/
by kubanczyk | 2025-12-23 11:45:47+00:00
> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people

Yes.

But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.
Show HN: Automated PostgreSQL backups that verify they work
by kira_aziz | 2025-12-23 11:46:04+00:00
Healthy Base automates PostgreSQL backups so you never have to worry about cron jobs failing silently or lost data.

Features:
- Automated scheduled backups (or manual with one click)
- Encrypted cloud storage with versioning
- Email alerts for backup status and errors
- Mount backups to inspect data without full restore
- Free tier available with 3 backups per project

Stop babysitting pg_dump scripts. Start sleeping easy.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-12-23 11:46:25+00:00
Oh god, of course it's mr undecided. Go thru years of his hype videos and decide if ANY of his predictions were right. Goes well with EV viking and "just (don't) have a think".

Yes, eventually it might be 50%, but right now you can't even get _specs_ from CATL while LFPs are traded like commodity.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-23 11:46:35+00:00
> "state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society

Within a realistic geopolitical framework, it’s really not.

What Marx have you read? It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to throw out quips like 'now I know you don't know what communism means' and then spout a faulty internet meme of an idea one is trying to relate to.
by clickety_clack | 2025-12-23 11:46:39+00:00
I’ve started a few projects with SQL over the years, and it makes for a much slower development cycle. Instead of solving business problems, you’re spending too much time focusing on query optimization, and any iteration that touches the db requires all the mapping logic to be painstakingly reconstructed. For me writing queries in SQL is for later optimization. But then again, I’m pretty strict about abstracting even the ORM stuff away into a data access layer, so maybe people run into problems trying to thread ORM models all the way through to their frontend code or whatever crazy things people get up to.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-12-23 11:46:55+00:00
Just before Covid when everything was cancelled I booked some tickets through Kiwi and it was the worst decision - I spent year (!) getting my money back. I'm not saying Ryanair is a good company, but for their flight (i.e. one of those which I booked through Kiwi) they reimbursed me immediately. The second flight was EasyJet and they said they already sent the refund to Kiwi, while Kiwi said they got nothing. In the end it was Kiwi who sent me the rest, and in my view they truly are parasites (they also got a Covid loan from the Czech government). Maybe in the days of Skypicker when their search engine was good they provided some value, but nowadays I advise everyone to avoid them.
by throwaway290 | 2025-12-23 11:47:20+00:00
thank you, just saw this.

it looks like a similar case of US insane gang classification system talked about by last week tonight https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rlR8d9JVWtQ

it's obviously stupid. even if they say "only criminals are deported", when legal system classifies a guy for tattoos and being non white as criminal, it's a useless justification https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4z640dlz3o.amp

but right wingers will still say, the guy was not a legal resident yet and literally just arrived via the border without any visa etc.
by metalman | 2025-12-23 11:47:26+00:00
I am thinking more about time, and the ability to sincronise two signals, and say with an analog signal, and a digital time stamps, simply combining the signals 180° out of phase and getting zero verifies the accuracy of both, which is I assume is my crude beginings on modern encryption, and that gives our data the power to resist,entropy.
So can we then reverse entropy by encoding information into
everything?
woooo!
by abc123abc123 | 2025-12-23 11:47:44+00:00
This is the way! As a fellow bootstrapper let me also add the infinite value of peace of mind. Your business is your own, and you can focus on earnings, quality of life, growth, what ever you like, without annoying VC:s and investors telling you what to do.

As soon as you take in money, the businesses at some level, ceases to be yours. The only flaw is that with bootstrapping and one step at a time, it is more difficult to reach the unicorn-level, but as long as you are fairly successful and don't have infinite cravings and desires in terms of the life you want to live, the bootstrapping way is _the_ way.
by stavros | 2025-12-23 11:48:40+00:00
Yeah, I was between buying a new controller or making this too, but I figure it's a perfectly fine controller and I had the hardware lying around.

It doesn't work perfectly, as there are some HID intricacies that need to be remapped, and I don't have a second controller to see whether the intricacies are general or just specific to mine, but let me know if it works for you!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-23 11:49:26+00:00
> Yes, today Russia is trying to expand, which they've done before, like most countries in the world. Not sure what makes them special in that regard

Sure. Correct. Wishing for the failure of the Pax Americana is cheering on the return of wars of conquest. First and foremost by the great powers.

Russia isn't special. It was–like every other ordinary country–previously restrained. Dissolving the rules that restrained it also dissolves the rules that restrained every other current and aspiring global or regional power.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-23 11:49:53+00:00
As already posted in another comment:

Here is just one solution that helps parents, and respects everyone's privacy:

Zero knowledge proofs.

Allow any organization that already legitimately verifies ages (i.e. credit card company, driver's license issuer, ...) to provide a cryptographic key to their clients, that they can use to anonymously verifiably assert they are 18+ to any adult sites they visit.

This solution (1) gives sites no user information except 18+ verification, and (2) gives key providers no information about sites clients visit.

This is what zero knowledge proofs are for.

Everyone wins:

• Parents jobs get easier.

• Children are less likely to encounter adult material.

• Everyone's privacy is protected.

• Adult sites can verify 18+ ages, without driving users away.

Not solving/mitigating endemic child access to adult sites is (1) a great disservice to parents and children, and (2) makes the success of draconian surveillance legislation MORE likely.

(If you have a critique of this solution, please frame it as an issue to resolve, not a categorical swipe at crafting solutions. The cynical prevalence of the latter is so damaging to these debates.)
by shakna | 2025-12-23 11:50:32+00:00
Both of those are from over a year ago? For future, I wouldn't think that's "top" of any discussion.

The strange font sizes and setting reset was mostly fixed as part of the 2020 massive refactor [0]. There are still some minor inconsistencies between the two font editor panels, but they're being worked on.

Thankfully, you shouldn't have any random setting changes since about 2018 build.

[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/344
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-23 11:50:37+00:00
The president is responsible for the secretaries of State actions, and more generally their respective parties.

No one is responsible for the commissioners' actions, and they can't be fired. When Von der Leyen lied and refused to show her text messages where she privately negotiated Covid vaccines, nothing happened. When the EU commissioner for digital markets left and got hired by Uber right after... nothing happened, as no one was responsible.

Commissioners hold the legislative power, as they choose which laws to introduce and hold the pen during negociations. It's pure, unchecked bureaucratic power that ends up with a never ending flow of stupid regulations that weaken Europe slowly.
by themafia | 2025-12-23 11:52:17+00:00
The reason we're all here is because the government currently is dictating those rates in representation of the utility companies needs and not the citizens. How this is essentially socialized is beyond me; yet, I do concede that the same rules applied differently would much more likely meet that standard.

We already have an independent systems operator (ISO) to match the amount of load on the grid with the amount of generator current supplying it. I think this model could be expanded to where the state could literally own the transmission lines and equipment and use various regional contractors which would be engaged to maintain it in coordination with the ISO.

Then we have stable infrastructure where generation _and_ maintenance are open markets which may allow customer rates to no longer be controlled by a utilities commission and instead be directly computed from the actual suppliers costs plus taxes. It may even allow for more regional electric companies to form to provide better service to peculiar areas of the state.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-23 11:52:39+00:00
The quote has nothing to do with a well regulated militia. It's about whether the technical ability for internet shutdowns has been built or not.

>A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?)

>The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy.

Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.
by gf000 | 2025-12-23 11:53:43+00:00
> Simple package based distros like Arch basically just extract archives. Very few packages trigger post-install steps which usually just (re)generate something like initrd.

Sure it's simple, just like 80% solving the problem is usually significantly simpler than solving it 100%. Nix (and its generation) is the only package manager that actually works.

Try installing kde and gnome, then uninstalling both and check how many packages remain.

Nix can do that with the whole world with nothing residing.
by derriz | 2025-12-23 11:54:12+00:00
For me, the “whole point” of TCP is to add various delivery guarantees on top of IP. It does not mandate or require a particular API. Of course, you can provide a stream API over TCP which suits many applications but it does not suit all and by forcing this abstraction over TCP you end up making message oriented applications (e.g request /response type protocols) more complex to implement than if you had simply exposed the message oriented reality of TCP via an API.