MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-17 04:39:25+00:00
Yeah, once I grew up and started making money, I quit pirating. Just didn't have a need for it anymore.

But when streaming started to really go down the toilet I already had a homelab so I spun up radarr and Jellyfin behind seven proxies for family-scale piracy. It's wonderful. This is a new golden age for piracy.
by themafia | 2025-12-17 04:39:34+00:00
> You can be both at the same time.

Smart and dumb are opposites. So this seems dubious. You can have access to a large base of trivial knowledge (mostly in a single language), as LLMs do, but have absolutely no intelligence, as LLMs demonstrate.

You can be dumb yet good at Jeopardy. This is no dichotomy.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-17 04:39:53+00:00
This is a good question. I have seen a wide variety over the years from native Japanese speakers. Some use the 1990s-style kana keyboard. Some use romaji input where real-time software (called an IME) automatically suggests conversion to the final Japanese word (katakana/hiragana/kanji, etc.). On a mobile phone there is usually an option to do 1990s feature phone style kana input, where the 12 key input is shown, and you press one key as many times as necessary to rotate to the correct kana that you wish to input. You can see young girls with frighteningly long fingers nails jamming away -- chatting with their friends via mobile text (Line, SMS, etc.). Their "touch memory" (and sensitivity) must be jaw-droppingly good -- like a professional drummer or something similar.

Native Cantonese speakers in Hongkong have similarly diverse input methods. I've even seen tiny digital draw pads at the public library. It is pretty exciting (to me!) to watch an elderly person furiously scribbling away on the pad, inputting traditional Chinese charaters to search something on the Internet or in the media catalog. I think it is very cool that public library makes a strong effort to empower all types of users.
by array_key_first | 2025-12-17 04:41:03+00:00
My point was there is no systemd software. Systemd is a project naming convention with many projects under its umbrella that do not rely on each other in any way.

It's sort of like saying KDE is a whole thing because it has a text editor. Uh, no - KDE is a project, Kate is a text editor part of the k applications suite, which has nothing to do with plasma, the desktop shell. You can use Kate on any shell. You can use plasma without Kate.
by renehsz | 2025-12-17 04:42:11+00:00
Strongly agree with this article. It highlights really well why overcommit is so harmful.

Memory overcommit means that once you run out of physical memory, the OOM killer will forcefully terminate your processes with no way to handle the error. This is fundamentally incompatible with the goal of writing robust and stable software which should handle out-of-memory situations gracefully.

But it feels like a lost cause these days...

So much software breaks once you turn off overcommit, even in situations where you're nowhere close to running out of physical memory.

What's not helping the situation is the fact that the kernel has no good page allocation API that differentiates between reserving and committing memory. Large virtual memory buffers that aren't fully committed can be very useful in certain situations. But it should be something a program has to ask for, not the default behavior.
by Rendello | 2025-12-17 04:42:44+00:00
I saw the great Canadian raconteur Stuart McLean perform a year or so before his death. He wrote and read aloud The Vinyl Cafe, a mostly-comedic radio show about a fictional Canadian family. I was at one of the live recordings, and it was surprising how animated he was. He was basically dancing around the microphone and using his hands and body for emphasis. After seeing the show, I really noticed how much it carried through in the recordings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_McLean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vinyl_Cafe
by opo | 2025-12-17 04:42:46+00:00
>...Someone in a Scandinavian country where there are virtually no unsheltered homeless people probably doesn't index their zero to "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness," while an American who sees that regularly would.

Maybe I am not understanding this - do you think the average American regularly sees people dying of exposure on the sidewalk? Or what do you mean?
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-17 04:43:14+00:00
McMurtry Spéirling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurtry_Spéirling

See also McMurtry youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mcmurtryautomotive

Incredible stuff, crushes F1 cars, seems just as good as this Lola thing and you can already drive it (or at least see it on a track), and you can order one if you've got a spare 1 million GBP kicking around. Deliveries supposedly start next year or thereabouts.
by domenicd | 2025-12-17 04:43:14+00:00
It's terrible that Windows still has nothing good for this built-in. I use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac... which is at least first-party. It's still got a few bugs, but it's a big improvement.

(The bugs I've experienced: it doesn't properly disable itself during video games, despite claiming to do so; sometimes the popup seem to come up when I swear I didn't press the shortcut keys; rarely, the popup gets stuck on screen and needs to be Alt+F4'ed.)
by agreeahmed | 2025-12-17 04:44:24+00:00
Builder of an open source payments provider [0]. You could dynamically switch payments providers based on the situation, but as of today: - you would have to integrate into multiple providers' APIs and then maintain mappings of their event lifecycles to your app db's ground truth - internal revenue reporting would also get annoying, as your revenue charts would be split across multiple processors. You could see them in one dashboard via your accounting software (usually clunky and user hostile ime) or you'd need to start tracking payments in your DB so you could include it in your metrics

What's frustrating is that right now when you use a payment provider, you get everything in a bundle: their flow of funds and their developer experience. Solving this is one of the big problems on our roadmap. Because yeah, you're absolutely right. You should be able to route payments flows dynamically based on what's best for the situation.

[0] https://flowglad.com
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-17 04:45:17+00:00
Towards the end of using self-hosted email at $dayjob, a couple of years ago now, Google started bouncing [some of] our email.

In the header for the bounce messages was included a description of the problem (as they perceived it), and a link for background reading.

I never followed up on it personally (that wasn't my job anymore because reasons), but the bounces seemed descriptive-enough for someone who was paid to care about it to make it work.

Was that not the case for you?
by fsckboy | 2025-12-17 04:45:32+00:00
>Just a reminder the US military also conducts training operations around large civilian airports within the USA

that's misleading.

"The helicopter was part of the Continuity of Government Plan, with the flight being a routine re-training of aircrew in night flight along the corridor. In emergencies, elements of the US government would use it to evacuate the capital." Since the helicopter training flight needs to take place in proximity to the US government, and the airport serves Washington DC, they are of necessity juxtaposed.

the US military does not seek out large civilian "airports" within the USA to run training operations. In this case it's just "airport" that happens to be near where the training needs to take place.
by AngryData | 2025-12-17 04:46:23+00:00
It does but there is only a chance their usage will be benign depending on location and how much volume of the natural water they are going to be artificially heating. That heat has to go somewhere and more places than not could be overwhelmed because it was cheaper and more convenient to suck up 3/4 of a local stream to heat rather than pipe out deep into one of the lakes.

Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.

All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-17 04:46:35+00:00
>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.

They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.

Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.

It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
by fpoling | 2025-12-17 04:46:38+00:00
Well we know that vision works based on human experience. So few years ago it was a reasonable bet that cameras alone could solve this. The problem with Tesla is that they still continue to insist on that after it became apparent that vision alone with the current tech and machine learning does not work. They even do not want to use a radar again even if the radar does not cost much and is very beneficial for safety.
by vpShane | 2025-12-17 04:47:41+00:00
They didn't 'win' - use a laptop. Phones are decent for certain things but no, you don't need to use WhatsApp, IoT apps -- most have bluetooth, and you don't have to 'interact with modern society'

Interact with good circles of people and stuff. I mean, it's cool that my pixel is some mini high powered TPU computer that can run apps, F-Droid etc, but I only really care about the 5g data link within it.

If any app refuses to run due to rooted phone -> open a browser go to the web version.

I know that you know these things and I'm not trying to make any point other than: no, you don't have to use those things. but if you want to, you can.

the next big thing to come is already here, Linux with its infinite mix of desktop environments, user environments, distros with pre-set up things. You can have a device use your SIM/e-SIMS.

Google and Apple's push notification system being locked for what they deem allowed and control the push tokens, browsers have push notifications too.

All I'm saying is: Google and Apple didn't win anything and there's great things like GrapheneOS, plus Google's TPU chips are awesome.

But, they most certainly didn't 'Win' and 'modern society' is crazy.
by hannasanarion | 2025-12-17 04:48:15+00:00
This is an absurd take. The meaning of "selling" is extremely broad, courts have found such language to apply to transactions as simple as providing an http request in exchange for an http response. Their lawyers must have been begging them to remove that language for the liability it represents.

For all purposes actually relevant to privacy, the updated language is more specific and just as strong.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 04:49:15+00:00
Yes. I use it sometimes in Firefox with my local LLM server. Sometimes i come across an article I'm curious about but don't have the time or energy to read. Then I get a TL;DR from it. I know it's not perfect but the alternative is not reading it at all.

If it does interest me then I can explore it. I guess I do this once a week or so, not a lot.
by ehaliewicz2 | 2025-12-17 04:49:16+00:00
Seb is incredibly passionate about games and graphics programming. You can find old posts of his on various forums, talking about tricks for programming the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, etc etc. He regularly posts demos he's working on, progress clips of various engines, etc, on twitter, after staying in the same area for 3 decades.

I wish I still had this level of motivation :)
by ehnto | 2025-12-17 04:49:19+00:00
How would you solve the homonym problem without a kanji like character set? I am sure it's possible but that would be a big challenge.

(For the reader, Japanese has a lot of homonyms since it has a comparatively limited set of phonemes. Specifically a problem in writing due to lack of context, spaces and lack of tonality that can help disambiguate the language when spoken)
by lazylizard | 2025-12-17 04:49:22+00:00
npx create-deadlight-blog my-blog

.

.

.

Error: In a non-interactive environment, it's necessary to set a CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN environment variable for wrangler to work. Please go to https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/api/get-start... for instructions on how to create an api token, and assign its value to CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN.
by cal_dent | 2025-12-17 04:50:42+00:00
Cant remember who said it now but it was a riff on science & experiment with one of the point being when you've put a theory together after having a bunch of ideas, you want to ensure that when explaining what the theory fits, its not just the sum of things that gave you the idea in the first place, it should bring something else out too. This note just feels like that, some ideas pretending to be unified theory of something
by guywithahat | 2025-12-17 04:50:49+00:00
What I've heard out of Elon and engineers on the team is that some of these variations of sensors create ambiguity, especially around faults. So if you have a camera and a radar sensor and they're providing conflicting information, it's much harder to tell which is correct compared to just having redundant camera sensors.

I will also add in my personal experience, while some filters work best together (like imu/gnss), we usually either used lidar or camera, not both. Part of the reason was combining them started requiring a lot more overhead and cross-sensor experts, and it took away from the actual problems we were trying to solve. While I suppose one could argue this is a cost issue (just hire more engineers!) I do think there's value in simplifying your tech stack whenever possible. The fewer independent parts you have the faster you can move and the more people can become an expert on one thing

Again Waymo's lead suggests this logic might be wrong but I think there is a solid engineering defense for moving towards just computer vision. Cameras are by far the best sensor, and there are tangible benefits other than just cost.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-17 04:52:25+00:00
>The only real test will be who creates the best product, and while waymo seems to have the lead it's arguably too soon to tell.

Price is a factor. I’ve been using the free self driving promo month on my model Y (hardware version 4), and it’s pretty nice 99% of the time.

I wouldn’t pay for it, but I can see a person with more limited faculties, perhaps due to age, finding it worthwhile. And it is available now in a $40k vehicle.

It’s not full self driving, and Waymo is obviously technologically better, but I don’t think anyone is beating Tesla’s utility to price ratio right now.
by redthrow | 2025-12-17 04:52:27+00:00
Most of the confusion in written Japanese stems from the use of kanji. The Kanamoji Kai (カナモジカイ) was established more than 100 years ago by Yamashita Yoshitarō (山下芳太郎), and it has been advocating for the abolition of kanji for many years, though without much success.

https://www.kanamozi.org/

If you watch a Let's Play of マザー２ (the original release of the cult classic SNES game EarthBound), you'll notice that writing Japanese using kana alone is not only possible, but that most native speakers have no trouble reading it -- although some claim that having a few kanji makes it easier because of homonyms.

https://www.youtube.com/live/F_UrqsO2JQ0?si=-1r-FbCZCJ3rt-Z1...
by anky8998 | 2025-12-17 04:52:52+00:00
Thanks for sharing this — really solid write-up, and I agree with the core premise. Pickle is a huge blind spot in ML security, and most folks don’t realize that torch.load() is effectively executing attacker-controlled bytecode.

One thing we ran into while working on similar problems is that static opcode scanning alone tends to give a false sense of coverage. A lot of real-world bypasses don’t rely on obvious GLOBAL os.system patterns and can evade tools that depend on pickletools, modelscan, or fickling.

We recently open-sourced a structure-aware pickle fuzzer at Cisco that’s designed specifically to test the robustness of pickle scanners, not just scan models:

• It executes pickle bytecode inside a custom VM, tracking opcode execution, stack state, and memo behavior • Mutates opcode sequences, stack interactions, and protocol-specific edge cases • Has already uncovered multiple scanner bypasses that look benign statically but behave differently at runtime

Repo: https://github.com/cisco-ai-defense/pickle-fuzzer

We also wrote up some of the lessons learned while hardening pickle scanners here (including why certain opcode patterns are tricky to reason about statically): https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/hardening-pickle-file-scanners

I think tools like AIsbom are a great step forward, especially for SBOM and ecosystem visibility. From our experience, pairing static analysis + fuzzing-driven adversarial testing is where things get much more resilient over time.
by wudangmonk | 2025-12-17 04:53:20+00:00
Roman letters works somewhat with English because they are both phonetic. Japanese is phonetic too, they have an entire different hiragana alphanet with all the sounds of their language. There is no word in Japanese that you cannot sound out with that alphabet. In Chinese every symbol has a sound, a Chinese sound. Not sure how much you understand about Japanese but you can't just derive the pronunciation of a new word just from looking the components.

I do agree that English is terrible too. English is a mess of Latin, German, French words which is why spelling bee competitions are a thing in English but it would be stupid to have them in other languages such as Spanish and in fact Japanese too. In Spanish you can spell any word regardless of how long and confusing it might seem. Japanese too, using hiragana you can spell the sound of any Japanese word regardless of how how long or rare it is, good luck writing it though, a Japanese spelling bee is not possible but a written one is.

My argument is that the Japanese writing system is a big mess but spoken Japanese is not. Spoken English is a mess too. Any language were you have competitions about who can spell and write the words of the language is a big mess of a language.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-17 04:56:44+00:00
Somehow they also think we'll pay for Gemini, GPT, Claude, perplexity and their browser thingy, co-pilot and whatever else they have going on. Not to mention, all these things do 95% the same and don't really have any moat.

I don't understand why these CEOs are so confident they're standing out from the rest. Because really, they don't.

Right now firefox is a browser as good as Chrome and in a few niche things better, but its having a deeply difficult time getting/keeping marketshare.

I don't see their big masterplan for when Firefox is just as good as the other AI powered browsers. What will make people choose Mozilla? It's not like they're the first to come up with this idea and they don't even have their own models so one way or another they're going to play second fiddle to a competitor.

I think there's a really really strong part of 2. ??? / 3. profit!!! In all this. And not just in Mozilla. But more so.

I mean OpenAI, they have first-mover. Their moat is piling up legislation to slow down the others. Microsoft, they have all their office users, they will cram their AI down their throats whether they want it or not. They're way behind on model development due to strategic miscalculations but they traded their place as a hyperscaler for a ticket into the big game with OpenAI. Google, they have fuck you money and will do the same as Microsoft with their search and mail users.

But Mozilla? "Oh we want to get more into advertising". Ehm yeah basically what will alienate your last few supporters, and getting onto a market where people with 1000x more money than you have the entire market divided between them. Being slightly more "ethical" will be laughed away by their market forces.

Mozilla has the luck that it doesn't have too many independent investors. Not many people screaming "what are we doing about AI because everyone else doing it". They should have a little more insight and less pressure but instead they jump into the same pool with much bigger sharks.

In some ways I think it's that Mozilla leadership still seems themselves as a big tech player that is temporarily a little embarrassed on the field. Not like the second-rank one it is that has already thoroughly deeply lost and must really find something unique to have a reason to exist. Because being a small player is not super bad, many small outfits do great. But it requires a strong niche you're really really good at, better than all the rest. That kinda vision I just don't see from Mozilla.
by eszed | 2025-12-17 04:57:17+00:00
> simpler is almost always better

Yeah, a lot's hiding in the "almost", there. I've said this on this board before, but I have to write a lot of documentation for non-technical users, and the maximally-straightforward stuff doesn't get read, far less remembered. When I mix in some personalization, and a bit of imagination, it gets much better results. The example that most easily springs to mind was something like "if you don't regularly use this system, you can skip the next bit and come back to it when you have to; if you do, then imagine you're a squirrel", and then I named all the variables after nuts, and analogized choices between burying data underground versus storing in a tree. I know typical HN engineers would hate that sort of thing, but you have to know your audience before you can decide what works best.
by hannasanarion | 2025-12-17 04:57:58+00:00
Right, but the question then is, would it actually have been contracted out?

I've played RPGs, I know how this works: you either Google image search for a character you like and copy/paste and illegally print it, or you just leave that part of the sheet blank.

So it's analogous to the "make a one-off dashboard" type uses from that programming survey: the work that's being done with AI is work that otherwise wouldn't have been done at all.
by echelon | 2025-12-17 04:58:39+00:00
aadillpickle, fantastic blog!

I've got nothing to add there that people haven't already been saying - this was a fascinating quirk of humanity and technology. Really good full-circle adventure uncovering the source.

I'm commenting because I have to know what you're doing with your website and blog. It looks like a markdown/obsidian/static site generator. It's gorgeous and amazing. Did you write it yourself? Is it open source software?
by godelski | 2025-12-17 04:59:27+00:00
I do get that and I'm like 60% with you, but I'm just saying that it is easy to get a bit in a bubble and Mozilla needs to cater to the average person. And let's be honest, we aren't the average user.

Personally I'm fine as long as it continues to be easy to disable and remove. Yeah, I'd rather it be opt-in instead of opt-out but it's not a big price to pay to avoid giving Chrome more power over the internet. At the end of the day these issues are pretty small fish in comparison.