MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mgaunard | 2025-12-24 21:53:46+00:00
My interview aims to assess whether the candidate understands that the dependency of each iteration on the previous one prevents effective utilization of a superscalar processor, knows the ways to overcome that, and whether the compiler is able to optimize that automatically, and if so when it absolutely cannot and why.

I generally focus more on sum of arbitrary data, but I used to also ask about a formulaic sum (linear to constant time) as an example of something a compiler is unlikely to do.

My thinking is that I expect good engineers to be able to do those optimizations themselves rather than rely on compilers.
by notmyrealnym | 2025-12-24 21:54:47+00:00
mdavid626 3 hours ago | prev | next [–]

In the morning I finished figuring out

how Vivotek cameras store private keys for AWS KVS streaming.

They are encrypted on disk.

Disassembling some executables I managed to reverse engineer the encryption keys.

Apparently Vivotek things obscurity is security…

With the encryption keys we can switch

to a custom made solution,

while reusing the same certificates as before.

You go back, Jack. Do it again.

World spinning round and round.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-24 21:54:52+00:00
I think you are misunderstanding. The pipeline is e.g.:

Scan (600 dpi) > MRC (600 dpi) > OCR (600 dpi) > Downsample (150 dpi) > Save to PDF (150 dpi)

The image is saved as the raster layer at 150 dpi. That's the document, but not at the original resolution. If you performed MRC and OCR at the 150 dpi level, you'd get different/worse results than were originally gotten at 600 dpi.

This isn't changing anything about the Snopes article. It just explains why if you run MRC/OCR at the PDF resolution, you won't deterministically reproduce it because it's not the resolution it was originally run at.
by shantara | 2025-12-24 21:54:52+00:00
It's not only a matter of having better hardware (though it certainly helps a lot). For example, Apple does a lot of software tuning and tweaking to make the Macbook speakers sound as good as they do. And it's been fascinating to read the extent of work Asahi Linux had to do to recreate the software portion of Macbook's audio stack.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/audio-userspace/
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio
by Hackbraten | 2025-12-24 21:54:57+00:00
I feel the same.

When I learned that Framework started sponsoring DHH's distro, my immediate thought was that I'm not going to buy anything from them ever again.

On the other hand, you can boycott only so many companies before you start boycotting yourself out of existence. One has to draw the line somewhere.

I just hope Framework is going to come to its senses and eventually stop supporting distros that are controlled by an openly racist individual.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-24 21:55:10+00:00
I'm not changing the subject, I just pointed out that your description of apartheid really fits the people you claim are victims here. Somehow I think you do not wish to discuss what your definition means about them. Because, well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say: you checked ... and found that I'm right about at the very least the contents and existence of those laws. And of course that those laws, both the Palestinian ones and the islamic laws are racist and frankly inhumane. That they both violate human rights and are far worse than anything you've mentioned ... and that they are directly related to the subject.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-24 21:55:11+00:00
> the freedom of speech, the right to privacy, obscenity, or indeed anything of import online

That's funny - the EU has better digital laws protecting the average Joe than the US could ever muster in the current climate... GDPR, DMA, etc. You decry 'censorship' and 'barely-elected bureaucrats' while the US is controlled by the billionaire class.
by i_love_retros | 2025-12-24 21:55:27+00:00
I live on your side of the pond and and we are not doing great at all. Can't bullshit me son. No one is happy. Job market is dead. Country being run by a bunch of lunatic christian nationalists who don't know how to run a country. President is falling rapidly in polls and resorting to murder and piracy in the Caribbean to distract people from the forthcoming evidence that he abused young girls with Epstein, meanwhile the rest of the world is realizing they should work together and turn their back on America... Yeah things are looking good here in the mighty US of A!
by ip26 | 2025-12-24 21:55:42+00:00
Yeah, it’s a dumb term, sorry. Top spec? Whatever it is.

Certainly it’s fair to argue that the top spec will continue to grow year over year, like happens with long lived desktop CPU sockets. Framework is bearing this out! But that spec does have to actually be GOOD!

This is the hard part about what they are trying to do. Is a 12th gen in a Framework better than a 10th gen in an fully integrated laptop? If not, what does being able to upgrade to 12th gen mean?

The IBM PC platform worked so well because every annual component upgrade was an immense step forward. The macs, by contrast, began to dominate when the annual upgrades began to provide less benefit than seamless vertical integration did…
by deadghost | 2025-12-24 21:55:42+00:00
As a solo dev, I use $5 VPS on OVH or Hetzner for peace of mind. I remember trying out GCP for some simple html or django thing a decade ago and it cost me $30/mo or something and I said nah. I've also seen an ex-coworker rack up $50k with no recourse. I've already read enough horror stories like this.

Also don't outsource your thinking to LLMs, it's a useful tool, but once you do, it's brainrot for programmers.
by almoni | 2025-12-24 21:56:08+00:00
He knew about the section of the constitution that allows the Congress to be suspended by the President "until the time he sees fit". Most people don't know that is in there, and it's never been done in the history of the US. Godel was very much into logic and rules, including the Constitution he read for his citizenship exam. He didn't understand, however, political realities.
by ben_w | 2025-12-24 21:56:27+00:00
> And hoping for nuclear fusion proves that renewables don't solve the problem on their own.

It's weaker than that, it says that renewables don't currently look like they solve the problem at a national level on their own.

The "currently" is subject to tech improvements, the "look like" is subject to politicians having the same range of beliefs as the rest of us and not being magically blessed with true knowledge, the "national level" part is e.g. "yes the PV and batteries are both cheap enough and available in large enough quantities to do it all, but we don't like the country selling them".

Fusion (and fission) can be a hedged bet; against the third caveat I listed, it doesn't even need to be fully deployed to be useful, as the investment is a costly signal to e.g. China that e.g. Germany will be able to respond quickly if China tries to cut off supply in order to secure Chinese interests.
by thenobsta | 2025-12-24 21:56:29+00:00
Same. I'm very happy with my FW13 too. It replaces the MBA for my purposes -- dev on linux (mostly webdev on this machine, have a remote machine for gpu/heavy work), web browsing, streaming, some very light gaming (portal 2 on steam).

I'm waiting on that test too :) a few more cpu generations and I'll be itching to upgrade. I'm excited to for that to happen.
by tjruesch | 2025-12-24 21:56:44+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m one of the maintainers of Bridge Anonymization. We built this because the existing solutions for translating sensitive user content are insufficient for many of our privacy-concious clients (Governments, Banks, Healthcare, etc.).

We couldn't send PII to third-party APIs, but standard redaction destroyed the translation quality. If you scrub "John" to "[PERSON]", the translation engine loses gender context (often defaulting to masculine), which breaks grammatical agreement in languages like French or German.

So we built a reversible, local-first pipeline for Node.js/Bun. Here is how we implemented the tricky parts:

0. The Mapping

We use XML-like tags with ID’s that uniquely identify the PII, `<PII type=”PERSON” id=”1”>`. Translation models and the systems around them work with XML data structures since the dawn of Computer Aided Translation tools, so this improves compatibility with existing workflows and systems. A `PIIMap` is stored locally for rehydration after translation (AES-256-GCM-encrypted by default).

1. Hybrid Detection Engine

Obviously neither Regex nor NER was enough on its own.

- Structured PII: We use strict Regex with validation checksums for things like IBANs (Mod-97) and Credit Cards (Luhn).
- Soft PII: For names and locations, we run a quantized `xlm-roberta` model via `onnxruntime-node` directly in the process. This lets us avoid a Python sidecar while keeping the package ‘lightweight’ (still ~280MB for the quantized model, but acceptable for desktop environments).

2. The "Hallucination" Guard (Fuzzy Rehydration)

LLMs often "mangle" the XML placeholders during translation (e.g., turning `<PII id="1"/>` into `< PII id = « 1 » >`).
We implemented a Fuzzy Tag Matcher that uses flexible regex patterns to detect these artefacts. It identifies the tag even if attributes are reordered or quotes are changed, ensuring we can always map the token back to the original encrypted value.

3. Semantic Masking

We are currently working on "Semantic Masking"—adding context to the PII tag (like `<PII type="PERSON" gender="female" id="1" />` ) to preserve (gender) context for the translation. For now, we are relying on a lightweight lookup-table approach to avoid the overhead of a second ML model or the hassle of fine tuning. So far this works nicely for most use cases.

The code is MIT licensed. I’d love to hear how others are handling the "context loss" problem in privacy-preserving NLP pipelines! I think this could quite easily be generalized to other LLM applications as well.
by gnyman | 2025-12-24 21:58:36+00:00
Funny how I made almost exactly the same but for maps.

I needed a way to share a link to a map, with drawings and the ability for the receiver to see their own location on the map.

Annotated screenshots solves the first but not the second.

Vibe engineered this, with many of the same ideas as OP.

Took an evening. Just in time apps for one specific use case is a thing.

And because it's so cheap to make and can be hosted cheaply with no backend, it can be given away for free.

https://nyman.re/mapdraw/#l=60.172108%2C24.941458&z=16&d=LU8...
by missingrib | 2025-12-24 21:58:52+00:00
You have first-person knowledge of qualia. I'm not really sure how you could deny that without claiming that qualia doesn't exist. You're claiming some middle ground here that I think almost all philosophers and neuroscientists would reject (on both sides).

> "couldn't something be H2O without being water?," "what if the universe was created last Thursday with false memories?," or "what if only I'm real?" These are dead-end questions. Like 14-year-old-stoner philosophy: "what if your red is ackshuallly my blue?!"

These are all legitimate philosophical problems, Kripke definitively solved the first one in the 1970s in Naming and Necessity. You should try to be more humble about subjects which you clearly haven't read enough about. Read the Mary's room argument.
by throwawaypath | 2025-12-24 21:59:11+00:00
"The English people are an ethnic group [...] native to England." [0]

"[White Brits] is an ethnicity classification used for the White population identifying as English..." [1]

The English are the native and indigenous ethnic group to England (London). White Brits are a category that includes the English.

QED.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British
by fractallyte | 2025-12-24 21:59:23+00:00
England was duly humiliated for its many misdemeanors (but not all, for sure), and has entered a period of "political correctness", where its sins must be acknowledged and atoned for.

Nothing like this has ever been forced onto russia.

And russian crimes are on an unimaginably vast scale. Remember, it was Stalin who said: "Quantity has a quality of its own."
by ninalanyon | 2025-12-24 22:01:55+00:00
Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.

If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.

This is what unions are for.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-24 22:02:10+00:00
One counterintuitive issue with spaced repetition is that the modern algorithms like FSRS are actually almost too good at scheduling. The effect is that each card is almost perfectly scheduled to be very difficult but still doable. Now, it's a bit weird to call it an issue considering it's the whole concept working exactly as designed. But it does cause one follow-up problem.

The problem is that in life, we are accustomed to things becoming easier as we get better at them. So you start drawing faces and it starts out feeling very difficult, but then as you practice more and more, it feels easier and easier. Of course, by the time it's feeling easy, it means that you're no longer actually getting effective practice. But nevertheless, it's the feeling that we are accustomed to. It's how we know we're getting better.

Because spaced repetition is so good at always giving you things that you will find difficult, it doesn't actually feel like you're getting better overall even though you are. The things that you are good at are hidden from you and the things that you are bad at are shown to you. The result is a constant level of difficulty, rather than the traditional decreasing level of difficulty.

I've encountered this problem myself. I built a language learning app for fun, and some of my users feel like they're not learning very much compared to alternatives that don't use spaced repetition. In fact, it's the exact opposite. They learn much more quickly with mine, but they don't have that satisfying feeling of the lessons becoming easy. (Because if I gave them easy challenges, it wouldn't be as productive!)

I'm not sure what the best way to solve this problem is. I would much appreciate any advice.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-24 22:02:57+00:00
No that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that there is software that does not have a redaction feature (perhaps because the developer didn't implement it), but users of the software worked around it by adding a black rectangle to the PDF in such software, falsely believing it to be equivalent to redaction.

Properly implementing redaction is a complicated task. The redaction can be applied to text, so the software needs to find out which text is covered by the rectangle and remove it. The redaction can be applied to images, so the software needs to edit a dizzying array of image formats supported by PDF (including some formats frequently used by PDFs but used basically nowhere else, like JBIG2). The redaction can be applied to invisible text (such as OCR text of a scanned document). The redaction can be applied to vector shapes, so some moderately complicated geometry calculations are needed to break the vector shapes and partially delete them.

It's very easy to imagine having a basic PDF editor that does not have a redaction feature because implementing the feature is hard.

For the same reason, a basic PDF editor does not have a real crop feature. Such an editor adds a cropbox and keeps all the content outside the cropbox.
by sunaookami | 2025-12-24 22:03:06+00:00
The current government constantly violates the consitution, they are still trying to implement Vorratsdatenspeicherung which was ruled illegal by the constitutional court. The former government tried to change how elections work with the goal of kicking out opposition parties. And for the current elections there still wasn't a needed re-count because the organisation that needs to approve a re-count is the current government themselves. How is any of that in line with the consitution? It's ever only an argument when it's the "side I don't like".
by spankibalt | 2025-12-24 22:04:01+00:00
> "People (not necessarily the author, [...] will lament how manufacturers don’t have upgradable ram, etc and then turn around and are upset at the bulkiness of a repairable laptop, or the price."

I desire sturdyness and repairability but anything larger than a 14-inch machine (and then only either as detachable or at least convertible) is completely inacceptable to me. And that 14-incher better be a dream. In other words: As small and light as possible, as big and heavy as neccessary.
by Arathorn | 2025-12-24 22:04:27+00:00
Most people actually working on Matrix have been aware of state resets for quite a while. Hydra is just the name of the project which addresses them. There are 3 phases, of which the 1st covers the most serious ones; the 2nd and 3rd phases should drop next year.

As an analogy, it's not dissimilar to how Git has added various different merge resolution approaches over the years in order to come up with more predictable and more "do what i mean" algorithms (resolve, recursive, ORT, octopus, etc). It's slightly different in that a bad merge in Matrix feels very unexpected and problematic, whereas manually unpicking collisions in a VCS is just part of the territory.
by NaOH | 2025-12-24 22:05:52+00:00
Related on the business side, and from the last two years:

AI Chip Startup Groq Raises $750M at $6.9B Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45276985 - Sept 2025 (5 comments)

Groq Raises $640M to Meet Soaring Demand for Fast AI Inference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162875 - Aug 2024 (34 comments)

AI chip startup Groq lands $640M to challenge Nvidia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41162463 - Aug 2024 (12 comments)

Groq CEO: 'We No Longer Sell Hardware' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39964590 - April 2024 (149 comments)
by spwa4 | 2025-12-24 22:06:15+00:00
Wait, isn't that statistic from the same source that claims that in the entire war, not a single hamas member was even targeted at all? That these numbers come from hamas?

(well, I should clarify, because I am going to bet a lot that you don't even understand how hamas' claims really work. Hamas is not claiming Israel isn't targeting and killing hamas members. Their claim comes directly from the religion, namely that there isn't any difference between civilians and soldiers, between 3 year old girls and "what you call" terrorists (and they call mujahid), between Gazan grandmothers and leaders of hamas. That all of the above are killing Jews or dying trying, and it is just a stupid mistake of Israel not to target everyone. And no I'm not putting it badly here, if you read the hadith you will find much worse images, involving pregnant women and wombs, involving crowds beating ... Hamas says this because they see it (I'd even say "sell it", both to you and to their muslim patrons) as simply what their religion demands. Hamas is not putting out those numbers because they think this death toll on their side is terrible. They're putting out these numbers because they're proud of them, to prove they deserve more money, more support, more ... from muslims, they're putting out these numbers because they see these deaths as "the ultimate expression of muslim faith". In other words they're not claiming Israel isn't hitting hamas members, they're claiming that even if a baby was still in the womb and got hit, even that baby was convinced by hamas to fight for allah and thus was a hamas member. Of course the people actually dying don't really agree, but hamas has guns)

In other words, hamas isn't exaggerating these numbers to get a reaction from you. They're exaggerating them because it proves to their financiers how well the recruitment drive "to defend islam" is going. It should be understood as propaganda for arabic consumption. Should be understood as "look how well we're doing! Even 50.000 children are dying for our holy intifada! Send more money!".
by tguvot | 2025-12-24 22:06:37+00:00
well, we have difference of opinion about genociding. and you obviously not sufficiently exposed to russian opinions about ukrainians: to kill all adults and reeducate children to be good russian and use them to fight west, is not exactly fringe opinion.

but given that we were talking about cultural suppression, in my country, there is an state financed arabic school system where everything is taught in arabic, state sponsors muslim clerics/mosques and by law all signage and documents must have arabic.

ps. kinda ironic that you actually want to genocide entire country while complaining about "genocide"
by Terretta | 2025-12-24 22:06:51+00:00
One can move the word "almost" to make more sense: it's only almost a market even if everyone in it is rabid about those features.

It's not a substantial share of the overall laptop market because, quoting from above…

people don’t consider the ability to repair or upgrade your machine part of a “premium” experience ... will lament how manufacturers don’t have upgradable ram, etc and then turn around and are upset at the bulkiness of a repairable laptop

The flip side is technorati gripe about Apple (lack of) repairability, but their revealed preference then shifts back to this: a claim to want reliability but actions of shoppings for premium performance and fit and finish in slim value-holding form factors. To achieve those, particularly with durable value (and resale value to prove it), there's a way to make things that "repairability" generally makes compromises from.

Research has suggested Apple's approach — laptops with 4x the usable and resalable life span — results in less e-waste per capita than both the disposable and repairable ecosystems.
by reactordev | 2025-12-24 22:06:51+00:00
Ignore them. Keep going. Debates like these are “Since you said X, Y can’t be true” kind of debates. As long as you have access to be able to do assembly, you should be able to do this. I say you because this is way out of my wheelhouse. I just want a cleaner, less mine-field laden, OO language that compiles to machine code. That’s it. We can stick a feather in this until this time a decade from now when we complain about it again.
by creativesage | 2025-12-24 22:07:05+00:00
Appreciate the directness, and fair point. That’s exactly what I find confusing about their setup and why I’m here trying to learn.

A little more context: I’ve been on GCP for 4 years, App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable. I’ve used Gemini in the past to reduce costs successfully, so this wasn’t my first attempt at optimizing.

I take ownership of the outcome, but the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model and Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either, which is why I turned here.
by radiator | 2025-12-24 22:07:36+00:00
Isn't it a bit naive to declare that, just because Lua created a new minor version, it should be somehow better? The author of LuaJIT has often written his arguments, including why he disagrees with the changes to the language, why they should have been implemented as libraries instead, that in his view LuaJIT is still more performant and more widely used than PUC Lua, and more.

As for forking, you can try, but I would warn you that one does not simply fork LuaJIT. Required is deep expertise in tracing JIT compilers, in assembly and in many different computer architectures. Nobody was really up to the task when Mike Pall announced that he was searching for a maintainer, before his eventual return.