MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zrm | 2025-12-20 19:57:05+00:00
To some extent the only way around that is to use non-uniform hardware though.

Suppose you have each server commit the data "to disk" but it's really a RAID controller with a battery-backed write cache or enterprise SSD with a DRAM cache and an internal capacitor to flush the cache on power failure. If they're all the same model and you find a usage pattern that will crash the firmware before it does the write, you lose the data. It's little different than having the storage node do it. If the code has a bug and they all run the same code then they all run the same bug.
by kelnos | 2025-12-20 19:57:11+00:00
Eh, as with anything there are always exceptions. I generally agree with WARN and ERROR, though I can imagine a few situations where it might be appropriate for a library to log at those levels. Especially for a warning, like a library might emit "WARN Foo not available; falling back to Bar" on initialization, or something like that. And I think a library is fine logging at INFO (and DEBUG) as much as it wants.

Ultimately, though, it's important to be using a featureful logging framework (all the better if there's a "standard" one for your language or framework), so the end user can enable/disable different levels for different modules (including for your library).
by filoleg | 2025-12-20 19:57:39+00:00
> DJI got banned

Not sure how that statement squares against the fact that a lot of major US stores (Amazon, Target, Costco, Walmart, B&H Photo, Microcenter, etc.) have DJI products available for purchase, as well as that there is literally a physical retail DJI store[0] within a ~20min subway ride away from my apartment in the US.

0. https://maps.app.goo.gl/yAUyv6LcmKMbsSyX6
by throw0101c | 2025-12-20 19:57:55+00:00
> This is the only real reason in my opinion, why IPv6 is doomed to be second-grade citizen for (probably) a few more decades.

Except if you're using a mobile phone, in which case many telcos hand out only IPv6 addresses to handsets. 2018 NANOG presentation "T-Mobile's journey to IPv6":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6oBCYHzrTA

From 2014, "Case Study: T-Mobile US Goes IPv6-only Using 464XLAT":

* https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-...

But who cares about mobile phones, right? They're only second-grade devices.
by xnyan | 2025-12-20 19:58:00+00:00
Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.

Don't get it twisted, I agree with you. The US is far too tolerant of dangerous driving. We are too dependent on cars for travel, and this is a consequence of it.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-20 19:58:17+00:00
It's the same everywhere. It seems like police have just stopped enforcing traffic laws. Multiple times per week someone runs the red light in front of my local police station, in full view of an officer in their car, and nothing ever happens. Same with the multiple near-misses I see every week. They don't care, and since there are no consequences, there are no longer any traffic laws. Couple that with the mass psychosis afflicting the US, nobody seems to care about anything and just drive as fast and hard as they want to, and fuck absolutely everyone else.
by knowitnone3 | 2025-12-20 19:58:28+00:00
Our children are already stupid and have been for a while. Watch Jay Leno asking questions on the streets or Veritasium asking the scale of the universe[1]. Looking at the setting, this was asked on a college campus! Then, colleges are having to teach remedial math because college students even can't do basic math[2]. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8SwAFQFuU 2. https://nypost.com/2025/04/05/opinion/harvard-univ-the-ivy-l...
by zargon | 2025-12-20 19:58:30+00:00
> Every time I've used as a CAD GUI program I would get to this point where I would need to alter a single dimension by 0.25mm and realize that _all_ of my fastener holes, cutouts, etc have to be nudged with the keyboard or mouse to accommodate it.

There seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of CAD here. I can't imagine how you could even design something in CAD in a way that you would end up in this situation.
by Slow_Hand | 2025-12-20 19:58:34+00:00
While I wouldn't call this scummy I do agree with your sentiment. It is technically stealing and those copyrights should be respected.

Full disclosure, I am a career musician AND have been known to pirate material. That said, I think this is a valuable archive to build. There are a lot of recordings that will not endure without some kind of archiving. So while it's not a perfect solution, I do think it has an important role to play in preservation for future generations.

Perhaps it's best to have a light barrier to entry. Something like "Yes, you can listen to these records, but it should be in the spirit of requesting the material for review, and not just as a no-pay alternative to listening on Spotify." Give it just enough friction where people would rather pay the $12/month to use a streaming service.

Also, it's not like streaming services are a lucrative source of income for most artists. I expect the small amount of revenue lost to listeners of Anna's Archive are just (fractions of) a penny in the bucket of any income that a serious artist would stand to make.
by gopher_space | 2025-12-20 19:58:57+00:00
I'll be reductive in conversations like this just to help push the pendulum back a little. The prevailing attitude seems (to me) like people find self-hosting mystical and occult, yet there's never been a better time to do it.

> But it’s very case-by-case. There’s no general rule like “always prefer self hosting” or “always rent real estate, never buy” that applies broadly enough to be useful.

I don't know if anyone remembers that irritating "geek code" thing we were doing a while back, but coming up with some kind of shorthand for whatever context we're talking about would be useful.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-20 19:59:28+00:00
"cutting of a legal right-into-any-lane from the rightmost lane"

"its also possible for people to turn right from the middle lane of the source street into the rightmost lane of the target"

So you've created hypothetical situations that are no more useful than mine. I specifically mentioned having to turn into the nearest lane. If that's not true somewhere, then neither would adjacent turners be allowed. I simply asked if they were really cutting the other people off.
by sokka_h2otribe | 2025-12-20 19:59:55+00:00
Some good reasons:

-gotta hang them somehow, and in a very controlled way.

-thermal expansion, very important not to cause axial strain on a cable, which happens on tight bends.

You might think it would be enough to just have slack "somewhere" but I think you get to have many many micro adjustments when you have it across the entire length.

Why don't HV telephone lines do this?

I have no idea. Maybe because they can hang and droop more easily. I hope someone more knowledgeable gives a real answer.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-20 20:00:10+00:00
Interesting. Does nvidia offer control? Last time I checked they arbitrarily updated their drivers to degrade unwelcome use case ( in that case, for crypto ). It sounds to me like the opposite of that.

Separately, do you think they won't try to ingratiate themselves to gamers again once AI market changes?

Do you not think they are part of the cartel anyway ( and the DIY market exists despite that )?

<< So DIY market is gone.

How? One use case is gone. Granted, not a small one and one with an odd type of.. fervor, but relatively small nonetheless. At best, DIY market shifts to local inference machines and whatnot. Unless you specifically refer to gaming market..

<< That kills lots of companies and creators that rely on the gaming market.

Markets change all the time. EA is king of the mountain. EA is filing for bankruptcy. Circle of life.

Edit: ALso, upon some additional consideration and in the spirit of christmas, fuck the streamers ( aka creators ). With very, very limited exceptions, they actively drive what is mostly wrong with gaming these days. Fuck em. And that is before we get to the general retardation they contribute to.

<< It’s a doom spiral for a lot of the industry.

How? For AAA? Good. Fuck em. We have been here before and were all better for it.

<< If gaming is just PlayStation and switch and iGPUs there is a lot less innovation in pushing graphics.

Am I reading it right? AMD and Intel is just for consoles?

<< It will kill the hobby.

It is an assertion without any evidence OR a logical cause and effect.

So far, I am not buying it.
by cpeth | 2025-12-20 20:00:27+00:00
Check out https://zoo.dev/

I went from OpenSCAD -> cadquery/build123d -> Zoo/KCL

It still is early days, and it needs some more helper functions but it's really nice having two-way capabilities (not just code -> model, but also the reverse).

Of course having Text-to-model as a first class citizen is also nice.
by briHass | 2025-12-20 20:00:31+00:00
This is the reason I manage SQL Server on a VM in Azure instead of their PaaS offering. The fully managed SQL has terrible performance unless you drop many thousands a month. The VM I built is closer to 700 a month.

Running on IaaS also gives you more scalability knobs to tweak: SSD Iops and b/w, multiple drives for logs/partitions, memory optimized VMs, and there's a lot of low level settings that aren't accessible in managed SQL. Licensing costs are also horrible with managed SQL Server, where it seems like you pay the Enterprise level, but running it yourself offers lower cost editions like Standard or Web.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-20 20:01:08+00:00
No, they don't. A master/slave configuration (of hard drives, for example) involves two things. I specifically included it to head off the exact objection you're raising.

"...the slash is now used to represent division and fractions, as a date separator, in between multiple alternative or related terms"

-Wikipedia

And what is a key/value store? A store of related terms.

And if you had a system that only allowed a finite collection of key values, where might you put them? A key-value store.
by tcdent | 2025-12-20 20:01:19+00:00
We're not yet to the point where a single PCIe device will get you anything meaningful; IMO 128 GB of ram available to the GPU is essential.

So while you don't need a ton of compute on the CPU you do need the ability address multiple PCIe lanes. A relatively low-spec AMD EPYC processor is fine if the motherboard exposes enough lanes.
by throw0101c | 2025-12-20 20:01:49+00:00
> Enable IPv6 on a TP-Link Omada router (ER7212PC) and all internal services are exposed to the outside world as there is no default IPv6 deny-all rule and no IPv6 firewall. I get why some people are nervous.

A router routing traffic makes people nervous? Isn't that what it's supposed to do? I'd be annoyed if my router did not pass traffic.

Now, if the ER7212PC was a firewall that would be something else.

(And no, I'm not being pedantic: routers should pass traffic unless told otherwise, firewalls should block traffic unless told otherwise. The purposes of the two device classes are different, they just happen to both deal with Layer 3 protocol data units.)
by kelnos | 2025-12-20 20:01:55+00:00
I think this is useful for libraries in a language like C, where there is no standardized logging framework, so there's no way for the application to control what the library logs. But in a language (Java, Rust, etc.) where there are standard, widely-used logging frameworks that give people fine-grained control over what gets logged, libraries should just use those frameworks.

(Even in C, though... errors should be surfaced as return values from functions causing the error, not just logged somewhere. Debug info, sure, have a registerable callback for that.)
by zbentley | 2025-12-20 20:02:06+00:00
No argument here, that’s a fair and thoughtful response, and you’re not wrong regarding the prejudice against self-hosting (and for what it’s worth I absolutely come from the era where that was the default approach, have done it extensively, like it, and still do it/recommend it when it makes sense).

> “ geek code" thing we were doing a while back

Not sure what you’re referring to. “Shibboleet”, perhaps? https://xkcd.com/806/
by ModernMech | 2025-12-20 20:02:19+00:00
> nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.

When we talk about alcohol, we explicitly separate presence from impairment using blood alcohol concentration. We set legal thresholds because studies show a sharp increase in crash risk above those levels, relative to sober drivers. If alcohol were evaluated by merely asking "was alcohol present?" we would massively overestimate its causal role the same way THC is being overestimated here.

The problem with THC data is not that baseline comparisons are illegitimate; it's that we lack an agreed-upon, time-linked impairment metric comparable to BAC. THC metabolites persist long after intoxication, so presence alone is a weak proxy for risk.

So applying baseline controls to THC is not "apologism", it's applying the same evidentiary standards we already demand for alcohol, so the opposite of what you said.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-20 20:02:58+00:00
The deployments are still obviously limited, but this is something you can straight up buy if you're near a NIST facility [0]. I believe the longest existing link is NJ<->Chicago, which is used for HFT between the exchanges.

[0] https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=78200C
by badgersnake | 2025-12-20 20:03:11+00:00
I don’t think that’s true. But of course it depends how you’re measure the majority of websites.

Most of the figures I see show 60-70% of the top 100 sites do support it. But maybe that does not reflect your usage.

Why do you need it? Maybe you don’t right now since ipv6 only sites are niche. The most tangible advantage I’ve seen is avoiding CGNAT. Gamers in particular don’t like that because it introduces latency. Services like Xbox live definitely do support ipv6 for this reason.
by turtletontine | 2025-12-20 20:03:31+00:00
I don’t necessarily think you’re wrong, but I’m skeptical that the curious will really meaningfully learn from LLMs. There’s a huge gap between reading something and thinking “gee that’s interesting, I’m glad I know that now,” and really doing the work and deeply understanding things.

This is part of what good teaching is about! The most brilliant engaged students will watch a lecture and think “wow nice I understand it now!” and as soon as they try to do the homework they realize there’s all kinds of subtleties they didn’t consider. That’s why pedagogical well crafted assignments are so important, they force students to really learn and guide them along the way.

But of course, all this is difficult and time consuming, while having a “conversation” with a language model is quick and easy. It will even write you flowery compliments about how smart you are every time you ask a follow up question!
by devin | 2025-12-20 20:04:09+00:00
What irks me about so many comments in this thread is that they often totally ignore questions of scale, the shape of your workloads, staffing concerns, time constraints, stage of your business, whether you require extensions, etc.

There is a whole raft of reasons why you might be a candidate for self-hosting, and a whole raft of reasons why not. This article is deeply reductive, and so are many of the comments.
by kwillets | 2025-12-20 20:05:27+00:00
This is a fairly simple idea of indexing characters for each column/offset and compressing the bitmaps. Simple is good, as the overhead of more sophisticated ideas (eg suffix sorting) is often prohibitive.

One suggestion is to index the end-of-string as a character as well; then you don't need negative offsets. But that turns the suffix search into a wildcard type of thing where you have to try all offsets, which is what the '%pat%' searches do already, so maybe it's OK.
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-20 20:06:09+00:00
b) why wouldn't a future-LLM be able to maintain it? (i.e. you ask it to make a change to the program's behaviour, and it does).

a) why maintain instead of making it all disposable? This could be like a dishwasher asking who is going to wash all the mass-manufactured paper cups. Use future-LLM to write something new which does the new thing.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-20 20:06:42+00:00
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.

Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.

And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
by marojejian | 2025-12-20 20:07:08+00:00
Paper: "The evolution of cheaper workers facilitated larger societies and accelerated diversification in ants" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

NYT gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/science/ants-exoskeletons...

I love it when biology converges like economics. And there are so many cases in both where scale beats unit quality, in ways that might defy our intuition (or desires).

"Quantity has a Quality all its own" (Stalin?)

Consider: - Roman Legions (or Rome's scale in general) - US WWII tanks vs. Germany's - China's success with low price point products (e.g. solar panels) - (Hopefully) the future success of OS machine learning vs. giant proprietary models

I admit to find attractive the (totally speculative) idea that Neanderthals might have been as (or more) "smart" as sapiens sapiens, 1:1, but we were just much more social and would expand faster / better.
by integralid | 2025-12-20 20:07:39+00:00
TBH most of those problems are solved by using tor browser. Depending on how much you care: 1. make it possible to use your service with Tor browser, 2. create an .onion site 3. delete your clearnet presence and use only tor.

Without (1), people who really care about anonymity won't even care about you (tor is table stakes). (3) is a really strong vote for anonymity, but don't expect many customers that way.
by Sammi | 2025-12-20 20:08:03+00:00
Yes exactly. Skills are just sub agents.md files + an index. The index tells the agent about the content of the .md files and when to use them. Just a short paragraph per file, so it's token efficient and doesn't take much of your context.

Poor man's "skills" is just manually managing and adding different .md files to the context.

Importantly every time you instruct the agent to do something correctly that it did incorrectly before, you ask it to revise a relevant .md file/"skill", so it has that correction from now on. This is how you slowly build up relevant skills. Things start out as sections in your agents.md file, and then graduate to a separate file when they get large enough.
by dist-epoch | 2025-12-20 20:08:03+00:00
This problem was already solved 10 years ago - crypto mining motherboards, which have a large number of PCIe slots, a CPU socket, one memory slot, and not much else.

> Asus made a crypto-mining motherboard that supports up to 20 GPUs

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408610/asus-crypto-mini...

For LLMs you'll probably want a different setup, with some memory too, some m.2 storage.
by ethin | 2025-12-20 20:08:15+00:00
So I tried this on the NVMe specification (I have a huge library of PDFs) and it worked decently, though the output had some oddities:

- Parts of the table of contents were headings

- I didn't like how tables were links to separate markdown files.

In theory, I could recombine everything into one document, but that would require complicated Markdown parsing and manipulation and I wasn't even sure how to go about that given how free-form the resulting text was. I also haven't gone through the entire document (it's 784 pages) to check to make sure it's correct compared to what pdftotext or acrobat could create, so there's that too.
by Etheryte | 2025-12-20 20:08:33+00:00
To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-20 20:08:56+00:00
Yes, it is a very reasonable concern.

The quoted NOAA Administrator, Neil Jacobs, published at least one falsified report during the first Trump administration to save face for Trump after he claimed Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama.

It's about as stupid as replacing magnetic storage tapes with SSDs or HDDs, or using a commercial messaging app for war communications and adding a journalist to it.

It's about as stupid as using .unwrap() in production software impacting billions, or releasing a buggy and poorly-performing UX overhaul, or deploying a kernel-level antivirus update to every endpoint at once without a rolling release.

But especially, it's about as stupid as putting a language model into a keyboard, or an LLM in place of search results, or an LLM to mediate deals and sales in a storefront, or an LLM in a $700 box that is supported for less than a year.

Sometimes, people make stupid decisions even when they have fancy titles, and we've seen myriad LLMs inserted where they don't belong. Some of these people make intentionally malicious decisions.
by reconnecting | 2025-12-20 20:08:59+00:00
This is a usual tactic for many online businesses to show a specially designed page for search spiders, so any major search engine has a way to verify if content is faked for them. Perhaps they use another spider that doesn't have an official UA or buy this service from a third party.

If you take a look at any website, even an unpopular one, you will see that there are hundreds of bots every day, and it's impossible to recognize what any of them is doing and why.
by NeutralCrane | 2025-12-20 20:09:30+00:00
> If it takes a few thousand pages of textbooks or other reference material to gain competence

This is a huge assumption and not one I’m sure holds up. In my experience gaining competence is often more a matter of hands on experimentation and experience, and the thousands of pages of reference material are there to get you to the point where you can start getting hands on experience, and debug your experiments when they don’t work. If AI can meaningfully cut back on that by more efficiently getting people to the experimentation stage, it absolutely will be more effective. And so far in my limited experience, it seems extremely promising.
by mindslight | 2025-12-20 20:09:42+00:00
> THE argument that people who get deported are never US citizens. and it is a valid argument unless you can find examples of citizens deported (I can't).

It might be a valid argument in a dictatorship, but not in the US - rather it's hopeium that completely relies on preconceived assumptions. An assertion that everyone deported/disappeared must be a non-citizen (... because otherwise why would they have been deported?) is bog standard fallacy that the government/computer/bureaucracy] is always correct.

The entire foundation of Constitutionally limited government responsible to the People is that it is the government's job to justify its actions. That's the goal of open legal process, professional representation, the incarcerated's communication with the outside world, etc. A strongman wannabe-dictator asserting "trust me" but hiding all of the details, and for what we do know about engaging in wanton criminality, is nowhere near any level of good-faith executing the laws of a Constitutionally-limited government.

Personally I'd say people still thinking any of this is about "immigration reform" are being taken for a ride, just as they have been for the past thirty years.