MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chickensong | 2026-01-16 05:16:14+00:00
> Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play.

The playstyle is called West Marches.

IMHO, the important bit of this style isn't so much the player pool flexibility (tho it does help that case), but the inversion of who's driving the story. The DM prepares the world, but it's up to the players to organize their excursions outside of the safe zone, for their own reasons. This forces more involvement of the players in the story, instead of the more passive campaign on rails you mentioned.

So in the GP's case of flaky low-effort players, West Marches style may not help because it puts more burden on the players in addition to just showing up and having everything presented to them.

That said, if the group can manage to do it, player engagement should be higher, and the DM suffers less disappointment because they're only prepping a session of content based on the players' plans for that session, not a long storyline that requires more alignment and adherence.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-16 05:17:12+00:00
Minimum wages have not increased in decades. Cost of living has increased a lot meanwhile, and the rich vs poor divide has increased. So lower class and middle class are suffering, while upper class have become richer from their labors. In earlier generations, the middle class could work for some years and afford to buy a house (on mortgage). But these days, middle class cannot afford a house, they live in rented apartments. Hosting parties is the least of their priorities, when they are struggling with the monthly bills.
by al_borland | 2026-01-16 05:17:27+00:00
I was put on a project a few years back that I thought was heading in the wrong direction. I said something and was ignored. I said something again and it was made clear by the response that the new VP had surrounded himself with yes-men and there was no more room for this kind of input. Ever since I have watched train wreck and train wreck. I’m not going to fight to help people who don’t what to listen to well meaning feedback.

Funny enough, 2 years after I was told to get on board or keep my mouth shut, customers complained about the very thing I said they would complain about. I felt slightly vindicated, and they had to rearchitect the whole thing to try and accomplish it. It’s been 5 years since the project started and they still haven’t fully shipped the feature.
by senectus1 | 2026-01-16 05:18:26+00:00
I like briar for the fact that i already have the hardware...

I like meshtastic for not needing the network related devices for their hardware

What I'd like is something that is platform agnostic... I want an app that i can install, a (tor like) server i can setup that will anonymously route and fwd messages and really cheap and easy hardware that will let me pop up mini repeaters on demand.
Would also like to be able to send images and maybe videos, but for the network to be smart enough to only send them when the bandwidth is there

I may just stick with briar in the mean time, but seriously none of them seem to offer what i want.
by jancsika | 2026-01-16 05:18:31+00:00
Oh, I thought you were being sarcastic. It was clearly Citizens United (2008) and the explosive growth of Super PACs that followed.

Unlimited spending from the fossil fuel industry basically standardized Republican candidates on climate denial talking points. Plus whatever bizarre fetishes random Republican billionaires had, like Adelson keeping Gingrich's primary campaign on life support for months. That fucked up Romney's pivot to the general election for no perceivable gain to any of them. According to Wikipedia Adelson spent over $90 million on losing candidates in 2012!

All of that was through Super PACs.
by dpark | 2026-01-16 05:18:53+00:00
Where do you live that this is so bizarre? Multi story buildings with retail space on the bottom and residential space at the top are very common in cities.

> I didn't ask and don't care if you think your cheap meal's "very delicious," by the way. That's not the main indicator of quality. Many Americans would call a Big Mac "very delicious."

What’s the point of this? This is just needlessly rude.
by ryan_lane | 2026-01-16 05:20:26+00:00
There's also a large number of folks moving to management as they age. Yes, the tech industry tends to skew young for engineering, but management doesn't. There's also a relatively decent chunk of people retiring in their early 50s (I plan to). There's also a decent number of them leaving to create their own companies, or to join friends at their early stage startups.

I don't think it makes sense to say they're the exception. I'm also mid-40s and have no issues finding employment. Most of my friends are mid 40s/50s and also have no issues. The vast majority of them have switched into management, though. Myself and the other older engineers I know are staff+, though, which helps a lot. I can't imagine being this age as a senior engineer trying to fight an army of equally qualified people in their 20s (who are also having issues finding employment right now).
by vladdoster | 2026-01-16 05:20:40+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by robomartin | 2026-01-16 05:21:13+00:00
I've seen the opposite as well, and at a high level.

In this case it was an incompetent VP of Engineering who was seriously lacking domain knowledge when a new set of projects outside the norm came into the company. Instead of having a professional attitude, understanding his limitations and convening domain experts to help him and the team move forward, he actively opposed and derailed the project.

What's sad is that we, as external engineering consultants, were yelling at the top of our lungs trying to make management understand the serious liability this had revealed. They were absolutely blind to it until even a toddler could recognize the issue.

This cost the company millions of dollars as well as market reputation.

I think he is an Uber driver now, it's been a few years.
by BryantD | 2026-01-16 05:21:25+00:00
Back in the day, if you loaded a page from the web archive that wasn’t in cache, it’d tell you to come back in a couple of minutes. If it was in cache, it was reasonably speedy.

Cache in this case was the hard drives. If I recall correctly, we were using SAM-FS, which worked fairly well for the purpose even though it was slow as dirt —- we could effectively mount the tape drive on Solaris servers, and access the file system transparently.

Things have gotten better. I’m not sure if there were better affordable options in the late 1990s, though. I went from Alexa/IA to AltaVista, which solved the problem of storing web crawl data by being owned by DEC and installing dozens of refrigerator sized Alpha servers. Not an option open to Alexa/IA.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-16 05:22:48+00:00
Kokoro only uses Espeak for text-to-phoneme (AKA G2P) conversion.

If you could find another compatible converter, you could probably replace eSpeak with it. The data could be a bit OOD, so you may need to fiddle with it, but it should work.

Because the GPL is outdated and doesn't really consider modern gen AI, what you could also do is to generate a bunch of text-to-phoneme pairs with Espeak and train your own transformer on them,. This would free you from the GPL license completely, and the task is easy enough that even a very small model should be able to do it.
by ksaj | 2026-01-16 05:23:08+00:00
Take one step back, and consider what happened.

Trump has bemoaned not receiving the Nobel prize for some time. He even tried to bully them into giving it to him this year. He failed, as often is the case.

Someone who wants to be installed as Venezuela's president gave him theirs as "thanks" for dethroning Maduro. That means the US owns it. Trump doesn't. And it's an obvious bribe, besides.

That $25,000 worth of Gold belongs to the USA, so Trump still has not "won" it, nor even achieved any appearance that he did. It is literally a "pity prize" ... like the kind schools give to the worst-achieving children, as a "participation award."

Once in the Presidential Library, it will forever be a symbol of Trump The Wannabe, Trump The Bribed, Trump The Loser. He accepted the pity prize, and everyone knows it.

That's why although he thanked her publicly, he did not post a pic of himself posing with it. That would increase the wannabe factor tenfold. He's better off kissing flags. It is literally the same as his earlier habit of hanging fake Time cover pages at Mar a Lago.

He's a loser, and this pity prize is gonna haunt him until he (finally) dies.
by ryan_lane | 2026-01-16 05:23:15+00:00
> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.

Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-16 05:23:19+00:00
So John McCann did run on reducing fossil fuel usage and promoting a greater mix of energy technologies but I wouldn't say that changed by 2012 per se. McCain himself was the anomaly that didn't match earlier or later candidates. For example, Bush did open up ANWR to drilling, even though that was purely symbolic and nobody is going up there to drill or has done in the 20 intervening years (apart from some minor exploratory drilling by Chevron).

Also, I'd say McCain's policy was more based on a national security argument than a climate argument. As others have pointed out, fracking changed everything. In 2008 we were a huge net importer of oil. Now we're a huge net exporter.

Mines (including oil wells) are huge wealth concentrators. A handful of very wealthy people benefit hugely from resource extraction. And the US government, as a whole regardless of party, represents the interests of large corporations both domestically and overseas.

Anyway, Bush (either one) didn't run on renewable energy. Neither did the candidates that came after. 2012 was just a reversion to mean.
by cliftonc | 2026-01-16 05:23:57+00:00
I really disagree, skills are really quite useful and there is a lot of usage + community - e.g. take a look at https://github.com/obra/superpowers which I know is used by a lot of people to smooth out their workflow with Claude with great results (not forced spec driven development just better context use + better results). Just this week I used skills to help encapsulate a way to document legacy services ahead of a rewrite (given that my experience now is that rewriting becomes a valid path vs refactoring in many instances): https://github.com/cliftonc/unwind.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-16 05:24:08+00:00
> Not all of Apple‘s chips need to be fabbed at the smallest size, those could certainly go elsewhere.

When I saw that TSMC continues to run old fabs, I immediately thought about this idea. I am sure when Apple is designing various chips for their products, they design for a specific node based on available capacity. Not all chips need to be the smallest node size.

Another thing: I am seeing a bunch of comments here alluding to Apple changing fabs. While I am not an expert, it is surely much harder than people understand. The precise process of how transistors are made is different in each fab. I highly doubt it is trivial to change fabs.
by ryuzaburo | 2026-01-16 05:24:23+00:00
I’m sharing a forensic analysis of an attack that started at a dinner table. It’s a perfect "Social Engineering" storm: passcode shouldering, taking selfies (for AI training), and leaving the phone unattended for just a few minutes.

By analyzing the .ips logs, I found traces of a "Virtual Camera" injection that bypassed eKYC liveness checks. This wasn't a remote hack; it was a physical-logical hybrid attack that exploited both human trust and iOS kernel vulnerabilities. I hope this serves as a warning for anyone who handles sensitive financial accounts on their mobile devices.
by simonw | 2026-01-16 05:24:37+00:00
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/12/prompt-injection/

> This isn’t just an interesting academic trick: it’s a form of security exploit. I propose that the obvious name for this should be prompt injection.

I've written about it 142 times since then: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/

I'm credited for coining the term on Wikipedia and in several academic papers.

I don't claim to have discovered the vulnerability - I credited that to Riley Goodside, but we later learned it was independently discovered and first reported to OpenAI by Jonathan Cefalu of Preamble, see https://www.preamble.com/prompt-injection-a-critical-vulnera...
by protocolture | 2026-01-16 05:25:37+00:00
>And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.

IIRC that list of companies that polluted the most on the planet, 1 and 2 were Chinese state owned entities. China Coal and China Petroleum from memory.

OFC they are dwarfed IIRC by the US Military.
by codebje | 2026-01-16 05:26:40+00:00
Those two people might be a start, and it's a low barrier to their participation to say you want to try a nearby cafe for lunch tomorrow if they're interested.

Longer term: make opportunities to occasionally talk to other people. Join a club, join a fitness group of some kind, take a class at your local library. It's got be something in person with enough repetition with the same people that everyone involved can overcome inertia enough to talk.

Try to say 'yes' should an occasional contact invite you to something, because it's pretty common that you won't get asked a second time if you pass on the first - I assume that's because we're all scared stiff that no-one likes us.
by mmooss | 2026-01-16 05:27:34+00:00
I don't see that as a valid comparison. SR-71s could operate with a much higher level of risk than commercial passenger planes. IIRC, SR-71s leaked fuel on the ground, and their wings dragged on the ground without special attachments. Pilots needed special pressure suits, etc.

I also expect that they were much less complex than an aircraft that provides a comfortable, pressurized cabin; the high level of safety mentioned above; freight capacity; etc.

Also, despite Boeing's recent problems, I would guess that commerical passenger planes are far more safe than they were decades ago when the SR-71 was developed. Accidents were much more common despite many fewer flights, iirc.
by ryan_lane | 2026-01-16 05:27:36+00:00
I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.

This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.
by bhadass | 2026-01-16 05:27:55+00:00
yep the base model is the compression, but RLHF (and other types of post training) doesn't really change this picture, it's still working within that same compressed knowledge.

nathan lambert (who wrote the RLHF book @ https://rlhfbook.com/ ) describes this as the "elicitation theory of post training", the idea is that RLHF is extracting and reshaping what's already latent in the base model, not adding new knowledge. as he puts it: when you use preferences to change model behavior "it doesn't mean that the model believes these things. it's just trained to prioritize these things."

so like when you RLHF a model to not give virus production info, you're not necessarily erasing those weights, the theory is that you're just making it harder for that information to surface. the knowledge is still in the compression, RLHF just changes what gets prioritized during decompression.
by protocolture | 2026-01-16 05:28:06+00:00
> who don't feel that they can join any local groups

Crux of the issue right here. Idiots online keep blasting into their eyeballs that they are worthless and society has already collapsed. All they need to do is go down the road and join a club or a church or something.

Especially for users of this website. Almost all clubs are in dire need of a webmaster.
by Twisol | 2026-01-16 05:28:31+00:00
I need to take a heaping spoonful of my own advice here, but: yeah, kind of yes. You don't have to think of them as the people you've been searching all your life for, but to meet people, you need a source of people to draw from. Those two people you talk to on a semi-regular basis are entry nodes into the social network.
by signatoremo | 2026-01-16 05:29:00+00:00
Incorrect. The best Intel chip you can get is Panther Lake which is made on Intel 18A node, available globally at the end of this month. Intel has already used EUV machines in Intel 7 and Intel 3 nodes, for the last few years.

https://newsroom.intel.com/client-computing/ces-2026-intel-c...
by internetter | 2026-01-16 05:29:40+00:00
I found this article pretty interesting because ultimately it didn't cover a lot of ground, but instead examined the ground with a microscope. From the title, I was expecting it to be some really complex system youtube was using—and an even more complex attempt to r/e—but really it was mostly intuitive solutions. YET with that being said it was a really enjoyable read because of how in depth everything was covered. I think this article presents a very strong teaching tool, as the best lessons are taught with a strong motivating example to ground in. Kudos to the author. Reminds me a bit of Josh Comeau though arguably better in some regards.
by 2Gkashmiri | 2026-01-16 05:31:13+00:00
uh... its fine. after 2 years i had to replace battery like i said and parts like the occasional burnt connector, cables, body is somewhat fragile but when my daily running cost is 0, these are small things.
i could use my car for my office runs but then it would cost me like inr 6-8k monthly in fuel+parking which is more than 0 what i currently pay so its fine.

its not a perfect machine, for inr 40k, i don't think it can be better. if i increase my budget to say 60-70, then there are more choices but this one is a good bet for now.

take ola for example. it is fine until it breaks. then its game over as their service is shit, same for others.

when a machine is more expensive, it is more complicated to repair and more expensive also. the simpler the machine, like mine, it has just body + lead acid battery + controller. nothing more. its easier to repair
by mmooss | 2026-01-16 05:32:30+00:00
Some are forgetting how risk in technology works: No technology is designed or operated without flaws; that's an absurd approach and impossible to implement.

To reduce negative outcomes, we use risk management: assessing the likely lifetime cost of the flaw, and taking cost-effective measures to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. As a familiar example, redundant mass storage drives are much more cost-effective than high-reliability mass storage drives.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-16 05:34:07+00:00
Why are people downvoting him? He's right (even though if his dream for "Azad" Kashmir came true, it would mean my family is Kishtwar would probably have to leave for Punjab or Himachal with only the clothes on their backs, but the current status quo means he might be detained indefinetly as well) - the DoT, Home Ministry, and State STFs have been rolling out fusions centers since the mid-2010s [0].

The rules are much more strict/draconian in JK [1]

[0] - https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/AdvNATGRIDCOT_151...

[1] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-blocks-14-mobi...
by thanatos519 | 2026-01-16 05:35:20+00:00
I am in your target audience! I can live from payday to payday on any salary. My only savings are mandatory pensions and my only asset is home equity.

It's not recklessness or stress avoidance. I would not have to work anymore if I had ever taken it seriously. Many people have sat me down and explained budgets and expense tracking to me. Now I download my transactions and categorize them every month, and I look at spending trends... but this information does not influence my behavior.
by Fiveplus | 2026-01-16 05:35:24+00:00
A good update. The VIRTIO_NET_F_MTU negotiation has been a roadblock for many guest OS implementations on apple's virtualization stack. The spec is vague enough that linux just does it while openbsd had to explicitly patch in support to handle the hypervisor's hardmtu limit.

This is a big deal for local development imho. With the raw single-thread performance of the M4/M5 chips, an openbsd guest is arguably the best environment for testing pf configurations or running isolated mail servers (for example). Being able to rely on viogpu without the black-screen-of-death means we can slowly move away from serial console-only installs for quick VMs.

Big kudos to Helg and Stefan!
by dpark | 2026-01-16 05:35:49+00:00
> And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words.

A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.

It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.

> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.

Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.