skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they have no fucking clue you're supposed to lower them when another car is approaching

You know it's also true if you are approaching another car (eg. from behind). And if there are people in front of your lights in general it's a pain for them too
Not at all. For instance, I don't know what the next steps are, but I run SSH servers behind Wireguard, exactly to prevent them being accessible in the case of such events. Wireguard is simple to setup, even if I lack the expertise to understand exactly how to go forward.
Or you vendor everything.

You don't automatically download anything at build or install time, you just update your local source copies when you want to. Which to be clear I know means rarely.

It's 1970 all over again!
Yeah, a preliminary check that asks GPT if the request is about a medical issue might prevent it
Replication can be for HA, not just for scale. All depends on your business requirements.

Also replication can be good for other operational reasons, such as zero downtime major version upgrades. Again depends on the business need/expectations.
Lena is a mainstay of computer imaging calibration. It's silly and stupid to make any claims of harm to anyone from use of the image. Don't let the culture overlords tell you what is right and wrong. Use your common sense.
As a car driver, I love strobe lights on a bicycle. Much easier to notice them and avoid them.

As long as they're at a reasonable brightness...
Either you edited your comment, or infinitely more likely, I replied to the wrong comment
The three exhibits of beginner-vs-expert C code are quite perplexing.

- In the first one, there is advocacy for replacing (pointer == NULL) with (!pointer). I have no issue with either, but to me this sounds like canonical bikeshedding. I would certainly not argue that experts use only (!pointer) and beginners only (pointer == NULL).

- Then it advises replacement of a malloc()ated struct with an on-stack variable containing the same struct (fine so far, why not), then says "the assembly" is even superior if we make that variable "static". This completely glosses over the fact that those three options (malloc, on-stack, static) have completely different legitimate use-cases.

- In the second exhibit, there is a comparison of "glib-style" linked-list (in which the payload is separate, with pointers to it in the linked list), with "kernel-style" linked-list (linked-list pointers as a member structure in the payload structure). The author argues that the latter is what "ace" C coders do. Again, they have completely different use cases. Say you have a large payload structures in an array, and you want to represent a subset of them. "glib-style" can be the right approach then.

- The third exhibit, says "ace" C coders replace "fopen()/fread()" with "mmap()". They do mention in passing the small problem of portability (saying this is solved by just adding #ifdefs and having a separate codepath for Win32). Besides the obvious issues with that, what happens if the input is a pipe?

I find it particularly funny when the article so prominently mentions Dunning-Kruger.
Over the past two-three decades of computering I've only noticed xz in deb-packages.

Who's using xz as a long-term archiving or general purpose compression format? TFA doesn't give any examples of this, only that the Debian project picked it for packages, presumably because it creates smaller files than gzip and bzip2. And apt packages are arguably very ephemeral, if a compressed file turned out bad or bitrotted before culling from the repo it's likely to be discovered and fixed easily.

I work in e-archiving, with public sector clients, where we actually do long-term storage of whatever data format. Never seen xz used there.
Comment from Andres Freund on how and why he found it [0] and more information on the LWN story about the backdoor. Recommend people read this to see how close we came (and think about what this is going to mean for the future).

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/967194/
They did fuck up quite a bit though.
They injected their payload before they checked if oss-fuzz or valgrind or ... would notice something wrong.
That is sloppy and should have been anticipated and addressed BEFORE activating the code.

Anyway. This team got caught. What are the odds that this state-actor that did this, that this was the only project / team / library that they decided to attack?
Nice one :-)

“… => Thus, we build a monolith service for each app, which is easy to deploy and maintain. No Docker, no Kubernetes, no dependencies, no runtime environment - just a binary file that can be deployed on any newly created VPS. …”
This is not enough. They need to travel back in time to 1972 and make sure this history never existed. /S

I like the alt ones where people have created a guy version of this photo. Super cute!

https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/

Hahaha! :)
> so she was likely paid for it. The real, unpaid quote is also in the article, "I’m really proud of that picture,".

Let's not pretend low-budget documentary have the money to make somebody talk shit about something they like. There's also no contradiction between the two quotes: she is proud of the picture, but not very happy to see it being used like this decades after.
I'm not convinced this is such a cure-all as any library must necessarily have the ability to "taint" its output. Like consider this library. It's a compression library. You would presumably trust it to decompress things right? Like programs? And then you run those programs with full permission? Oops..
It’s not about the woman being beautiful. It’s about the in-joke where the cropped image itself is tame but the implicit context is pornographic. This in joke makes (many) women uncomfortable, I think.

Personally I don’t care either way, I just like to understand differing perspectives. Being offended by this one seems fairly reasonable as far as things go though.
Europe closed schools and businesses too.
This 2011 addition to the XZ Utils Wikipedia page is interesting because a) why is this relevant, b) who is Mike Kezner since he's not mentioned on the Tukaani project page (https://tukaani.org/about.html) under "Historical acknowledgments".

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=XZ_Utils&diff=pre...

Arch Linux played an important role in making this compression software trusted and depended upon. Perhaps not a coincidence, but at the very least, such a big project should more carefully consider the software they distribute and rely on, whether it's worth the risk.
It’s definitely not new and often nothing is done until it directly affects the “great and the good”

For example nothing was done about the pollution of the river Thames until it got so bad it affected the business of parliament.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
Replace Lena.jpg with calm.jpg
Or you could just create a custom GPT, upload all your data and history … and hope that you never set it to public and openai doesn't get hacked.
With leds and proper design not actually that big issue when they are properly installed. If dark spots are the problem, that indicates there is little light pollution. Just have to extend the beam so it covers only road and slightly beyond.
The issue is that the author had been contributing for 2 years.

Debian is considering reverting prior to his involment or switching, cf: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1068024
But it's also brightness: legal limits for brightness above the horizon were set in an age when light designers weren't able to do very detailed control of light distribution and the dimmed area was always a mix of some bright spots and on a much darker average. The legal brightness limits were selected under the assumption that the highest allowed was an exceptional peak that would only occasionally hit an observer for a short time before returning to the lower background.

Now headlight engineers have perfect control over the brightness distribution and they blanket the entire cone with what was intended as an exceptional maximum. And it's a full on arms race, because for the driver behind the wheel it's certainly awesome, one of the very few ways cars can differentiate from others (olders!) in terms of the quality of actual day to day driving.
Picture of a beautiful woman is offensive

I don't think that's it. I think it's the idea that Playboy objectifies women, and "porn" objectifies people. Which is understandable.

From that lens, Lena's picture could be seen as the IEEE equivalent of plastering the locker room doors with porn mag photos.
I miss the days when the Internet just didn't have a long standing archive of reminders of how old I'm getting, every day.

And somehow I don't feel like anything, but the absolute obvious, is any better.
Perhaps the text can be signed with steganographic methods and sufficient redundancy so changing the text wouldn't remove the signature?
No they are not and explicitly banned in some country. The strobing light is way more blinding for any other user of the road. It also makes it hard for you eyes to adjust. This means that you struggle to understand how fast the bicycle is moving, and exactly how its moving (and therefor anticipate their movement correctly), but you also get blinded which might prevent you from seeing other user of the road (especially pedestrian and other bicycle).
With strobing light, you not only putting yourself at risk, but every other user of the road.
I haven't checked, but I expect the ext2 driver to be smaller. Which can be relevant for embedded systems with limited flash space.
that's... creative. and patient. 11/10 concerning - now I'm wondering how many other projects could have shit like this in them or added right as I'm writing this shudder
Debian on xz-utils: revert to version that does not contain changes by bad actor
I'm at a company that is weighing a very similar decision (we are on RDS Postgres with a rapidly growing database that will require some horizontal partitioning). There really isn't an easy solution. We spoke to people who have done sharding in-house (Figma, Robinhood) as well as others who migrated to natively distributed systems like Cockroach (Doordash).

If you decide to move off of RDS but stay on Postgres, you can run your own Postgres but now lose all the benefits of a managed service. You could move off of AWS (eg to Azure), but moving to a different cloud is a huge lift. That, btw, would also be required if you want to try something like Spanner (move to GCP). Moving off of Postgres to another database is also risky. The migration will obviously take some effort, but you're also probably talking about lots of code changes, schema changes, etc, as well as unknown operational risks that you'll discover on the new system. This applies if you're talking about things like Cockroach or even moving to MySQL.

That said, rolling your own sharding is a MASSIVE undertaking. Limitless looks promising, since it takes care of a lot of the issues that Figma ended up spending time on (basically, you shouldn't need something like Figma's DBProxy, as shard routing, shard splitting, etc will be taken care of). It's still in preview though, and like the article mentioned, the costs may be high.

Overall, no easy decisions on this one, unfortunately.
I'm still using my stash of incandescents, and halogens for the track lights, but I don't control my friends' houses :)
Vision Transformers Are Overrated
I remember building an Ahtlon 64 system with a GeForce 7900GTX at that time and I played with Far Cry everything maxed out. Half of the cost of that computer was the graphics card and it was the absolute highest end model that money could buy.

Recently I bought a graphics card for 600 when the prices came down, a 3070 RTX, a more conservative choice since the top models now go for 2k.
Jia Tan "cleaned up" in all their ZSTD branches some hours ago, probably hiding something https://github.com/JiaT75/zstd/branches/all
One issue I noticed when I rented a newer car a couple years ago, was that it automatically switched to full-beam and dipped where it thought appropriate though I only switched on low beam in the first place. I was driving a winding country road with a fair amount of oncoming traffic so I didn't really need full beam. The problem is that it only dips when it has seen the oncoming headlight, whereas to avoid dazzling the driver it would be better to dip just before they come into view.
The Fall and Rise of Government Revenue
A nice thing about modern cloud providers is their expensive bandwidth so a new vector of attack is simply downloading large files that they host. (except cloudflare)
FWIW, that's mingw-w64-xz (cross-compiled xz utils) in AUR, not ming-w64 (which would normally refer to the compiler toolchain itself).
I didn't fully read the paper, but few questions come into mind.

1) How does this work differ from Mark Silberstein's GPUfs from 2014 [1]?

2) Does this work assume the storage device is only accessed by the GPU? Otherwise, how do you guarantee consistency when multiple processes can map, read and write the same files? You mention POSIX. POSIX has MAP_SHARED. How is this situation handled?

3) Related to (2), on the device level, how do you sync CPU (on an SMP, multiple cores) and GPU accesses?

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2553081
Having owned a few old motorcycles, the stock bulbs are terrible, you can barely see anything at night. LED aftermarket parts have been decent in my exp. That being said some cars are too bright but surely you could dim them a bit.
Similar problem and similar-ish product 0]; we get DDoSsed a lot and I don’t know why. We had to put Cloudflare botfight to stop it. That works very well, but what do you do if CF doesn’t exist?

0] https://flexlists.com
I added for the music. The website design was kinda cute. Music gave me "Cachemonet" vibes. Haha! :)
Many colour-correction swatches use a pale woman with a fruit hat due to the colour range, gradual skin tones, and high dynamic range.
I'm surprised it hasn't become the replacement standard image...
No it is pure evil: they opted for dividends over capex for the last 30 years
Yes, with the right political decisions most countries could switch to electric vehicles. EVs also are nicer to drive and cheaper over the vehicle lifetime. It’s just a matter of time in my opinion.
But password managers typically don't send keyboard commands to fill in a password, so a physical device would be useless.

> There are plenty of scenarios where MFA is more secure than just a strong password.

And how realistic are they? Or are they just highly specific scenarios where all the stars must align, and are almost never going to happen?
I don't use TablePlus myself. Are they talking about their marketing website? If so, then obviously thet wouldn't need to use Kubernetes. Are they talking about their application then I wonder how there can be no dependencies - don't it store data, log things, etc?
There’s an article in GIS for science, (vol 2 I think) by ESRI press which tells the story of students in certain US school using ArcMap to analysis polling stations accessibility, density and distribution. High School Students.

Very insightful book and article, recommended.
Develop in Swift Tutorials
Specific modern technical issues with the original scan are:

Lena contains about 250,000 pixels, some 32 times smaller than a picture snapped with an iPhone 6. And then there’s a quality problem: The most commonly used version of the image is a scan of a printed page. The printing process doesn’t produce a continuous image, but rather a series of dots that trick your eye into seeing continuous tones and colors. Those dots, Acton says, mean that the scanned Lena image isn’t comparable to photos produced by modern digital cameras.

and:

[..] Scott Acton, the current editor of IEEE Transactions [..] and two former editors revived the old call for a ban, and proposed to the journal’s editorial board that IEEE Transactions institute a moratorium on Lena research. “In 2016,” he says, “demonstrating that something works on Lena isn’t really demonstrating that the technology works.”

~ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/lena-...

the implication being that too many algorithms were trained on the Lenna image, to the point where the ASCII phrase LENA.JPG can now be expanded to the full original uncompressed image.

It, along with the Mandrill image, are quaint historic footnotes examples of types of images (drum scanned from magazine prints) that are no longer anything close to mainstream examples suitable for reference.

> it's surprisingly hard to find a good alternative test image.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.6429v3.pdf

uses a licenced image of Italian heartthrob Fabio Lanzoni with skin tones and fine detailed blond hair.
How to read text content with normal size of the website in Hacker News?
The size of text in some website on Hacker News is so little and it’s uncomfortable to read it on mobile phone, Because the website is designed for pc user. Tt will be great if I can read it with normal size on my mobile phone. Is there a tool that can meet my demand?
From my understanding part of the issue is that people would use it as a test image for the sake of using Lena as a test image rather than actually picking a suitable image for their testing.

I mean also this is a scientific publication which should try to stray towards neutrality and this image is a cropped playboy still. This is blatantly not an appropriate image to use in an academic publishing not even getting into copyright issues. If you absolutely need to use a photo of a beautiful woman for your testing you could use literally any photo taken in a standard photo shoot which isn’t overly sexualized that is appropriately licensed.
Rustic UI: Crafting the Future of UX
And flashing lights are not filtered out? How can traffic even exist during Christmas season?

A continuous light at least gets perceived as a path through image space. Strobes on the other hand can easily fail at getting perceived as belonging to the same unit of light source when there are many other illuminated dots (xmas crap! rain droplets!)
I might be out of touch with reality, but billions of requests per month sounds like peanuts. Is that considered a big ddos attack?
I’ve read the strobes are bad because it makes it hard to see how close or far you are. Maybe the best thing is to just wrap yourself with some battery powered Christmas lights…
Non-profit is a private entity, lmfao
If you want your image processing algorithm to be optimized for the real world you should test against real photos. It’s not like we have a shortage of photos so synthetic data is absolutely necessary
Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100B data-center project
I don't read the story this way personally (not saying that these scenarios do not occur, but I feel the narrative detailed in the original article makes sense even without "chasing cool problems").
I think it's a reflection of a lot of culture war stuff that so many comments are about the ethics of the image and the opinions of the subject of a photograph and all this other really difficult philosophical argument stuff when it really seems much more simple than that:

40 years ago we used one particular image to test compression and certain DSP operations. Now in the age of CGI, TBs rather than KBs of storage / bandwidth, and the internet, we can use a suite of examples. These can be more varied, more controlled, and less encumbered by copyright or being from an erotic publication.

MP3 was apparently tested against the a capella song "Tom's Diner." Nice song, lots of detail on the voice. But is the benchmark I want to be using nowadays for Opus and AAC? Probably not.

It's a shame rules have to be made to force behavior. But whatever people's philosophical views, it should be a prompt to ensure we do have things to fill this role that have benefited from those last 40 years of development.
Why LLMs Aren't Enough
What do you think about future of AI Agents and LLMs?
If you're doing tens of millions in revenue and the RDBMS is critical to your operations, I'm a firm believer you need replication. Keep in mind this was the era of spinning rust and a day-old backup could take hours to restore even with a SAN/DAS. A replica was for more than just distributing load, it was for resilience to keep the business healthy and avoid a SPOF.

Risks to the business are more important to me than my enthusiasm for a technology or product.
Right, fewer letters equal better! Very professional.

Honestly though, it doesn't matter to me what you or I name branches or what test images we use. I'm going to objectify women and own slaves in any case.
This is what happens when you privatise monopolies. They're not looking at a 100y plan, they're paying shareholders and [unnecessary] c-level positions.

What's surprising is that it lasted 35 years.
Strobes are much harder if not impossible to effectively gauge the distance, bearing, and speed of. They are insufficient.

Both a bright solid light and a much dimmer strobe provide all of the benefits with none of the down sides.
Whether a hypothetical alternate world in which Rust didn't have a package manager or didn't make sharing code easy would be better or worse than the world we live in isn't an interesting question, because in that world nobody would use Rust to begin with. Developers have expected to be able to share code with package managers ever since Perl 5 and CPAN took off. Like it or not, supply chain attacks are things we have to confront and take steps to solve. Telling developers to avoid dependencies just isn't realistic.
Depends who is paying for that? Self hosted that’s not a problem, but ‘serverless’ that’s usually costly at those levels, especially for worthless traffic.
This is such a fantastic benefit of Golang: spin up a VPS, apply some sensible defaults, cross compile then run your binary.

Compare this to deploying python, node or php... Needless complexity.

If only running (and keeping running) a database server could be this straightforward!
Awslabs/mountpoint-S3-csi-driver: Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI Driver
That's the point of MoE. Sacrificing VRAM for compute/RAM bandwidth which makes it harder sell for consumer devices but easier for server devices where things are more likely to be compute or RAM bandwidth bound.
1 petabit is not that far away https://www.nict.go.jp/en/press/2020/12/18-1.html
> the constant refrain that LLM hallucinations are precisely equivalent to common human behavior

You sure it's "precisely" and not "analogously"?

Ironically, one common human failing is to use binary classification.

> or had severe mental deficiency

It seems I have worked with more human idiots than you. And at least one time where I was the idiot, despite literally scoring "off the charts" on a cognitive abilities test at school.

I'd agree that LLMs are not as smart as humans — they had to read 10% of the internet just to be as competent as an intern — but to me they're more like newspapers and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect than "severely deficient", even when indeed unacceptable.
I do agree here. The choice to prefer X over Y for hosting (no matter X and Y) often makes sense, changing hosting providers can take a bit of time & it's hard to fully assess the reality of the quality of support / security (again, not specifically writing about RDS or Citus, both are very good teams) beforehand, so it usually is safer to have a long probing period to move safely, which takes time, something they visibly didn't have much.
Krita/GIMP are great but also more complicated. So depends on what someone needs which one is better.
lol I’m not going to try convince some nobody who thinks he’s safe cos Facebook makes a claim.
Totally agree. Bike lights also shine far into the distance, and I have the feeling that (with the old lights being weaker) didn't used to be the case. If these new overly bright LED lights shone a bit more downwards it might be an improvement.
Now this is all fun, but has anyone managed to make these mechanisms work with Multicast PCIe ? I really need GPUdirect and StorageDirect to support this, until PCIe catches up to today's (or Blackwell's) NVLink ... around PCIe 12?