skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a great post and would be worth submitting again in (say) 2 or 3 months, but for now it's a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42426284, which is currently at #1 on the front page.

The best place for follow-up links is in the comments of the existing thread; otherwise we end up with repetition on the front page, which we try to avoid. That's why we downweight follow-up links, which I've done here.

If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com in a few months and remind me about this, I'll send you a repost invite for it. Those get a random placement on HN's front page (similar to the SCP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The next step is ELBO — the evidence lower bound.
This is exactly correct. We're not saying somehow somebody is cheating the system (e.g. by not paying taxes), we're showing how it's a lot more transparent.
Good points; however, 1) many victims are not running http3 and 2) there are ways of addressing the cases you mention, such as dropping unauthenticated TLS traffic, isolating any external-facing DNS and NTP servers (and probably with whitelisting/sandboxing/time-windowing), etc. (I'm also not a fan of abusing DNS for load balancing, but that is another discussion.) All of this can be done in hardware at line rate. And source address validation is going to help as well.

I'd be interested in your ideas as to the best steps forward for improving the DDoS situation, if you have a reference.
A lot of my code takes in garbage data and does some complicated stuff to produce useful outputs. Almost all the difficulty comes from hidden problems in the data upstream, including very often the data contradicting itself (a lot of fuzzy matching, 'voting' to determine the truth, etc.) None of these problems are ever-known beforehand, and can typically only be discovered after a lot of work has been done to make the data more intelligible (i.e. in the process of writing of my code).

I've realised over time that everyone else who prefers the design-doc approach refuse to do work like this. There's just a whole class of problems that are too hard without prototyping.
> In 2021, lawyer and FOIA expert Michael Ravnitzky filed a request for copies of video footage of a lecture by legendary computer scientist Admiral Grace Hopper that were present in the National Security Agency’s archives. The NSA denied the request in May of 2024, stating that the agency no longer owned a machine capable of playing back the AMPEX video tapes in their collection.

This is no longer correct. Once the denial was issued in May it was shared widely via HN and other outlets. This attention resulted in the video being digitized and put online in August 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356528a). As I and many others observed in May, there are quite a few specialist video firms as well as archivists, technology museums and private collectors of vintage video gear who have working 1-inch Type-C video player/recorders. It was by far the most common broadcast video tape format for well over a decade. Almost every broadcast TV station and post production house had several decks, so it's not even considered a rare or challenging format by any serious video archivist. The NSA's pro forma rejection was due to bureaucratic silos, budget and lack of motivation - not any technical inability to play that video format today.

The staff charged with issuing the legally required responses to FOIA requests don't care about archiving, preservation or history. They are measured by clearing the request backlog and the fastest (+ cheapest) way to do that is to find any legitimate grounds for denial and check that box on the form - which they obviously did. Of course, the NSA does have other staff who are measured on preserving and disseminating the organization's history. Once the opportunity to preserve this media was brought to their attention, the right thing happened - and in this happy case it did so with surprising speed.

The article should be updated because there are much better examples of vintage media being lost forever, such as acetate film reels including masters and camera negatives from early cinema. Although in that case, as with many others, the loss is most often due to improper storage of the media accelerating chemical decomposition - not any technical inability to read the media. In fact, I suspect there aren't yet many examples of loss purely due to no longer being able to technically parse a digital storage format. All the losses I'm aware of are due to things like bit rot, fading magnetic pulses and chemical degradation preventing recovering the raw signal in the first place. As evidenced by the heroic recovery and reconstruction of some of the earliest ever experimental television recordings, if the bits, pulses or grains still exist and there's motivation to recover it, we can usually find a way to capture the raw bits, pulses or waveforms and decode them into a modern format.
/? What happens if a black hole hits Earth?
https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Happens+If+A+Black+Hole...

Though, the same folks claim there could be a microscopic black hole every 30 km on or throughout earth

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38452488 :

> PBS Spacetime estimates that there are naturally occurring microscopic black holes every 30 km on Earth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33483002

> [...]

> Isn't there a potential for net relative displacement and so thus couldn't (microscopic) black holes be a space drive?
> Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.

I will. Opportunity cost is the danger in focusing on the stock price beyond your existential financial needs.

What did silencing those engineers cost in terms of creativity and motivation? Yes Apple’s stock price went up, but at what cost? How many iPhone-level innovations did their corporate culture cost?
Somehow torvalds/linux is in Fronterra, next to JS projects, awesome-X lists, and frontend checklists.

Either kernel hackers unexpectedly love frontend, or more likely the people that write the code don't overlap much with the people that star Github projects!
Another data point: Before all the smart TV stuff you would tend to pay significantly more for an A/V monitor (basically a TV without the tuner) than you would for a regular TV.
That comment flabbergasted me, lol. One of the few things popularly known about Hindus is many of them consider cows sacred. Although, technically, many in India will choose to use ox milk instead of cow milk since it is much richer/fattier (and I assume cheaper too).
Ah okay - I misremembered - I only had to work with strict C89 once and that was close to 15 years ago now, and at a similar time I inherited a codebase that did things the C89 way but it was compiled as C++ so with no enforcement of variables at the top of blocks I didn't really pay attention to where things had been declared when it was first written.
How to Spot Psyops? [video]
so cool! anyone have any recs for cheap cards (or hardware) that is scannable on iphones?
Police in China take hi-tech rolling robot out on patrol
Eg Dextroamphetamine is well studied. A dose that causes the same capillary dilation as caffeine would have undetectable side effects
Thanks for sharing. Just a small nit: the first time you mention the name of the product it's written "Inkscape", not "Inkplate".
> The officer used advanced UAS monitoring technology to identify the drone’s location, flight history and its operators’ position on the largely uninhabited Boston Harbor Island known as Long Island, police said.

This just makes the New Jersey thing all the weirder.
As a tech-adjacent FAANG outsider, I’ve been pondering this for some time and this blog captures what I’ve been thinking for some time now. Eloquently delivered. I think this is accurate yet likely an oversimplification.

My theory is the roots of innovation go much deeper it’s not simply about incentives. When a company reaches a certain size, the goals for the company also shifts. Large companies manage risk away, they refocus on short term shareholder value as opposed to technological disruption, avoiding costly lawsuits, layers upon layers of red tape, internal audits, external audits, consultants. All of these things are the cost of doing business but they all erode innovative freedom and culture. Large companies can avoid a lot of these things but it’s astronomically difficult and when you’re publicly traded on the stock market it’s even harder to do. It’s the same reason startups seem to move so much faster and the massively large companies end up struggling.
Thanks for posting the NPR source.

I read about the anesthesia case from VOX, and they claimed the opposite, namely that there would be no additional costs for the patients
https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shi...
In other words, they are bound by social obligations that encourage them to support the system, and their leadership. Just like the young people.
The US military has been doing stuff like this for a long time. I remember reading about a dish that would be filed with mercury and then spon. Allowing for adjusting the shape and focal point on the fly.
Right I feel like the problem isn't "prototyping is bad". Prototyping is good! But sadly many companies and devs aren't disciplined enough to throw away first solutions. And that's the real problem.

And its not just the companies, developers get too attached to their first solution, rather than using it as a way to discover knowledge. Companies need to reward knowledge discovery, not just "shipping to prod"
Yes, you are right. It is a weird decision by the developers behind Hacker News to decide which version of Reddit (old/new) the user wants to use
Quake 2 on an FPGA (MRISC32 CPU) [video]
You absolutely can. But you'll want to pay attention to how insistent the TV is when it comes to being disconnected from the internet. I have an offline Samsung that will occasionally prompt me to accept the terms of service, which obviously fails because it's offline. I can imagine there are some brands/models that are more pushy.
This is a nice project, but personally I'd favor demanding that the school come up with an alternate solution for your son that doesn't require you to supply smartphone. Rather than allowing them to shift the burden to you
> Can't I just get a nice OLED smart TV and NEVER connect it to the internet?

Until they start shipping wideband chips in them. Make sure your helpful in-laws don’t connect it either.
The API has mostly stabilized and at this point other than some minor errors (“groupby” vs “group_by”) LLM’s seem to do pretty well with it. Personally, I’m glad they made the breaking changes they did for the long-term health of the library.
When I was in the Navy, we had $X to spend at the end of a quarter, and by god did we fucking spend it! Anything under the sun with any shred of argument that it was needed would be purchased. I was personally responsible for a huge department and I recall we had to spend an insane amount one quarter. I'm talking almost Brewster's Millions levels of trying to spend money, but let's call it Brewster's Hundred Thousands instead.

Spare parts for the Whizz-Banger which we would probably never use because you only need to replace that part maybe one time in the ship's life? Yea, buy ten of those! Fancy pocket tools and knives for every human onboard the ship, even the guys who sit at a desk ordering supplies? Sure, get two of them each, so they have a spare!

I always wondered why they did that "reset the budget to the lowest quarter" type of thing, just set a budget and if there is a surplus then next year the taxpayers don't have to pay as much. I don't know who ran the budgeting system, but it was fucked how badly we wasted money during quarters where nothing broke on the ship.

I don't read the news anymore to save my mental state, but I hope that this DOGE is a positive influence instead of just more oligarchy in action, though I am not holding my breath.
I haven't developed in this space for a while so I'm just curious - which framework(s) are you referring to that this could have replaced?
Why would there be so many changes? Do they seem legitimate, or more like they are trying to justify spending money on the scheduling system and playing with the new toy?
Reminds me of how some of the races from Mass Effect (notably turians and quarians) have the opposite chirality to our own, which means humans can't be nourished by their food and vice-versa. Interspecies sex is also complicated by this difference, so turians and quarians tend to date each other (when they date outside their species).
Huh. Worth trying. Is the original cut available?
Thanks for MCP, I think it is sorely needed, it shouldn't take more than a single file shell/python script to teach an llm how to access a resource.
This mod turns the PSP into a tiny PS2 with Bluetooth controller support
XML vs. JSON Why JSON Sucks (2017)
Inside the university AI cheating crisis
Yes, the ads infiltrating Windows, for example. Linux and Mac seem to be holding the line for now.
It's partisanship that ought be avoided. Team sports. Outside of that politics are a game of ideology, ideas, policy, and power dynamics, all of which are worth discussing.
I'm a sucker for replying to any sort of "how do I [career]" HN posts if they're relevant to my own experience, just can't help myself.

I also freelance exclusively, and opportunities come from word of mouth + the personal network that I've built over years of working with (or in) digital agencies. Full-timers jump from agency to agency at a fairly high clip and it's inevitable to run into people you've worked with before because they eventually need somebody and just think back to who they worked with in the past who they have fond memories of.

Generalism isn't a hindrance IMO because the job itself, like it or not, is a service job. You're not there to learn on the job, be part of the family, or find growth opportunities / upward career tracks inside of the organization -- you're there to help solve immediate problems, augment staff, and by God get things done. The more you know, the better! The way project resourcing works internally in these places is, the wider the skillset, the easier it is to slot you into a particular project that needs extra attention. The engagements are also pretty low risk for the agency since whatever you charge, they just inflate your rate to make sure they make money and pass it on to the client (which almost always gets paid), deliverables get delivered, the client is happy, and life marches on -- and if you're ineffective, they can just let you go with no notice, no offboarding, no extra costs, etc. For me personally, that's a win-win. For a lot of people, it's too much stress / risk / uncertainty, but different strokes for different folks!

Every now and then I'll get a gig or retainer that's more in line with "we're a small, thriving business, we need expertise, we have some budget, but we've also had bad experiences with small-to-medium tech shops. Help!" -- these are right in my wheelhouse because it's an easy retainer, quite low-risk for the client, and you can really make some meaningful impact on their bottom line as just one person.

You become "their guy", and the relationships can last for years and years and years. Again, this is a service job, and generalism REALLY helps on these types of engagements -- to be clear, you're not being paid to R&D a product or do academic research on cutting-edge algorithms -- you're just helping a client or business navigate the often-murky waters of technology to help them win. It might not sound "world-changing" in the context of big tech, but it can be quite satisfying work that really means something significant to real people just trying their best to make their thing go.

Anyways, to OP, good luck man! There's infinite opportunity out there if you've got the personality and the drive!
So they’ve reached peak refined oil but not peak coal yet.. their electric grid is very coal intensive and will only need more to accommodate more electric vehicles. this is NOT a good environment news story.
Coal is much worse for the planet than natural gas or gasoline.

In this chart, thermal power is almost exclusively coal in power China. https://www.statista.com/statistics/302233/china-power-gener...
I hope these things are never allowed around here. Roads are already dangerous enough without people driving around in tanks.
For now (see e.g. [1]), though companies with surveillance capitalist business models are not only abusive but often sneaky and may do things like include a surreptitious prepaid mobile connection to better thwart your wishes. You really can't trust the bastards.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/hdmi-customized-ad-i...
I use it daily. For java, I've just set the JDK by hand, as I'm learning it for a future job, but I plan to ditch it after I have no use for it at home.

No Sudo? Doas does it fine under OpenBSD. And so does Hyperbola. On Chromium... gven the future Google choices on extensions (hint: UBlock will either no work at all, or be severely limited) and current telemetry, that's a good riddance.

You can just use Luakit, or Iceweasel-UXP up to a limit.
Is this true that men aren't connecting to real women? What's the evidence? US STD rates are up 90% from 2004.
The major suspects this time around are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those agencies are very efficient by normal measures. But Elon/Vivek are coming at it from a perspective that considers their entire mission to be 100% waste. From that perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.
I like it. Kinda cool, and looks like it took a substantial effort. Completing the puzzle is great too.
Almost certainly this one https://www.serverless.com/
The hardest part is to know what to type. If I'm typing, problems are solved and I'm in auto pilot.
The last point even made it to NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/dining/homemade-yogurt-st...
Why would anyone respond to that? I haven't talked to you in 15 years and barely knew you. Looks like you are working at Google, I want a job there too. Lets catch up on zoom.
Get a projector. I have a Phillips short-throw projector. It has no OS beyond settings. It can have up to a 10' screen. Works great with Apple TV.
(2018) Related studies:

Reading texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension [pdf] (2012) (200 points, 3 months ago, 113 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41644086

Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension (2022) (320 points, 3 years ago, 124 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30181560
This is a perennial question (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for how far back it goes). I suppose we should add it to the FAQ.

The answer, which has been stable for many years, is that some stories with political overlap are inevitable and ok, as long as they aren't garden-variety politics and there is something of intellectual interest to be discussed. The current post falls in that category (as long as one skips the title and starts at the subtitle).

A thwack of past explanations about this is accessible via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourelf with some of those, and then still have a question, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering it.
there's approximately zero chance that the department of dodgy will go after this sort of thing.
Agreed, why not both? In fact, I’d say, first write up a theory, then demonstrate that it does or does not work using a prototype, then write the actual design doc. At all times, and continuing into the implementation phase, prioritize the disposability of your code. The easier it is to delete, the better.
This is hardly new. My high school did this over fifteen years ago. This app just shows hour+subject+teacher+room number. Quite useful on days the hours/rooms get switched around because a teacher is on leave.

Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable.

As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
Was? Companies still collude to suppress wages, albeit via layers of indirection. cf: Radford survey.
Very interesting and non partisan description of the near hopelessness of trying to make government more effective!
Well, this is embarrassing. I just realised I had wrongly interpreted the result in [1]. I made an error on how Shor's algorithm encodes the numbers, wrongly assuming that numbers are encoded into quantum state space, which is 2^(2^n), where instead, there is one bit encoded into one qubit, which is also more practical.

The result shall be interpreted directly with the error rate for logical qubits to decrease as ~n^(-1/3). This, in turn, means that factorisation of a 10000-bit number would only require an error rate of 1/10th of the number of the logical qubits for a 10-bit number. This is practical given that one can make a quantum computer with around 100k qubits and correct errors on them.

On the other hand, a sibling comment already mentioned the limited connectivity that those quantum computers now have. This, in turn, requires a repeated application of SWAP gates to get the interaction one needs. I guess this would add a linear overhead for the noise; hence, the scaling of the error rate for logic qubits is around ~n^(-4/3). This, in turn, makes 10000-bit factorisation require a logical error rate of 1/10000 that of 10-bit number factorisation. Assuming that 10 physical qubits are used to reduce error by order, it can result in around 400k physical qubits.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11432-023-3961-3
I think my argument would be that they could be the same artifact. Hence my usage of Draft PRs with a lot of rich documentation. And a willingness to throw it all away if you don't think its ultimately the right approach.

The real problem is the industry's inability to throwaway first solutions, so we introduce this (IMO inefficient) 'design doc' step as a safety mechanism
At my workplace, coding automatically silences your message notifications!
It won't happen, it didn't happen before, plus there is too much money to be made by his friends.
While I can appreciate the hesitation to move into what is seen as a politically charged topic, I encourage you to not ignore it hoping things will work themselves out. I fully agree that the odds of a technical solution are low, I don't think it is impossible to imagine some technical help.

Which is not to demand that you personally get involved. Feel free to ignore the topics and move on.
in Europe it's gone a long way towards that
I feel this same fury. It's nice to know I'm not alone.
Clickhouse has excellent performance and it scales out indeed. Unfortunately, it's hard to deploy and maintain a Clickhouse cluster and its catalog features are pretty basic compared to Databricks and Snowflake.
peanuts now, but peanuts then?
Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.