skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You really should read his articles.

> IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros

Devereaux argues precisely the contrary, that LotR is more realistic than GoT at presenting faux-medieval societies and the feudal caste! Perhaps Tolkien simply did his research better... or that simply by taking medieval and ancient literature as his sources, he got it better.

He has quite a bit to say about the system of vassallage as depicted in GoT, as well as the relationship between the Church and both the common people and the nobles. Devereaux argues that the cynical take in GoT, i.e. that most nobles didn't believe in their religion and only cynically used it when it suits their purposes (which is the norm, not the exception in GoT!) is at odds with the real middle-ages.

Also, none of Deveraux's objections focus on obviously fantasy things like zombies or dragons, he's not trying to score cheap points, and he explicitly states he's living magic & dragons out of the equation. No realistic explanation could come out of them, anyway.

Again, none of this would be a problem if we accepted GoT as pure fantasy (as I do, by the way -- I'm a fan), but it was actually hyped as "more realistic"!
I wonder if you can quantify if there's any lower risk because you used this app. The odds of all the things are so low that I'm not sure it could be measured.
There was a post on Language Log once scoffing at the stupidity of the Chinese for their feeling that Uyghurs should use normal Chinese names.

I asked a friend in Shanghai whether she thought Uyghur names should be allowed. She responded: "Huh? You don't get to choose what other people's names are. They tell you their names, and then you have to call them that.

And if you really want to think about weird names, there's a country called 'St. Vincent and the Grenadines'!"

(In other minority-names-in-China news, I have a Mongol friend whose name is Saruul. Her parents sinicized this as the three Mandarin syllables sha-ru-la, which look like a normal Chinese name. I don't actually know what she prefers to be called, but I suspect most people she knows call her Rula.)
Anyway, people can get IP addresses of phones, public Wifi still tells them where you were and it only takes on mistake of you connecting through your own phone for them to know certain.

This taken together means there's no security with regard to contacts if the server or the network is compromised.

There are excellent solutions to this: dummy messages and remailing. Without those no system can ensure that contact information is kept secret.
The rise of Big Latency is trashing our long distance relationships. It is absolutely infuriating.
I've had a contact in my phone named "The Beast" with phone number 666 for more than 20 years now. Originally came about as a joke for some high school buddies when we were EXTREMELY into Iron Maiden. Now just a dumb easter egg for myself, or I guess anyone as weird as I am who gets hold of my phone and tries calling 666.
Battery life deteriorating is only a pain point because they make it so users can't trivially service the battery themselves. It is amazing seeing the walk back over the years from sensible affordances to the consumer to binning those features behind expensive repairs. I still remember my ibook where you could pop out the keyboard with your fingers and pop out the battery with a dime. I remember when they released the unibody macbook and they gave you a simple clasp to access both the battery and the hard drive as they were anticipating consumers shifting to SSDs in the near future in 2010 and wanted to offer an affordance. Slowly that went away. The latch went away for a dozen small screws that are easy to strip and lose. Eventually the ability to change out the drive or the battery yourself went away too. Slippery slope of setting up user expectations for a worse version of the product in a few generations from certain standpoints. Sure it is faster but imagine if it was faster and also as serviceable as devices used to be. There isn't good reason for it other than to gouge you when you spec out your macbook at rates that are always at a convenient premium over today's prices for these hardware.
systemic problems require systemic solutions, currently the systemic incentives are for single-party. If you want multiparty you're going to have to want a good deal of constitutional changes or internal party structure changes (although we already have a good amount of that in the form of house caucuses).
So New York City doesn't get to impose tolls on a Federal highway without the federal government's agreement? That sounds... actually reasonable.
Gravitas Threads: Chrome Reddit Player Open Source and Free
Gravitas Threads plays Reddit posts as an interactive, gamified experience. The extension aims to reduce scrolling prevalent in social networks by replacing the wall with an interactive 3D volume of posts. Users can play the simulation to receive recommendations based on heuristics such as upvotes, newness, top, hot, and so on. In addition, the user can pause the simulation to pick video and image posts by clicking on the interactive elements. The last 10 absorbed posts get displayed in a pane which are clickable links to the Reddit pages.

Gravitas Threads is available for free as a google chrome extension.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gravitas-threads-re...

The GitHub repo is open source under an MIT license.

https://github.com/richfallatjr/gravitas-threads-chrome

I built the app based off a gravitational formula I've been working on which diverges from Newtonian gravity and Kepler's Laws and finds an averaged gravitational pull from all bodies in the system. This provided an elegant and incredibly efficient real-time physics engine which is built on ThreeJs. The motion mimics planetary orbits and also insects swarming to a certain extent.

Gravitas Threads is unique because it is a real-time recommendation engine which is fast and free in contrast to AI which costs businesses untold, vast amounts of dollars to build and maintain significant models.
> defining discreet units of AI actions that can be chained into workflows that interact with non-ai services.

You got. But that is the interesting part! To make AI useful, beyond basic content generation in a chat context you need interaction with the outside world. And you may need iterative workflows that can spawn more work based on the output of those interactions. The focus on Agents as personas is a tangent to the core use case. We could just call this stuff "AI Workflow Orchestration" or something ... and it would remain pretty useful!
>Not sure how you can have the software without the hardware.

You can have good software. You can have bad software. The hardware does not make it good or bad. The software is whatever the devs made it to be utilizing whatever hardware on which it runs. The user is ultimately responsible for the software they use whether they installed it or it is preinstalled.

Again, blaming the horse because the rider is doing bad things is not the right approach

> In your example, I can just look thru your HN history and see you posted dozens of times yesterday.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? I don't use a device to do this.
> roads constructed with federal funds, such as those in Manhattan

Does this mean that you are calling for the federal government to take over road construction and maintenance in New York City? The people who want to get rid of congestion pricing don’t live or pay taxes to the city so that would be more fair in a sense.
This looks really great! How do you make money? Do you charge for deploying these to your platform? I couldnt find anything on pricing
So it‘s a lie.
>If Apple starts spearheading changes in how phone modems work, could we imagine mobile towers playing along and converging? Or is it more entrenched than that?

Do You mean Telco Equipment vendor converging? Well first thing is that 4g / 5G or 3GPP is an open standard so anyone could implement it. Second is that there are only a few Telco Equipment vendor left already. There will still be insane amount of testing required to be done even if everyone were to use the same equipment. The amount of variables such as spectrum, regulations requirements, physical space and density as well as weather difference.
I mostly try making automated developer scripts, which take a project description as input, and have the LLM write a script to implement it, then execute the script, then return the output to the LLM, and asked it if the project is complete or it wants to submit an updated version.

The sample project description I've been using is asking it to get the public IP, location, weather conditions, and 5 regional news headlines, using free public APIs or feeds.

Even with the project description telling it to use free, public, keyless APIs, half the time it will immediately throw in a paid API and a line like weather_api_key = #insert your API key here, the script will run, the API will return a keyerror, we give that to the LLM says "the error is because the API key is missing, let me try again" and submits the exact same code again, when the line about using free APIs is in context. (wttr.in is the public weather API it knows how to use if you remind it specifically that wttr.in exists...)

It will also invent indexes when trying to extract the response data.

I have tried using 4o, 4o-mini, and mistral small 24b 2501.

I get that I still need to do the work of prompt engineering if I want impressive results. I have lots of text strings telling the LLM, you are a developer, you will be given a project description, you will write a script, we will run the script, we will return the output to you, you will judge if the output fully achieves the project description, and if not, include an updated full script to try again. It overall works, but it certainly makes plenty of junior dev mistakes too.

We need a way to impart the type of additional knowledge accumulation and instruction following that happens with fine-tuning, at runtime, because clearly, knowledge that is "baked in" and knowledge that is provided in context is in very separate classes.
An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time.

A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.
no shor no upvote
i will not, but thank you for your concern.
Scaling up Open Reasoning with OpenThinker-32B
Discussion (39 points, 19 hours ago, 29 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097212
After reading Laurenz's blog post on TeX vs Typst layout [1], it made me wonder: how hard would it be at this point for them to make Typst directly understand TeX, and let you insert chunks of TeX. It would make for a really nice upgrade path. Of course, being bug-for-bug compatible once people layer on tons of TeX packages seems like a losing game. But if most straightforward TeX stuff "just worked", it would be an easy way to upgrade one paragraph at a time…

[1] https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/layout-models/
Russians aren't allowed to bring phones on the frontlines apparently but Ukranians often do still as they have the combat management app which is critical to operations. I've always wondered if this is why there's far more published footage of Ukranian combat video than Russian. Beyond the donation incentive they attached to videos when publishing them on Youtube/Telegram.
It's also been a while since I read it but he address some of those points in the extended series as they come up.

IIRC the two main things are that one of the main athenian sources greatly admired sparta and wanted athens to be more like it, so was actually biased in the other way than you'd expect. And in the other sources it's clear that some degree of respect for sparta's history and military tenacity was common among at least the athenian elite whose views we have access to.

Also in an extended conflict in a complex political environment involving other military powers, it can sometimes be to your benefit to acknowledge or even inflate the might of your enemy. A polity's regional stature is not improved by having a hard time defeating a weak opponent. So to some extent athenians probably contributed to sparta's enduring reputation as a formidable military power.

So yeah the sources are biased but mainly in ways that an informed-enough reader can recognize and account for and still draw useful information from them, albeit carefully. Which, I learned from this blog, is a big part of the actual practice of the discipline of history.
> Locally, the black hole would swallow any atoms it comes into contact with

Would it be capable of doing that? If the radius of the event horizon is significantly smaller than the radius of a proton, would it be capable of swallowing a proton (and how)?
Available on Ollama also: https://ollama.com/library/openthinker:32b-q4_K_M
Ok I'm curious: since this strategy sacrifices consistency, has anyone thoughts about something that is not full fan-out on reads or on writes ?

Let's imagine something like this: instead of writing to every user's timeline, it is written once for each shard containing at least one follower. This caps the fan-out at write time to hundreds of shards. At read time, getting the content for a given users reads that hot slice and filters actual followers. It definitely has more load but

- the read is still colocated inside the shard, so latency remains low

- for mega-followers the page will not see older entries anyway

There are of course other considerations, but I'm curious about what the load for something like that would look like (and I don't have the data nor infrastructure to test it)
> The Democratic Party is more comfortable with Trump as a dictator than an actual progressive getting in power. If the Democrats opposed and sabotaged Republicans half as well as they did Bernie Sanders, we would be in a very different place.

It's been like this for decades, and is why I haven't voted for a democatic party candidate for president in that time. Living in California, it doesn't even matter, all of the electoral votes go to the dems anyway.

This is all a consequence of the US still governing with an organization that was designed in 1776. After WWII european contries reorged their governments as well as their physical infrastructure. The wswitched to propotional representation with parlamentary style governments. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot closer than what we have in the US.

With presidenatial electrions decided by 7 states, and by a small minority of the voters in those states, something like 1% of the US population is deciding the outcome.

Neither dems nor reps want to change this. There is no real hope for actual democracy in the US...
Every time I see this pop up it reminds me of this part of an epsiode of This American Life [0]. At parts its quite difficult to listen to, however it seems like an important thing to be aware of. If they're willing to do this to children, what are they fine with doing to adults? It's beyond words how someone can imagine that this is moral behavior in the pursuit of justice. I don't see how anyone can harass a child like that - already distraught by the death of his sister - and to treat some kid like a murderer for hours on end.

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/210/perfect-evidence/act-tw...
AI vs. an Extra Minute in the Shower
I wouldn't say it's an engineering problem. Biology and pharmacology are very complex with lots of curveballs, and each experiment is often different and not done enough to warrant full engineering-scale optimization (although this is sometimes the case!).
Show HN: Lovecraft FTP (Maybe a Honeypot?)
I had a thought today: I can just send anything to an FTP client. It just assumes that the FTP server will tell it what files are on the server and handle the exchange of data. What if I just lie to it?

I was going to make a blog that could only be read by FTP, my other thought was a sort of "gate" system that would turn on a website but to access the website first you had to submit a file (maybe signed GPG message) to the FTP server and on a connection it would fire up port 80 or allow your IP address on port 80.

However, I've been playing with Masscan and wanting to learn more about that side of the Internet so the tool I built is Lovegood FTP - "Maybe a honeypot?". You could use it to log ip addresses that try to access your FTP. I love the idea of using it to prank your friends. Set it to display a bunch of pirated movies and then have a message for them.

Anyway, if you would like to see for yourself what it does you can connect to FTP at lovecraft-ftp.travis.plus on port 21 with any username/password.

:) If you think this is funny / good / stupid I would love a star. I'm job hunting and apparently they can help and I'll take all the help I can get.
The market for a cheaper iphone like this has always been just buying a 4 year old phone for like $0-small few hundred from your carrier. Makes no sense for apple to push a new product in this segment when their own supply eats it. And all they really offer in the se is a new old iphone anyhow making use of old components they have spare inventory available or on order from their vendors remaining supply lines.
“we would be arguing”? I wouldn’t.

I would argue it should be illegal for the police, media, and others who have significant roles in society to lie and that they should be criminally prosecuted.

The only tragedy that I see is that most people seem to scream something in relation to free speech when the idea of criminally prosecuting folks for lying is mentioned. I prefer truthful discourse with serious consequences over whatever most call “free speech”.
> OCR is good enough for even my terrible handwriting

Challenge accepted! I can't even read my own handwriting anymore, I would be incredibly impressed if an OCR can.

It's sort of a feedback loop; my handwriting is bad, so I type everything, so I never use a pen, so I don't practice my handwriting, so my handwriting gets worse. As it stands, I don't think I've written anything with pen and paper (other than a signature) since ~2021?

I've thought about picking up something in the Boox series but they've always been just a bit too pricey for me to justify; I'm afraid it would be yet another tablet thing that I use for a week and then just ends up collecting dust under my bed (of which I have a bunch).
There's poor quality videos of older tests on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc

These inert reentry vehicles are impacting at hypersonic speeds; I wouldn't want to be anywhere near there.
Biden chose not to use the power available to him to its full extent. He could have done something really extreme with the immunity he was granted by SCOTUS, but instead, he disavowed it.
I wanted to add that there is the cease and desist case against Signal-FOSS fork that tried to implement an open server, too.

In my opinion Briar is where it's at, but because there's no data collection it's pain to do a handshake or manage contacts.
Personally I've never had real people use any of my personal projects, just some bots trying to break into the server occasionally with some generic scripts. So you'll probably be fine
It looks like theyre using the vercel ai sdk, which really isnt the vercel platform, doesnt have anything to do with any of the rest of vercel. Its actually quite nice and full featured.
My understanding is that they can/do on WhatsApp.

On Signal, unless there is a some bug or outright fraud, afaik they cannot - that is one of their fundamental goals, and they did a lot of work to develop communication technology that worked without revealing that metadata.

(Of course, if someone gets access to your phone, then they know who you are talking to.)
China's electric-vehicle-to-humanoid-robot pivot
Your kitchen sponge teems with bacteria – should you use a brush instead?
And from our internal newsletter: Sysadmin team test showcases readiness to restore files from backups in case of ransomware attack.
I like this one a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/
Sprint is long out of service.

Fun fact: when I drove out to see what was left of the launch complex, probably 20 years ago now, I was surprised to find a guy mowing the lawn and the lights still on! I assumed this was for some ABM treaty reasons. Wondering if it's still kept in that state.
The British Swingfire missile does this too, hence the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swingfire
Observations About Tokyo
I have never worked for Faang and have seen this be an issue in every single company Ive worked for. Every one. You don’t need millions of pods. Even a fleet of a few hundred (which isn’t crazy for most small to medium businesses) will cause you much pain if you don’t handle this properly.
Yep, certificate pinning is the one scenario Subtrace can't handle in my experience, but thankfully, it's fairly rare like you said. And IMO there is no general solution to the problem [1], but it's one of those very interesting problems to daydream thinking about when you're stuck in traffic or whatever :)

We still try our best by handling as much of the long tail of environments with some library/framework specific workaround (e.g. Deno bundles all TLS certs in its binary so we set the DENO_CERT env var when applicable).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923998
I'm curious how do we know this? I don't plainly see this it all.
My comment should’ve been prefaced with “Assuming you have an existing 200A service,”

A new service drop and panel shouldn’t be $10k, but lots of residential electricians are greedy. 4/0 4/0 2/0 aluminum triplex cable isn’t that expensive but if they included directional boring instead of trenching, $10k makes more sense. A fully loaded resi panel with the correct AFCI and GFCI breakers is around $2500 or so. If you happen to live in MN or WI, I can give you a better quote.
I love that the kids are rediscovering things like landlines and baggy pants.
Surprised this is comment is not higher. Gatsby was one of the worst technologies I have worked with in my long career of working with various JS libraries and frameworks. Im sure the team is smart and capable, but I would not be advertising their work with Gatsby.
> 2) do you have a basis to suggest it’s “not-very-secure or likely backdoored,” in response to their apparently thoughtful and transparent engineering to ensure otherwise?

The forum post explains this:

> This data is encrypted by a PIN only the user can know, however users are allowed to create their own very short numeric PIN (4 digits). By itself this does not protect data from being decrypted by brute force. The fact that a slow decryption algorithm must be used, is not enough to mitigate this concern, the algorithm is not slow enough to make brute forcing really difficult.
The promise is that Signal keeps tge data secured on their servers within a secure enclave. This allows anyone to verify that no data is taken out of the server, also not by the Dignal developers themselfs, not even if they get a subpoena. At least that is the idea.

> It is also not clear if a subpoena can force Signal to quietly hand over information which was meant to stay within this secure enclave.

That should be very concerning for activists/journalists who use Signal to maintain privacy from their government. Subpoena + gag order means the data is in the hands of the government, presuming Signal want to keep offering their services to the population of the country in question.
It’s not. It’s on top of AI SDK, which is a popular open source library maintained by Vercel.
Exactly. They are so junior they aren't even protected yet. This is still a side-effect of unionization, from my POV.