Hacker News Reader

meltynesson U.S. gov't moves to suppress pushback on data centers

are you confident the demand for massive ai datacenters peppered everywhere isn't just some financial gambit? wouldn't you ask for consequences and side-effects that are socially desirable, even if the facility brings no wealth to the immediate area (either as a consequence of being owned by a remote corp, or by the investment failing completely).

meltynesson Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users

theyre sunsetting the google assistant that can "take me home"

meltynesson OSS-SEC: 432 Linux kernel CVEs (in less than 32 hours)

... or that the kernel can't be hot reloaded is itself a vulnerability?

meltynesson Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered [video]

I want an AMA on whoever had an army of upvoter bots on early Reddit such that every front page post would have a dictionary typo.

meltynesson A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median

without thinking about it or looking at the article, this feels rather radixy

meltynesson I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows

I would speculate myself instead the more likely thing is related to:

- dns cache configuration

- wlan power saving which is kind of aggressive since Linux has had some power management issues

It's really why I go for a minimal distro, debian with xfce. There's not many components, they're not "tuned", and I can just kinda research any issues myself and find what works. Usually there's some pretty big gaps (missing a whole component, wildly malfunctioning, high resource utilization) and then it's easy to figure out. There's not much code, or really hard scripts to understand. Just maybe enable debug on the service. Learn where the developers put diagnostics (about:support is a godsend). You get to architect your hardware's success and get a rock-solid system. But yeah, if it's weird it might be weird for a while, haha.

For my setup I think the last few lessons were like:

- use gamescope for X11 Wine/Proton (huge.)

- Firefox profile reset to fix hardware decoding (followed some good guides and some bad guides)

- to make changes use the same git tag as your distro so the deps are easily in-reach.

My favorite new discovery for debian in particular is their extensive functional docs. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/

absolutely adore this.

meltynesson Let's Buy Spirit Air

Let's see the pool's at $88M with $670 average buy-in, so each of the 132k buyers will owe $15,000-$60,000 of outstanding debt so they can support solvency and to keep airline prices down, and become buyers in the not particularly exciting and highly regulated, volatile capex and opex expensive, fuel consuming and definitely not particularly environmentally friendly, with much larger competitors passenger air transport industry. What an opportunity!

meltynesson A new trick brings stability to quantum operations

... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.

meltynesson Ask HN: Should AI credits be refunded on mistakes?

It's interesting on the grounds of aligning incentives.

It's not interesting due to the fact that it suggests humans are still in the loop of some slow-cycle improvements. That'd never get by any board. In fact, selection of model modes implies it's your responsibility, so that meal was scraped into your flowerpot years ago.

I'd say fat chance.

meltynesson Run Linux containers on Android, no root required

https://github.com/ExTV/Podroid/blob/3f7d19dee63e24e0bd36c22... not sure

meltynesson April 2026 TLDR Setup for Ollama and Gemma 4 26B on a Mac mini

I feel like the READMEs for these 3 large popular packages already illustrate tradeoffs better than hacker news argument

meltynesson Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins

is this token friendly?

meltynesson Billion-Parameter Theories

... but then why not a model model to perform that outer analysis and overcome the representations shortcomings of an encoder network?

meltynesson Microgpt

  vocabulary*

  *In the code above, we collect all unique characters across the dataset

meltynesson TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

You can try and squeeze a free speech absolutism story out of it, but the reality is that this has been a story since Microsoft got into cable news.

At that point it was a game of "I'm not slandering you" to chip away at every other valuation, that could have easily have just been called antitrust because they didn't build it. That was 1996-2005 and went completely unchecked.

This is similar but the stack was even cheaper, and closer to more people's faces.

Even if governments take no recourse, I don't see an issue with government using it's position to put a food pyramid in citizen's faces to say like, "this can be harmful." The church probably would have if this were long ago, except, instead of fire and brimstone, some sort of epic story of social isolation, permanent dissatisfaction, and self-imposed constraints, alien abduction, transformation into a pig by a wizard?

There's probably a lot of visceral fears that would be worthy analogs to the harms of the feed.

I don't think that this narrative has been explored enough, honestly. Corps keep building crap like this, even amazon has (had?) an influencer feed.

People who are in play/leisure should probably practice tolerating more choices than "express mild, momentary dissatisfaction and receive an instantaneous reward"... that's probably not a life everyone should be trained to live

meltynesson 175K+ publicly-exposed Ollama AI instances discovered

Apparently been that way for a while haha

https://github.com/moby/moby/commit/1cbdaebaa1c2326e57945333...

meltynesson 175K+ publicly-exposed Ollama AI instances discovered

It's more of a distribution thing for me really. I'm basically using docker as a package manager since they otherwise distribute through one of those ad-hoc shell scripts that I'd prefer to avoid accidentally breaking Debian with somehow.

I've built ollama before too, but, I like that I can cleanly rip it out of my system or upgrade it without handing root off to some shell script somewhere I guess.

If anyone's gonna bash up my system it oughta be me

meltynesson 175K+ publicly-exposed Ollama AI instances discovered

This is a weakness of docker, a bit, I think.

I was rigging this up, myself, and conciscious of the fact that basic docker is "all or none" for container port forwarding because it's for presenting network services, had to dig around with iptables so it'd be similar to binding on localhost.

The use case https://github.com/meltyness/tax-pal

The ollama container is fairly easy to deploy, and supports GPU inference through container toolkit. I'd imagine many of these are docker containers.

e: i stand corrected, apparently -p of `docker run` can have a binding interface stipulated

e2: https://docs.docker.com/engine/containers/run/#exposed-ports which is not in some docs

e3: but it's in the man page ofc

meltynesson Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

Like reddit but nomic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

meltynesson Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots don’t misbehave

I mean I'm sure cramming synthetic data and scaling models to enhance like, in-model arithmetic, memory, etc. makes "alignment" appear more complex / model behavior more non-newtonian so to speak, but it's going to boil down to censorship one way or another. Or an NSP approach where you enforce a policy over activations using another separate model, and so-on and so-on.

Is it likely that it's a bigger problem to try and apply qualitative policies to training data, activations, and outputs than the approach ML-guys think is primarily appropriate (ie., nn training) or is it a bigger problem to scale hardware and explore activation architectures that have more effective representation[0], and make a better model? If you go after the data but cascade a model in to rewrite history that's obviously going to be expensive, but easy. Going after outputs is cheap and easy but not terrifically effective... but do we leave the gears rusty? Probably we shouldn't.

It's obfuscation to assert that there's some greater policy that must be applied to models beyond the automatic modeling that happens, unless there's some specific outcome you intend to prevent, namely censorship at this point, maybe optimistically you can prevent it from lying? Such application of policies have primarily targeted solutions that reduce model efficacy and universality.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35703367

meltynesson Beijing is enforcing tough rules to ensure chatbots don’t misbehave

In security-eze I guess you'd say then that there are AI capabilities that must be kept confidential,... always? Is that enforceable? Is it the government's place?

I think current censorship capabilities can be surmounted with just the classic techniques; write a song that... x is y and y is z... express in base64, though stuff like, what gemmascope maybe can still find whole segments of activation?

It seems like a lot of energy to only make a system worse.

meltynesson US bars approvals of new models of DJI, all other foreign drones

That's an optimistic take, a more pessimistic take is that this is a tactic to lock marketshare for Wing, Zipline, Amazon and stall investment in drone delivery services while production catches up.

edit: I'm speculating here that the supply chain wasn't already state-side for these players without knowing much about their business model

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

Did you watch the YouTube timestamp? Do you know the difference between audience and subject? Do you know that we don't all live in primary school? Can you list any 7 buzz words I've raised that didn't come immediately from the YouTube timestamp?

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

I mean this is just one case, I didn't cherry pick this, I peeked at a few previous episodes to find an episode where there was indeed a professor for the feature interview.

It's uninteresting because it's basically become a platform for regulatory capture. It's a wellspring of obviously non-universal ideas like, "there is no right way to integrate AI and primary education", "the federal government should subsidize ai access", or "only safe ai platforms should be permitted". I mean it's obviously their right to blather incessantly about it, I just think it's boring, and that's all I've said.

Maybe it's because I'm not a politician or a philanthropist, and I'm not required to tailor my actions to appease a large number of people subject to my will, but there's obviously better ways to approach that, like delegating and talking to people, who are local to the concern.

It's a nuanced and long term discussion and I think lots of the stuff that winds up in these interviews is really a local issue that's going into the wrong channel by well-meaning folks who don't understand government, or worse folks who are seeking to exploit government for profit.

And concretely, the interview doesn't focus on the book or the study, it's literally just an authoritative "intersectional" quiz about how AI/Education crosses with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,... a dumb question.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

You are optimistic about my ability to get things done, and I appreciate that.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

Yeah, we're opining on a segment that I opined is excessively opinionated (i.e., opinions are confidently stated so as to be represented as facts, "half of teachers are using LLMs") but when you look, the "study" is just a bunch of opinion polls. So yeah it is, in the literal sense, the professor's opinion being represented as facts, thank you have a nice day.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

It's a national federally funded organization and they want to chat on about justice and fairness, literally asking in order "how does this effect diversity? oh. How about equity? oh. how about inclusion?", and it's such a surprise that it costs a trillion dollars to not plop a choo-choo from LA to SF when everyone "feels like it"? It's gross, it's gross to me. Stick to the news.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oqr95elV5io&t=2108s

Probably best to dissect a specimen. I guess really the guy's just hocking his book here, but it's vacuous and packed with opinions and pessimism, and really not particularly high quality journalism.

For example, I disagree with the opinion that LLMs can't be a free lunch, or at least can't be CAPEX instead of OPEX, which Reich doesn't realize in the stated opinion.

I had to go back pretty far to find a professor, specifically, the first few were social outreach or labor organizers.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

The first half is usually solid, the back half is, well, usually more opinionated/softer. Lots of interviews with professors who seek to have their opinions represented as facts or members of the public have their plight elevated as serious national policy concerns.

meltynesson PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract

As an avid and long term PBS viewer, donor, news hour west was 90% a waste of time anyway. Most evenings it is virtually the same broadcast, same segments. Media is more VOD-oriented anyway. They have been posting both broadcasts to YouTube for years, so you can assess this if you'd like.

The exception is if there's something notable to report on between 5PM and 8PM EST