MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-04-24 08:32:42+00:00
The original PDP-11/Hack was an attempt at designing a minimal PDP-11 based on a discarded J-11. The J-11 is a microprocessor a bit similar to a 16-bit M68000 or a fast I8086.

http://madrona.ca/e/pdp11hack/index.html

Since that time, many people have made variations on Brent Hilpert design. One of my sources of inspiration is:

https://www.5volts.ch/pages/pdp11hack/

My design has the following features, but I never instantiated it:

* Much more RAM, 512KW

* The data bus is buffered (it is not in other designs)

* It has a GPIO (65C22) (because why not?)

* It can write into the upper byte

* The UART is the 6402, as in Brent Hilpert schematics, but the address is fully decoded to enable using a DEC OS.

* It has 5 switches to test/learn to single-step the memory accesses, the HALT, interrupts, or make a reset

* The boot configuration could be set up with micro-switches
by danielpetrica | 2025-04-24 08:32:50+00:00
You can totally see my english is not the best.

> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.

Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part. We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too. We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends. We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it). The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.
by rkangel | 2025-04-24 08:33:08+00:00
The adaptive charging used to be great for me, and then I had a baby. Now I get up a few times in the night, and so the adaptive charging just defaults to full rate. My night is still going to "end" at the same time so slow charging is fine, but my phone doesn't know that. I wish I had an override.

(I do have an old, lower wattage charger beside my bed to limit the charge rate)
by lhl | 2025-04-24 08:33:36+00:00
While Llama 4 had a pretty bad launch (the LM Arena gaming in particular is terrible), having run my own evals on it (using the April 5 v0.8.3 vLLM release - https://blog.vllm.ai/2025/04/05/llama4.html , so before the QKNorm fix https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/16311) - it seemed pretty decent to me.

For English, on a combination of MixEval, LiveBench, IFEval, and EvalPlus Maverick FP8 (17B/400B) was about on par with DeepSeek V3 FP8 (37B/671B) and Scout (17B/109B) was punching in the ballpark of Gemma 3 27B, but not too far off Llama 3.3 70B and Mistral Large 2411 (123B).

Llama 4 claimed to be trained on 10X more multilingual tokens than Llama 3 and testing on Japanese (including with some new, currently unreleased evals) the models did perform better than Llama 3 (although I'd characterize their overall Japanese performance as "middle of the pack": https://shisa.ai/posts/llama4-japanese-performance/

I think a big part of the negative reaction is that in terms of memory footprint, Llama 4 looks more built for Meta (large scale inference provider) than home users, although with the move to APUs and more efficient CPU offloading, there's still something to be said for strong capabilities at 17B of inference.

I think people are quick to forget that Llama 3, while not so disastrous, was much improved with 3.1. Also the competitive landscape is pretty different now. And I think the visual capabilities are being a bit slept upon, but I think that's also the case of releasing before the inference code was baked...
by lurk2 | 2025-04-24 08:33:53+00:00
> You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information

The same event is described in the book of Mark (10:32-34) and the book of Luke (18:31-34).

There are two other predictions that appear in all three books:

Matthew 16:21-23

Mark 8:31-33

Luke 9:21-22

Matthew 17:22-23

Mark 9:30-32

Luke 9:43-45
by larsga | 2025-04-24 08:34:24+00:00
> Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.

I am a historian. This is based on 10 years of reading ethnographic archive documentation of what people used to drink on farms, plus of course wide reading of ethnographic and historical literature on this.

> Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.

Industrial contamination is not the issue. The issue is bacteria and other micro-organisms. This page is very good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_disease

This is what toilets used to look like, from a museum in Gotland, Sweden. https://img.garshol.priv.no/photoserv.py?t378684

Now imagine the effect on your well, which usually would be downhill from the houses.

> Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.

Actually, lots of people contest that people used to drink beer, but that's fine. Let's move on.

I agree fear of drinking water is tricky. Evidence on this one way or another is hazy and ambiguous, but it seems to be more a preference for beer. What motivated the preference is again tricky to pin down.

It's easy to come up with quotes showing aversion to water. Just look at the first page of Linné's "A Description of Beer" (actual title in Swedish) from 1749. It says straight out that many kinds of water are harmful and therefore people prefer beer. But it doesn't mean this was a general belief, and there's plenty of evidence the other way.

> Btw, you don't need metal to boil water.

I already linked to a paper on how to boil water without. But it does mean that it was difficult. And people didn't know they needed to. So they didn't.

>> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water

>Yes you did:

Quote is missing or garbled somehow.

> > What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).

> I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical.

I think at this point the best thing I can do is point you to this, which is a relatively superficial summary of the evidence as I know it: https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html

Note the map with coloured dots. Every single one of those dots is a primary source where someone describes their own home parish.

The subject deserves a proper paper, but it's going to take a while before I have time to put one together.

That blog post is from 2022. Here's the state of that map today: https://imgur.com/a/K8YmqV7

Note that it was not just common to drink beer every day. French schools served wine with lunch until 1981. https://www.vice.com/fr/article/quand-les-enfants-buvaient-d...
by thenaturalist | 2025-04-24 08:34:59+00:00
Not 3.0 yet, but Airflow is a very, very mature project I'd say.

It was released Oct. 2014, joined Apache Foundation in 2016, became a top level project in 2019.

Check the release notes/ blog post and you'll see the amount of people involved.

In this release, some, but not all features are genuinely new without past dependencies, but I didn't spot major breaking changes.

I'd confidently go ahead, esp. in greenfield.

Might be a bit more muddy to migrate from 2.X to 3 atm.
by surgical_fire | 2025-04-24 08:34:59+00:00
> I would love it if I could use Linux on the Desktop.

Not sure what you use your desktop for. If your issue is that you need certain professional applications that are not compatible with Linux you may be out of luck.

But if your complaint id "core usability and stability", I am not really sure what you are complaining about.

I migrated my personal laptop from Windows to Linux Mint around 3 years ago, and it's amazing how much more stable and easy to use it is in comparison - case in point, back in Windows days I would have to do a fresh install every year or so.

And don't get me started on OSX. I have to use it daily on my work-issued laptop, and I deeply loathe it how it is hostile to more technical users (I would sincerely prefere using Windows than that crap).
by varjag | 2025-04-24 08:35:10+00:00
> So you think that a Russia that cannot defeat Ukraine has a chance to win, meaning you think they have the troops, equipment and logistics to defeat Poland, the Baltics and Finland at the same time?

No, just the Baltics. There will be no attack on Polish or Finnish mainland and so would these countries reciprocate only on the Baltic theatre. Neither Poland nor Finland will commit all their resources to defending the Baltics exposing the rest of their border.

The Baltics can be supplied only by air, sea and a very vulnerable land corridor. Air and sea will be very much excluded for the duration of hostilites and the Suwalki gap heavily contested. If Russia would manage to hold onto it long enough the Baltic story will be one huge siege of Mariupol. For Estonia the odds are the worst: even if the siege is broken and its neighbors are liberated it's too small and too close to Russia mainland that it could still remain under effective Russian control.

> You seem very confident, but your premise is wrong and lacking in critical information.

Well back in September 2021 I felt that the attack on Ukraine is coming (and have the receipts for that). Certainly not just me alone but at that moment and up to the very invasion there was huge skepticism around, and not just among Putin shills. "How would it help Russian security?" "But Sweden and Finland would join NATO!" "Russian economy would reel from sanctions, why do that!" Yet here we are.

I remember participating at a national championship here in Norway on 18.02.2024 and my teammate asked me what do I think of the situation. My take was that we're days, if not hours from the invasion and certainly within a week. He was quite startled by it then.

This year on the same championship people in the cafeteria were talking about the coming war matter-of-factly.
by guappa | 2025-04-24 08:35:16+00:00
I used mobian for a few months, but I normally have 2 sim cards, and battery life was really short.

Not that android with 2 SIM cards works good, but it seems no phones with 2 sims are supported by linux at the moment.

The geniuses at google can't comprehend the concept of "call numbers from country X with number from country X, do the same for country Y" so I must manually select by myself every single time and I get charged some obscene amount of money if I click wrong.
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 08:35:25+00:00
I've anecdotally tested translations by ripping the video with subtitles and having whisper subtitle it, and also asking several AI to translate the .srt or .vtt file (subtotext I think does this conversion if you don't wanna waste tokens on the metadata)

Whisper large-v3, the largest model I have, is pretty good, getting nearly identical translations to chatgpt or whatever, Google's default speech to text. The fun stuff is when you ask for text to text translations from LLMs.

I did a real small writeup with an example but I don't have a place to publish nor am I really looking for one.

I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. It took, iirc, several days. I use it to grep the audio, as it were. I intend to do the same with my DVDs and such, just so I never have to Google "what movie / tv show is that line from?" I also have a lot of art bell shows, and a few others to transcribe.
by gf000 | 2025-04-24 08:35:30+00:00
The Linux kernel is a beast of an engine at the heart of all sorts of things, from small to large.

But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).
by aldous | 2025-04-24 08:36:18+00:00
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. Surely in most instances it is easier to just bash out the email plus you get the added bonus of exercising your own mind: vocabulary, typing skills, articulating concepts, defining appropriate etiquette. As the years role by I aiming to be more conscious and diligent with my own writing and communication, not less. If one extrapolates on the use of AI for such basic communication, is there a risk some of us lose our ability to meaningfully think for ourselves? The information space of the present day already feels like it is devolving; shorter and shorter content, lack of nuance, reductive messaging. Sling AI in as a mediator for one to one communication too and it feels perilous for social cohesion.
by thih9 | 2025-04-24 08:36:34+00:00
Not so fast, if you can do `:` (i.e. enter command-line mode) then you can do plain `:q!` - no Esc or Ctrl needed.

How I understood the original problem is that you're in vim, you started editing text (insert mode) and now want to exit; but there is no Esc, so even exiting insert mode is a challenge. And now you added the constraint of missing Ctrl too, so no Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C.

If you type `:.! kill -9 $(pgrep -u $(whoami) vim)` then you just entered that as text into your document.

One answer could be to use the trackball, launch a new terminal window and kill the process from there.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-24 08:38:41+00:00
I think that with the general movement of communication into online spaces, our ability to actually understand other people went down, sometimes catastrophically so.

We don't only communicate with words. We also communicate with gestures, voice tones, dynamism of our voices, facial expressions etc. Once this all goes out of the window, it becomes much harder to actually understand other people.

I wonder if the Internet just gave our civilization a massive emotional tinnitus.
by notpushkin | 2025-04-24 08:38:42+00:00
Aurora Store also runs a bunch of their own throwaway Google accounts you can use (the “anonymous” option on the sign-in screen). Usually works great, though sometimes takes a few tries to get a working account.

Many apps do require passing the integrity check, though, but microG is getting better on that front (and IIRC you don’t need a Google account for that).
by larsga | 2025-04-24 08:38:52+00:00
Yes, it can. But infections by harmful organisms is very difficult to achieve. The common spoilage organisms in beer are all harmless to humans. Here's a good overview http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long

Just the hops alone stop pretty much all gram-positive bacteria except Lactobacillus and a few other harmless ones.
by rohgpt | 2025-04-24 08:39:14+00:00
Atlassian is sunsetting Opsgenie. If you're a CTO or eng leader still relying on it for incident response, the clock's ticking especially if you're bundled with JSM (cutoff: Oct 2025). This blog breaks down what comes next, why JSM + Compass won’t cut it, and how to migrate with zero downtime. Includes side-by-side tool comparisons, feature parity breakdowns, and Zenduty’s Opsgenie migration flow (used by 100s of teams).
by discreteevent | 2025-04-24 08:40:35+00:00
The parent is saying that when higher-level languages replaced assembly languages you only had to learn the higher level language. Once you learned the higher level language the machine did precisely what you specified and you did not have to inspect the assembly language to make sure it was compliant. Furthermore you were forced to be precise and to understand what you were doing when you were writing the higher level language.

Now you don't really have to be precise at any level to get something 'working'. You may not be familiar with the generated language or libaries but it could look good enough (like the assembly would have looked good enough). So, sure, if you are very familiar with the generated language and libraries and you inspect every line of generated code then maybe you will be ok. But often the reason you are using an LLM is because e.g. you don't understand or use bash frequently enough to get it to do what you want. Well, the LLM doesn't understand it either. So that weird bash construct that it emitted - did you read the documentation for it? You might have if you had to write it yourself.

In the end there could be code in there that nothing (machine or human) understands. The less hard-won experience you have with the target and the more time-pressed you are the more likely it is that this will occur.
by lucb1e | 2025-04-24 08:40:40+00:00
Happens to me all the time. Also on laptops, secureboot is such a life saver any time you're out and about

...it's sure nice this exists and is available to anyone but it's not seriously a risk if you're not of interest to people who are willing to physically show up and bug your hardware in a way that requires quite a bit of preparation
by larsga | 2025-04-24 08:40:53+00:00
Yes, there is residual sugar, but it's complex sugars that not even yeast that specializes in fermenting sugar can consume. Plus there is alpha acids from hops, as you point out, there is alcohol, pH is low, oxygen is gone, there's a CO2 blanket, etc. So it's a very, very difficult environment for microorganisms. Pretty close to none that cause disease can grow in this environment.

Is it more than 99.99999999999999% safe? No. Is it vastly safer that water? Yes.
by hk__2 | 2025-04-24 08:41:07+00:00
The typing system should use the most specific valid type, and the code author can broaden it with explicit typing if needed. No good typing system should ever infer a variable as `Any`: "I don’t know the type of this" (`unknown` in TypeScript) is not the same thing as "This function accepts anything". Conflating these things is one of the main reasons why Mypy is so annoying.
by greatgib | 2025-04-24 08:41:21+00:00
Indeed, on the bad side it is a little large (like the biggest iphone I guess but can still dit in a jean pocket), a little heavy, battery life average, and not perfect, like with the expectable rough edges that makes it a developer/tech enthousiast thing but not general public.

But, compared to the pinephone and co, this is the first one that could be used as a daily driver, without another read android backup phone. And it works well out of the box, without firmware flashing or any console/dev operation.
by Garlef | 2025-04-24 08:43:23+00:00
Interesting thought.

But maybe the companies would actually like to at least pipe the communication throught the cloud to get all the usage data. Here's one possible architecture:

local chat client

- talks to cloud LLM - talks to local MCP servers

local MCP server provided by company

- connects to company cloud (this lets the company collect usage data) - forwards tasks to the cloud

local tool (for example photoshop)

- connects to company cloud to get a users tasks - executes the tasks (this lets the company use the users hardware, saving cloud costs)
by Jhsto | 2025-04-24 08:43:52+00:00
I have been thinking daily driving Linux phone just to manage smartphone addiction. My first step was to get rid of my MacBook. Now, a year later, I think I'm ready to get rid of the Apple Watch. With the watch, it has been surprising how much you think you need to record your HR and workouts -- but it's just another bogus number that you don't need. Later the year I think I'll be finally ready for the phone. This would happen by getting an iPad mini first, which would stay at home while I go to work with the phone only. I think the hard class of apps to get rid of is mainly "Travel", plus password manager (I use passage but the transition will take time) + Find My. But travel is very much planned in my life, so for those occasions I can take my iPad mini with me.
by imtringued | 2025-04-24 08:44:51+00:00
I don't know why you are trolling us. Tests aren't supposed to check every input. The entire point of classic testing is to define static execution traces by hand. That is obviously meant to only cover a finite number of execution traces. Even 100% test coverage doesn't give you proof over all possible execution traces. Tests prove that the software "works", but they do not prove the absence of bugs (which inherently requires you to specify what a "bug" is, hence the need for a specification).

Not only is static verification more powerful, there is also a massive usability difference. You define your pre and post conditions in each function (also known as specification or design contract) and the tool will automatically check that you do not violate these conditions. It solves a very different problem from classic unit or integration tests.
by tamat | 2025-04-24 08:45:20+00:00
Great work, I would love to have the skills to do something like this, but I can see you had to read lots of specifications to achieve this and thats my weakest point.

One silly question you may know: Imagine you wanted to use GPU acceleration, even in the smallest form. How hard would it be to build a driver for the GPU? Do you think there is good documentation about it?
by maelito | 2025-04-24 08:46:55+00:00
Funny that I found this article going to hacker news as a pause in my work : I had to chose between using Aider or my brain to code a small algorithmic task, sorting items of a list based on dependences between items written in a YAML file.

Using Aider would probably solve the task in 5 minutes. Coding it in 30 minutes. The former choice would result in more time for other tasks or reading HN or having a hot beverage or walking in the sun. The second would challenge my rusting algorithmic skills and give me a better understanding of what I'm doing for the medium term.

Hard choice. In any case, I have a good salary, even with the latter option I can decide to spend good times.
by tliltocatl | 2025-04-24 08:47:41+00:00
Except almost every database (and most storage devices nowadays) works this way - mark an entry as deleted, then batch delete a lot of entries during garbage collection. It's fundamentally impossible to efficiently erase a record from the middle of a file, except maybe by using an encryption tree, which would still be fairly inefficient.

Actually erasing data is quite hard. Soft deletes doesn't add any new lies, they just move the lies to the upper layer.