MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim333 | 2025-04-11 18:48:08+00:00
While Trump and Musk have tendencies that way the US hasn't really gone fascist yet and I guess in a democracy you have to kind of let the process run and protest a bit and vote democrat in the midterms.

The place that does seem to be doing proper roll the tanks towards Poland fascism is Russia and there is a lot going on in tech there with drones and the like.
by weard_beard | 2025-04-11 18:48:34+00:00
I've... had to adapt to similar circumstances. Separate data sanitization from other problems. Ignore "prioritization" as an activity you can control. Walk up to the first responsible party you can find, and do your best, "Robin Williams as the Genie in Alladin" impression.

poof what do you need?

poof what do you need?

poof what do you need?

Keep going until you end up with a manageable set of problems.
by esalman | 2025-04-11 18:48:36+00:00
I am part of a neighborhood group where I grew up in Bangladesh and lived until 5th grade in the 90s.

The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.

Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.
by troyvit | 2025-04-11 18:48:40+00:00
> Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

I think that's a really good point. It's extracting money from consumers through taxes and handing them to industry in the hopes they innovate.

Tariffs though. In that case you're extracting the money from the consumer (through the international organizations being taxed) and giving the profits to the government. What are they going to do with it?
by corysama | 2025-04-11 18:48:45+00:00
With an SPU's 256K local memory and DMA, the ideal way to use the SPU was to split the local memory into 6 sections: code, local variables, DMA in, input, output, DMA out. That way you could have async DMA in parallel in both directions while you transform your inputs to your outputs. That meant your working space was even smaller...

Async DMA is important because the latency of a DMA operation is 500 cycles! But, then you remember that the latency of the CPU missing cache is also 500 cycles... And, gameplay code misses cache like it was a childhood pet. So, in theory you just need to relax and get it working any way possible and it will still be a huge win. Some people even implemented pointer wrappers with software-managed caches.

500 cycles sounds like a lot. But, remember that the PS2 ran at 300MHz (and had a 50 cycle mem latency) while the PS3 and 360 both ran at 3.2Ghz (and both had a mem latency of 500 cycles). Both systems pushed the clock rate much higher than PCs at the time. But, to do so, "niceties" like out-of-order execution were sacrificed. A fixed ping-pong hyperthreading should be good enough to cover up half of the stall latency, right?

Unfortunately, for most games the SPUs ended up needing to be devoted full time to making up for the weakness of the GPU (pretty much a GeForce 7600 GT). Full screen post processing was an obvious target. But, also the vertex shaders of the GPU needed a lot of CPU work to set them up. Moving that work to the SPUs freed up a lot of time for the gameplay code.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-11 18:49:10+00:00
He is in a maximum security prison. There are records of his entry, and if he has by some manner left, records of that as well. If he is still inside the prison, some salvadorian guard is staring him in the eyes right now. If you listen to what was written in the court session with Judge Xinis (?), basically the US government is stalling not just how to get him out but also stalling the courts question of where he even is.

The administration, at every step, is buying time against the inevitable.

Why are they buying time? Can someone not just pay the guard $100 to find out where the fuck he is? It doesn't make sense. My conspiracy angle is they need 4 days to figure out how the hell they are going to explain the current situation, whatever that is.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-11 18:49:42+00:00
Take your pick:

* Difficult to navigate in a narrow underwater structure without crashing

* Signal penetration, or lack thereof, in an iron hull at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean

* Extremely niche technology that would have few practical uses in other contexts since most of the seabed does not suffer from the same complexities as a shipwreck

* Can't see for shit underwater in general

* We already know whats down there and why it's down there, therefore unlikely to lead to significant new information

* This could actually be considered desecrating a mass grave under maritime law
by ojl | 2025-04-11 18:49:49+00:00
> the digitalization of everyday life took longer, whereas everyone and their dog in the US had a smartphone and social networks from day 0.

This very much depends on where in Europe you were living. In parts of the Nordics (at least Sweden and I think Finland as well) cell phones were very common already in the 90s, and a few years later smart phones as well. I don’t even remember when it wasn’t possible to handle taxes, banking and similar stuff with an app or online. We also had social networks but I guess most died when Facebook arrived here. The US are usually ahead of us in consumer products, but to say that all European countries are bad at all kinds of innovation is quite exaggerated.
by JamesBarney | 2025-04-11 18:50:00+00:00
100% this. If you guys had significant traction with your startup then it might be worth it to work really hard to try to salvage the relationship.

But right now you're just wasting your life. The most valuable resource you burn through at a startup is your life. Startups are stressful, they wear you down, they're not great for your finances, and many of those are doubly so if you don't get along with your cofounder.

Just quit, you don't owe anyone your life. You are less likely to find traction with two cofounders with a bad working relationship, and if you do find traction you are less likely to be able capitalize on it.
by hacb | 2025-04-11 18:50:13+00:00
Of course, an AI will not "magically" code an app the same way 10 developers will do in a year, I don't think we disagree on this.

However, it allows you to do things you don't understand. I'm again taking examples from what I see at my university (n=1): almost all students deliver complex programming projects involving multi-threading, but can't answer a basic quizz about the same language in-person. And by basic question I mean "select among the propositions listed below the correct keyword used to declare a variable in Golang". I'm not kidding, at least one-third of the class is actually answering something wrong here.

So yeah, maybe we as a society agree on the fact that those people will not be software engineers, but prompt engineers. They'll send instructions to an agent that will display text in a strange and cryptic language, and maybe when they'll press "Run" lights will be green. But as a professional, why should I hire them once they earned their diploma? They are far from being ready for the professional world, can't debug systems without using LLMs (and maybe those LLMs can't help them because the company context is too important), and most importantly they are way less capable than freshly graduated engineers from a few years back.

> 10 years from now we can all laugh at the idea of people defending doing stuff without AI assistance.

I hope so, but I'm quite pessimistic unfortunately. Expertise and focus capabilities are dying, and we are more and more relying on artificial "intelligence" and its biases. But the future will tell
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-11 18:50:18+00:00
For 99.99% of the people, it doesn't matter. Even if Wordpress stopped getting updates today, the code already works and it's open source, thanks in part to Matt for maintaining it for 20 years.

It was just the weekly Internet drama of the programming niche probably pumped by Youtubers and influencers in need for content to drive views and then by memes. Barely anything of substance was actually written about it.

After all, if Matt were such a negative factor in the project, it would be trivial to just take all the code and fork it and then for all the developers to just move to the new project. The fact that this didn't happen shows that there is non-trivial infrastructure being provided that is separate from the open source project. How do such smart people as programmers fail to understand this when they repeatedly conflate the open source project with the whole trademark/plugin hosting thing is beyond me. Does nobody question the whole thing before pointing fingers and picking their pitchforks?

I've seen a Youtuber who interviewed to Matt in one video and the Youtuber himself raised the point of hosting costs, and then in a next video they conflate the two concepts as if they had completely forgotten about everything they said and heard. It's surreal.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-11 18:50:27+00:00
Undersea drones are a remarkably (and fascinatingly!) complex field.

Ignoring all the mechanical challenges (airtight, watertight machine that can operate under crushing pressures and still has a way to separate delicate, saltwater-sensitive electronics and actuators from external-facing motive devices), the communications are also a challenge: radio does awful under water (VLF can go 100 feet, but now you're trying to control something inside the Titanic with radio signals that bounce off all the still-existent metal in wild ways; problem is a bit harder than "get full WiFi coverage of your house"). Sound would actually probably be a great tool, but sound also behaves strangely under water that deep. The most well-researched, well-tested solution is a long cable back to the control ship, but that constrains how deep you can get into the Titanic (one idea I've never seen floated: attach a fleet of robots to the cable, a main one for exploration and observation and multiple wire-managers who's full job is to anchor to something and manage the cable slack... But now you're anchoring to the wreck, so that's also not good).

Fully-autonomous robots might actually be the best option here, and the only thing stopping that is the actual research and development to build a machine that can make independent decisions exploring an environment with unknown shapes, dangerous sharp edges, and possible currents, in full 3D. We've put more research into rovers on Mars than into this problem.
by dcow | 2025-04-11 18:50:58+00:00
You joke, but I read stories at the time of developers saying their studio did just that. I shit you not. Because developing a “traditional” pc-like game for pc-like hardware on a pc is what their teams were tooled to do. Studios didn't sit down and train up new teams of devs on how to maximize the cell architecture. The result is games that are very poorly optimized for the PS3. Even some of the exclusives (though I was only specifically calling out the cross-console games as an obvious example).

There were some gems. I owned a PS3 and had tons of fun. Nothing in this discussion speaks directly to the entertainment value of good Sony exclusives or cross-console ports. Many people don’t care one ounce about a minor performance deficit. Deep breath.
by jchw | 2025-04-11 18:51:15+00:00
The PS3 maybe wasn't a failure in the long run, but at launch it was a disaster all around. Sony was not making a profit on the PS3, and the initial sales at its initial price were not looking good[1]. With the Wii as its primary competitor, the Wii absolutely smashed the PS3 at launch and for a long while after, and it still maintains the lead. Sony mainly kept the competition close by slashing the price and introducing improved models, but in the long run I think the reason why their sales numbers managed to wind up OK is because they held out for the long haul. The PS3 continued to be the "current-gen" Sony console for a long time. By the time Sony had released the PS4 in late 2013/early 2014, Nintendo had already released its ill-fated Wii U console an entire year earlier in late 2012. I think what helped the PS3 a lot here was the fact that it did have a very compelling library of titles, even if it wasn't a super large one. As far as I know, Metal Gear Solid 4 was only released for PlayStation 3; that stands out to me as a game that would've been a console-seller for many.

So while PS3 was not ultimately a commercial success, it was clearly disliked by developers and the launch was certainly a disaster. I think you could argue the PS3 was a failure in many regards, and a success in some other regards. Credit to Sony, they definitely persevered through a tough launch and made it out to the other end. Nintendo wasn't able to pull off the same for the Wii U, even though it also did have some good exclusive games in the library.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104003151/http://www.pcworl...
by tanvach | 2025-04-11 18:51:18+00:00
My understanding of the motivation for this (really neat) hack is that cheap FPGA boards lack IO pins to interface to USB3 interface chip and external components (i.e. parallel DAC) at the same time. Seems like these boards tend to have built--in connector that uses up the GPIO pins.

Wonder then if it's possible to use the HDMI port to connect a custom board with the USB3 chipset. Maybe the crosstalk between the wires is too high.
by charcircuit | 2025-04-11 18:51:19+00:00
>Defaulting to Android-style nanny sandboxing ("you can't grant access to your Downloads folder because we say so" etc.) is unlikely to go over well with the average Linux distro userbase.

If you market it that way. Plenty of Linux users say they care about security, don't want maleware, etc. This is a step towards those desires. Users have been conditioned to use tools badly to designed for security for decades so there will be some growing pains, but it will get worse the longer people wait.

>Just use Podman and only mount your Wayland socket + any working files.

This won't work for the average user. Security needs to be accessible.
by gmueckl | 2025-04-11 18:51:31+00:00
This leaves out an important step. When 3D graphics acceleration entered the broader consumer/desktop computing market, it was also a successor to the kind of 2D graphics acceleration that consoles had and previous generations of desktop computers generally didn't. So I believe that it's fair to say that specialized console hardware was replaced by general purpose computing hardware because the general purpose hardware had morphed to include a superset of console hardware capabilities.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-11 18:51:42+00:00
What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately veterans, while at the same time raising prices of everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation.

EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's just me
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-04-11 18:51:47+00:00
I've lived in Russia between 2003-2009. I am an engineer in the U.S. From the dozens of "engineers" in Russia I met, I found that the bulk of their college level teaching was basically babysitting. They had no real engineering knowledge, and to pass college exams was extraordinarily easy. It was an eye opener for me. They also severely compartmentalize their teaching and knowledge. A VERY intelligent IT engineer I met there accused me of trying to poison his family when I suggested using Sodium Hypochlorite to cleanse an obviously polluted well they used at their dacha. He had no clue about anything chemistry. Total zero. I subsequently found out that throughout the college levels, they basically are diploma mills, with a high level of 'degree inflation'. Not one college graduate I met there had any broad knowledge nor any knowledge or ability beyond an American high school.
by tptacek | 2025-04-11 18:52:01+00:00
Do you really need a lawyer here? Presumably the mechanics are pretty simple: you're vested halfway to your share (in what is probably going to be worthless equity), which is what you walk away with.

I ask this because I have on several occasions lawyered up (sometimes adversarially, sometimes just to keep my own ducks in a row) during separations and (if you're working with someone serious who is qualified to manage a founder separation) it's always expensive, but not always valuable.

I also ask this because this is the Nth "I'm splitting up from my startup" I've participated in, and I've noticed that for better or worse, this community has a bias towards dramatically satisfying resolutions, like ensuring for instance that each founder in a doomed startup receives precisely the allocation of company assets that they're entitled to. In the real world, the smart play is often just to walk away.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-11 18:52:44+00:00
65% of American Firefighters are volunteer.

Funding for Firefighters in the US is usually on the county level. The vast majority of counties in the US are poor as dirt, and can't pay for anything.

Don't ever use an "average" to look at the US. From education to sewers to courts to elections to the DMV to land zoning, the US is 50 different countries. They do wildly different things, have wildly different results, and generally are hard to compare.

Then add the Rural/Urban divide and things become even more bleak. Rural fire departments are usually partially or mostly volunteer forces.

So while Urban fire departments probably pay alright (ignoring that the job is "Run into that burning building and maybe die"), do not mistake that for "Firefighters (in general) get paid well"
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-11 18:52:57+00:00
I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each.

The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.

A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.
by GolDDranks | 2025-04-11 18:52:59+00:00
Okay, so the same idea that I spitballed in a sibling thread:

> Btw. wouldn't it be possible in modern pipelines to remap or "disfigure" the texture when converting to triangles, so that it counters the bias accordingly? Ah, but that bakes in the shape of the quad, so it can't be modified runtime or it will get distorted again, right.

How does that work with animated meshes?
by keybored | 2025-04-11 18:53:14+00:00
Making models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can’t they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants they could get close to approximating something like Newton’s Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be nerdy about it).
by cjbenedikt | 2025-04-11 18:53:24+00:00
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". George Washington stressed freedom of religion as a fundamental American principle even before the First Amendment was ratified. Welcome back to the Inquisition. Or perhaps rebirth of the Blockwart ? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blockwart
by mjevans | 2025-04-11 18:53:29+00:00
For northern states it almost doesn't matter, the latitude completely dominates the length of the day.

However I am irked at 'noon' being so far from solar noon year round, that's about the only solid reason to go back to 'standard' time so that at least in the median of timezones that time is approximately the same.

Southern states? Just let people work 8-4 instead of 9-5. This problem is entirely manufactured by trying to change the ruler rather than the prescribed mark points on it.
by ryao | 2025-04-11 18:53:29+00:00
That aside, if you ask me, the cheapest way is to get rid of US jobs. Remove the US parts so you have a 100% non-US product. 0% tariff so far. For US-only sales have it assembled shipped to a country like Singapore or Australia with 10% tariffs to package and re-label. When you ship from say Singapore to US, the buyer fills in the tariff code with country of origin Singapore. Case closed. 10% tariffs.

I did not ask, but this does not make any sense to me. As per the following article, this trick where the country of origin changes based on assembly only applies to Canada and Mexico, not Singapore or Australia:

https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...

It is unclear how removing U.S. components from products would reduce U.S. tariffs.

Excluding your “remove US components idea”, it is clear to me that China is losing in such a scenario, since they cannot tariff the non-Chinese components anymore and the Chinese components would be subject to tariffs in the country of assembly. To be clear, I do not know to what extent they enforce tariffs on non-Chinese components, but I have read of them placing tariffs imports from other countries, which could affect the components made in those countries.
by crq-yml | 2025-04-11 18:53:43+00:00
I didn't gain direct experience with Cell, but given that description of the tooling, I'm unconvinced that the issue is fundamental to many-core, or that the author's assertion of non-composability holds up under scrutiny. Composition in "flat" processing architectures is, in principle, exactly what is already seen on a circuit diagram. It recurs in the unit record machines of old, and in modern dataflow systems.

That architecture does have particular weaknesses when it is meant to interface with a random-access-and-deep-callstacks workflow(as would be the case using C++) - and CPUs have accrued complex cache and pipelining systems to cater to that workflow since it does have practical benefit - but the flat approach has also demonstrated success when it's used in stream processing with real-time requirements.

Given that, and the outlier success of some first-party developers, I would lean towards the Cell hardware being catastrophically situated within the software stack, versus being an inherently worse use of transistors.