MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-04-24 22:15:59+00:00
POWER is not uncommon in HPC, but IBMi (which is very enterprisey) is also based on POWER. You won't find IBM mainframes in HPC, but that's because HPC is not as sensitive for latency and reliably than online transaction processing, and, with mainframes, you are paying for that, not for TFLOPS.
by j0e1 | 2025-04-24 22:16:01+00:00
From my experience having attempted to migrate away from VSCodium (in the attempts to de-VSCode) and build atop Theia as a platform, there are few things to consider:

- The build system is finicky and can easily take hours to figure/fix.

- The error-reporting is severely lacking. You can be lost why something internal isn't working and go on a rabbit-trail with your favorite AI-copilot, etc.

- Documentation is lacking. You have to dive into the platform code to actually figure things out.

- This can be seen positively but there are quite a few new things being introduced regularly (especially AI-related) which, for a platform, isn't always ideal.
by 9dev | 2025-04-24 22:16:42+00:00
It’s actually fairly straightforward using the OPFS API; I used it to build an upload queue a while ago, so the user can drag arbitrary files on the browser, they get copied into the OPFS as regular files, and then I can upload them at my own leisure, even after browser restarts. The SQLite WASM build even has support for it AFAIR.

Can recommend, it’s a fun challenge :)
by calmbonsai | 2025-04-24 22:16:43+00:00
I imagine zero people care about the manufacturing provenance of their shower-head and many other household utility items. This is just hot-button-issue glommering marketing fluff.

FWIW, such country-of-origin labels are largely misleading when it comes to most durable goods which, by design, are made up of an amalgam of parts sourced from multiple supply chains.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-24 22:19:34+00:00
This article is completely non-rigorous and doesn't mean anything, but it shows what "simple" thinking about problems leads to. They would have had to gather enough data points to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way.

This is why it's important to have academic rigor and people who study specific problems deeply in positions of power. This ignores potential economies of scale cost reductions and paying more for home made products is circularly dependent on earning more from selling those higher cost products.

I think the most interesting question by far in this space is what percent of every purchase ends up going to housing, food, or health care. If you buy a burger, what percent of the cost of that burger is going directly into housing via the workers wages?
by xp84 | 2025-04-24 22:19:44+00:00
> Want them to

I mean, I don't care what they do (other than as a shareholder, lol. But it's not a major part of my portfolio.)

I just do not think they have made an impact on the mass-market -- and at their market cap, anything short of mass-market should be considered a failure and a distraction from products that actually sell.

"Horizon OS copying them" is flattering I guess, but they're not copying all the stupid things about AVP: The heavy, expensive metal construction, the silly outer display, the stupid tethered proprietary battery, the $3500 price tag. I do have a Quest 3 though, which is vaguely fun, but was an impulse buy I only occasionally use.

I've never even tried the AVP, and while that seems like a disqualification of me as a judge of it, that's just the point: I'm a geek. If even I dismiss it as a useless and overpriced toy, it will never be mass market, because normal people need more of a justification than I do to adopt a gadget. It needs to do something amazing that people immediately see the value of. Which is why I cited courtside NBA games (not a 10-minute short btw) as an example.

If Apple's 'game' is to make a niche device with no important apps and about 5,000 MAUs then they're playing it great.
by m4rtink | 2025-04-24 22:19:54+00:00
What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record.

Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)
by tejohnso | 2025-04-24 22:20:05+00:00
It takes more than a slogan.

It's almost impossible to justify a significant percentage increase in price based solely on a questionable declaration of manufacturing location.

There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase. And that used to be the impression, but I don't think that's the case anymore. "Made in the USA" used to mean that it was a quality product, not a cheap knockoff. Now the meaning is not so clear. Hasn't been for a long time.

The text says specifically that the quality is identical no matter where the product was manufactured. When people say they'd pay more for American made products, I think they mean it in the context of what that used to imply, not that they're going to pay nearly double for exactly the same quality.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-24 22:20:30+00:00
My father was a trader on the floor of the CME in Chicago for a short bit (mid to late 90s), and Trading Places was provided as required reading before he taught me how to trade commodities. Great film. I have the VHS copy somewhere for sentimental reasons.

Why you can’t trade onions futures is also a fun read, for similar reasons (“The Great Onion Corner”).

https://www.npr.org/2015/10/22/450769853/the-great-onion-cor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Kosuga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
by ziddoap | 2025-04-24 22:21:07+00:00
>or find subversive, incremental ways to undermine it.

I'm asking for concrete examples of what "subversive, incremental ways to undermine it" would be.

You basically just reworded the vague suggestion of "fight back". What are some specific examples of what the NSF director could have done that are subversive, incremental ways to undermine the orders which ultimately came from the president?
by rcxdude | 2025-04-24 22:21:09+00:00
>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.

Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.

Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?
by londons_explore | 2025-04-24 22:21:40+00:00
Heat pipes have some very counterintuitive properties.

They have almost infinite thermal conductivity - far better than copper or even diamond - ie. Heat input at one end is immediately conducted to the other end, up to a limit of watts, above which their thermal conductivity drops to near zero.

They also typically have very orientation specific properties - the limit is dramatically lowered at odd angles.

They also don't work in free fall - there is a very real chance of your laptop CPU overheating if you throw the laptop.
by owebmaster | 2025-04-24 22:22:10+00:00
> (I was going to also say "or the OSS guys all unify behind a choice" but Hell will freeze over before that happens.)

The editor war is going as strong as ever, emacs vs vim will still be here in 20 years. Compared to 10 years ago, the amount of people using emacs and vim only grew, although VSCode growth was 1000x faster.
by film42 | 2025-04-24 22:22:12+00:00
To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta:

> I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.
by procinct | 2025-04-24 22:22:32+00:00
I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.

The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.

I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
by harrison_clarke | 2025-04-24 22:22:54+00:00
another issue is that at least in the short term, the "made in america" sticker is likely to be detrimental in many foreign markets

so, it might make sense for US companies selling to US customers, if they can find suppliers. but even in the cases where it works for that market, multinational companies might prefer a "made in taiwan" or "made in mexico" sticker, or they might prefer to leave the sticker off
by zokier | 2025-04-24 22:23:40+00:00
Density is also bad. You spend 4 full racks and get 208 cores. Sure, they might be the fastest cores around, but that gets you only so far when even off-the-shelf Dell server has 2x128-192 cores in 1U server. Similarly 64 TB of RAM is a lot, but that same Dell can have 3 TB of RAM. If I'm reading the specs correctly (they are bit confusing), z17 has only 25G networking (48 ports); the Dell I'm checking can have 8x200G network ports and can also do 400G networking. So the single 1U commodity server has more network bandwidth than the entire 4 rack z system.

Sure, there will be lot of overhead in having tens-hundreds of servers vs single system, but for lots of workloads it is manageable and certainly worth the tradeoff.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-24 22:24:09+00:00
IBM prices processors differently for running COBOL and Java - if you run mostly Java code, your monthly licensing fees will be vastly different. On boot, the service elements (their BMCs - on modern machines they are x86 boxes running Linux) loads microcode in accordance to a saved configuration - some CPUs will run z/OS, some will run z/OS and COBOL apps, some will run Java, some will run z/VM, some will run Linux. This is all configured on the computer whose job is to bring up the big metal (first the power, then the cooling, and only then, the compute). Under everything on the mainframe side is the PR/SM hypervisor, which is, IIRC, what manages LPARS (logical partitions, completely isolated environments sharing the same hardware). The cheapest licensing is Linux under a custom z/VM (they aren't called z but LinuxONE), and the most expensive is the ability to run z/OS and COBOL code. Running Java under z/OS is somewhat cheaper. Last time I saw it, it was very complicated.
by usrusr | 2025-04-24 22:26:24+00:00
Founder(s) sold to Bendinggspoons who specialize in the kind of takeover where the buyer stops all development and tries to keep the money inflow from a service running with minimal maintenance crew. Evernote is the most famous example I think.

Apparently 80% are already gone:

https://escapecollective.com/how-komoot-lost-its-way/

(paywalled, but I think it's the definitive aftermath writeup, as opposed to all the older news that stop at speculating about layoffs that had not happened yet)
by chiph | 2025-04-24 22:26:28+00:00
At least partially - the technical introduction for the Z17 says that several items can be concurrently maintained (IBM-speak for hot-swapped). So far as major items like the processing units - maybe (still reading).

(3.4mb PDF) https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248580.pdf

> Four Power Supply Units (PSUs) that provide power to the CPC drawer and are accessible from the rear. Loss of one PSU leaves enough power to satisfy the power requirements of the entire drawer. The PSUs can be concurrently maintained

I would think their customers would demand zero downtime. And hey - if BeOS could power down CPUs almost 30 years ago I would expect a modern mainframe to be able to do it.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-24 22:26:35+00:00
> I mean, no one except for banks can afford one,

A Rockhopper 4 Express, a z16 without z/OS support (running Linux) was in the mid 6 digits. It's small enough to co-locate on a rack with storage nodes. While z/OS will want IBM storage, Linux is much less picky.

IBM won't release the numbers, but I am sure it can host more workloads in the same chassis than the average 6-digit Dell or Lenovo.
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-24 22:26:45+00:00
As far as I'm aware the only thing that works is very skilled use of focus groups and market research, although something similar exists in the world of politics too. At the end of the day though it's tough, people are often unaware of the disconnect in themselves, we are rationalizing machines after all. In areas where feedback from some kind of market is lacking, it's a hard problem to solve.

Economists deal with this a lot, and being economists they create models or modify existing models to account for this gap. That certainly seems to work, to an extent, but only when applied to populations rather than individuals.

On a less academic note this is a major problem for science that relies on surveys, because even when anonymous people have an awareness that they're "speaking" to someone and being "judged" in some way. People, even in that moment alone with a survey, want to reinforce the image they have of themselves. When asked by a survey, "What do you want from a new newspaper?" Very few people respond, "Celebrities, scandals, and lewd pictures." People often skew to asking for thoughtful, long-form, in-depth reporting.

BUT... then they buy tabloids and click on bait, and they don't read the complex, nuanced, long-form stuff. If they aren't even consciously aware of that, short of getting them in a behavioral lab, how do you tease that out of them? Well structuring survey questions with redundant questions phrased differently can help, you can get a sense of someone's overall "sentiment" for example, but it's still limited for the reasons described above.

A few interesting examples from :

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/laibson/files/how_are_pref...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36434890/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
by _mlbt | 2025-04-24 22:27:14+00:00
Yeah but these companies will force me to install their garbage third party app stores to install their apps. I really just want one good, properly vetted app store on my phone, is that so hard to understand?

If you ever tried out third party app stores on Android you’ll see what I mean. See also the crappy launchers/stores major game publishers try to force on you on PCs.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-24 22:27:53+00:00
You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.

> Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.

I don't see how this affects anything the GP said.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-24 22:27:53+00:00
> The overwhelming majority of incels are android users

Seriously ?

I have read your links, it shows that some kids are stupid and discriminate over what phone brand one is using.

First of all, that’s purely a USA issue.

Secondly, it says nothing about incels.

A phone brand doesn’t make you more charismatic, in fact in my experience I have seen more iPhone user being insecure than Android user.

Especially the one who invest heavily into Apple « ecosystem », they are more often than not (in Europe) nerds.

Just to be honest, I write that from my iPhone. Really got no bias.
by zelon88 | 2025-04-24 22:28:10+00:00
How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have like, 6,000 profiles?

/sarcasm

Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be.

Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are completely inadequate.
by mmphosis | 2025-04-24 22:28:28+00:00
To completely remove a file from history, one must rewrite history using tools like git filter-branch, git-filter-repo or by manually rebasing and running garbage collector (with prune) to clear unreachable objects — good luck with that.

I am fairly careful about what files that I add and I have stopped using GitHub. I push locally only. I should learn how to use git better, but I want to completely delete the repo and init just the latest snapshot to remove all of the history.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 22:29:41+00:00
At the very least you can decode UTF-8 really quickly with AVX-512

https://lemire.me/blog/2023/08/12/transcoding-utf-8-strings-...

and web browsers at the very least spent a lot of cycles on decoding HTML and Javascript which is UTF-8 encoded. It turns out AVX-512 is good at a lot of things you wouldn't think SIMD would be good at. Intel's got the problem that people don't want to buy new computers because they don't see much benefit from buying a new computer, but a new computer doesn't have the benefit it could have because of lagging software support, and the software support lags because there aren't enough new computers to justify the work to do the software support. Intel deserves blame for a few things, one of which is that they have dragged their feet at getting really innovative features into their products while turning people off with various empty slogans.

They really do have a new instruction set that targets plain ordinary single threaded branchy code

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

they'll probably be out of business before you can use it.
by godelski | 2025-04-24 22:30:31+00:00
Worse, it feels productive. But I'd bet if you watched the clock and tracked progress of a non-trivial project, you'd find what we've always known to be true: there are no shortcuts.

I'm sure it's faster in the short term. Just like copy-paste-from-stack-overflow is. But it is debt. The shit builds and builds. But I think the problem is we're so surrounded by shit we've just normalized it. It is incredible how much bloat and low hanging fruit there is that can be cheaply resolved but there is no will to. And in my experience, it isn't just a lack of will, it is a lack of recognition. If the engineers can't recognize shit, then how do we build anything better? It is literally our job to find problems
by dataflow | 2025-04-24 22:30:54+00:00
I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.

> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.

What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?

> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.

You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
by pixelesque | 2025-04-24 22:31:04+00:00
> to determine the price that people would pay to be meaningful in just about any way

Not convinced that would be meaningful, but even if it was, it'd be totally useless if you can't actually manufacture items in the US with less overhead than what this company managed.

Saying "people would have bought it if it was only 35% more for the same item" is not helpful if it's not possible to profitably manufacture them at 35% more than in China.
Show HN: A new way to verify remote AI model execution (no TEEs, no ZK)
by lospoy | 2025-04-24 22:31:33+00:00
We’ve published a whitepaper proposing a simple method to verify that a remote AI node is executing a specific model — without using trusted execution environments (TEEs) or zero-knowledge proofs.

The method relies on a minimal set of reference outputs to test model behavior, enabling trust without full re-execution.

Curious to hear thoughts from folks working in ML, distributed systems, or trustless compute.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13443
by gchamonlive | 2025-04-24 22:31:35+00:00
Now it's as good a time as ever to try out Lazy Vim. Came to it from Lunar Vim and it just works.

Working with anything is a breeze.

I'm just not too familiar with refactoring tooling and how to configure it, but there's rarely any reason for me to use something more complicated than sed, and in those occasions I can just use ast-grep.
by xp84 | 2025-04-24 22:32:34+00:00
> There should be a quality improvement that goes along with the location and price increase.

> what that used to imply

This last part hits the nail on the head. The quality difference is mostly a fantasy. While the long tail of random aliexpress/temu junk suggests there's some big quality difference, it's more that those are random small businesses operating without any regulations, reputational concern, or legal liability and incentivized to make stuff cheap.

If you think about the things most people buy from real brands, the quality argument against Asia is preposterous, since not only are the products made in Asia quite high quality, but America has essentially zero slack in the skilled labor market as it is. We literally could not build a device to the quality standards of Apple or Samsung because everyone in America who could conceivably do so already has a job building cars or specialized, very expensive industrial products.

Now, people do complain that everything is crappy and made to fall apart just as the 90-365 day warranties expire. But that's not China being too dumb to make it correctly -- it's made perfectly to spec most of the time. It's the designers of the products (often in the US) optimizing their profits by using the cheapest, worst parts and unrepairable designs. If anything, moving production to a high-labor-cost country would increase the pressure to cut any corner possible.