MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wolfgang42 | 2025-05-18 04:58:42+00:00
> Mini vMac is better suited for this, but it checks the ROM’s checksum, so I couldn’t boot with mine—it’s not in the recognized list.

You can compile Mini vMac without checksum verification (either yourself or with the variations service[1]), which will allow you to use unknown or completely custom ROMs, though you need to be aware that it patches the ROM (it doesn’t emulate the original floppy hardware; instead it pokes a custom driver in where the original one ought to be) so if your ROM doesn’t line up with the original you will have problems with random chunks being overwritten.

I’ve done this so I could use Mini vMac to learn assembly language: the Mac has the convenient property that pixels on the CRT are 1:1 the contents of a chunk of RAM at a fixed offset, so you can get very immediate visual feedback about what your program is doing. I just set up an assembler to dump raw machine code and named it "Mac128K.ROM" and Mini vMac picked up on it fine.

[1] https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/var_serv.html - though since Paul Pratt disappeared a few years ago nobody is quite sure how the server is staying up
by transpute | 2025-05-18 04:59:37+00:00
There's roughly 4 different approaches to Linux on Android: • virtual machine emulating x86_64 • Termux • arm64 binaries running in chroot • proot.. Same idea as chroot, but doesn't use forbidden system calls

Fifth option: arm64 pKVM VM from Android 15 on Pixel 7+ phone/tablet hardware using nested h/w virtualization. Shipped in 2025 under the uninformative name of "Linux Terminal" via Development options, Android now has full Debian Linux with VM root, no emulation, compatible with USB-c desktop display.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43973395 & https://www.androidauthority.com/android-linux-terminal-purp...

> The main purpose of this Linux terminal feature is to bring more apps (Linux apps/tools/games) into Android, but NOT to bring yet another desktop environment.. Ideally, when in the desktop window mode, Linux apps shall be rendered on windows just like with other native Android apps.. GPU acceleration is something we are preparing for the next release.

Hopefully Android 2025 Linux VMs will lead to iOS 19 VMs at WWDC, since Apple wants to sell smart glasses to compete with Meta glasses.
by izyda | 2025-05-18 05:00:00+00:00
I work on alternative data in the hedge fund industry. We're not quants -- we don't try to predict the stock market... instead, we try to forecast how individual companies are performing using aggregated clickstream, point-of-sale, and payments data. It's a data cleaning, timeseries, and modeling problem with a lot of domain knowledge necessary.

LLMs can be helpful (Ie. for example, entity resolution for data cleaning) but the core models you have to use to actually make the predictions (this looks a lot more like "old" tabular data approaches).
by jlmorton | 2025-05-18 05:00:22+00:00
Because the major categories are very hard to cut:

Social Security: 22% Interest on the Debt: 14% Medicaid: 14% Medicare: 14% National Defense: 13%

That's 77% of the budget in those categories.

Everything else is 23%. The Federal deficit is ~25% of receipts.

You could cut each and every function of the government other than the above and still be left with a deficit. And there isn't a lot of room to cut everything else, as they've already been squeezed for decades.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-18 05:02:02+00:00
It’s extremely well known what happens in this scenario: When governments start printing money like nothing matters and there are no consequence, the currency collapse into a hyper inflationary death spiral.

You act like that interest payment is just a technicality or something. It’s not. It’s a market rate that reflects the world’s belief in the soundness of the currency and government.

Throw that away and it all comes crashing down.

The US doesn’t exist in global isolation. We still buy things internationally as inputs to our factories and to make everything work. If we start a hyper inflationary currency death spiral where the government prints money out of thin air as a solution to spending problems, the value of our dollars becomes progressively less, hence the inflation. Then we all, including the government, have to spend more of those dollars, so the printing increases, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

This entire line of thinking that it doesn’t matter is basically quackery. It has been tried. It does not work.
by msla | 2025-05-18 05:02:26+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkfpi2H8tOE

That's "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. It's 8:21 and quotes both the Tao Te Ching and the US Postal Service. It peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Why? Because John Peel curated a radio show on BBC Radio 1 and happened to like it. That's the advantage of human curation: Every so often you get a John Peel in the booth and hear something so off-the-wall no well-written algorithm would ever mix it in with everything else you listen to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Superman
by zahlman | 2025-05-18 05:02:49+00:00
I can think of multiple users offhand with 500k+ rep that I think are more damaging to the site than any newcomer ever could be. (No, I will not name names.) And I previously showed you a link of someone with 60k+ rep (slightly more than me) who went 14 years without even trying to use the meta site for anything and demonstrated a complete failure to understand the basic standards for questions.
by pie_flavor | 2025-05-18 05:04:23+00:00
That is introducing a new variable binding, and strictly more verbose in all cases for no particular benefit. Destructuring was gone over many times; the problem with using it naively is that it's not clear upon first encountering it whether the destructured object or the fields destructured out of it are disposed. Destructuring is supported via DisposableStack in the proposal. This was already litigated to death and you can see the author's response in your links.
by resonious | 2025-05-18 05:04:25+00:00
I see - actually in my case I'm on Samsung, and Dex takes several seconds to boot. I like the desktop but It sounds like chroot + Termux:X11 would be way faster in every way.. I just really wish there was a Termux:Wayland - my favorite desktop doesn't seem to have an equivalent in X11 (niri, though maybe I need to look harder)
by yorwba | 2025-05-18 05:05:33+00:00
Not that different. Bilibili is a big, above-board video streaming service; they definitely have distribution rights to a large collection of anime content. (They also have YouTube-style user uploads where proper licensing is less likely.)

It's the equivalent of Crunchyroll putting out a video generation model. If the rightsholders disagree with this usage, it'll come up during the negotiations for new releases.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-18 05:05:37+00:00
> In theory, governments can run on new printed money.

Anyone who thinks this is an infinite money glitch for governments should see what has happened when other governments have tried it. Hint: Search for “hyperinflation”

If you just start printing money to spend it, the currency crashes in value, which necessitates printing even more money to maintain the same level of purchasing power, which crashes the currency even further. It’s how you end up with people paying for bread with trillion dollar bills. Sure you can keep printing that money, but acting like it’s a cheat code or even a positive thing is to ignore all of economic history.
by godelski | 2025-05-18 05:06:05+00:00
I'm quite aware that stores cost money. I'm not sure why you'd think I didn't.

I agree that Apple is doing it right and is kinda what I'm talking about. They do focus on the experience even though I'm sure most sales translate to online sales. They do understand that the physical presence generates many of these sales. It's not trivial to measure like direct sales but it is measurable.

I'll admit Apple has an advantage that it isn't a franchise (pretty sure?). But that doesn't mean the other companies couldn't adapt to the new environment. But clearly a lot of them failed due to this. The experience still matters to customers but if they don't have many choices they still gotta do what they gotta do
by Aurornis | 2025-05-18 05:08:38+00:00
> The national debt is simply all the money the government created minus the money it destroyed from taxes. Another way of thinking about it is it's national savings.

The national debt is all the money spent minus money collected via taxes

If a government starts printing money like nothing matters, we already know what happens: Hyperinflationary death spiral. The government gets money to spend, but it crushes the value of the currency in the process. In crushing the value of the currency, they then need to print more money for the next round of spending, which further devalues the currency, which accelerates the cycle.
by shawn_w | 2025-05-18 05:13:26+00:00
Houge's the brand. RSK-Mk1 is the model (Ritter Survival Knife). Sold exclusively at https://knifeworks.com/dr/

Benchmade used to make a variant of their Griptilian that he designed (the "Ritter Grip", and when they discontinued it, Hogue stepped up (proceeds go to support Ritter's https://kniferights.org/ organization)
by YouWhy | 2025-05-18 05:14:44+00:00
Proper disclosure: I'm not a US resident, and I'm deeply alarmed by the de facto defunding going on right now.

Furthermore, I concur with the piece that a proper investment in the said fields would further the common good.

However, take objection with equating investment with investment in the way specifically done up until now.

The article opens with longevity; the Alzheimer amyloid hypothesis, which served as a bandwagon for low impact, perhaps even bad faith research, whole syphoning out billions of public spending and blocking out alternate research pathways.

Many of the other domains mentioned exhibit similar dynamics. To my ears, it makes little sense to champion further spending without exploring the reform that needs to be carried out to align that spending with the various notions of public good.

To reiterate, I abhor the populist choice of dismantling everything and putting cronies to feed off the rest. I'd be looking forward for a way forward to make change, because some change is due.
by tomjen3 | 2025-05-18 05:15:40+00:00
The market for MCP servers is the same as the market for rest endpoints: its a delivery mechanism for the underlying service.

I don't think you can make money on them, they are too simple to clone, but you can make money charging for the API. If you have a per usage license making an MCP is a very obvious choice - if you charge per seat it is mostly a question of how how sticky you are versus the competition.
by dbrgn | 2025-05-18 05:18:53+00:00
Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.

Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
by protocolture | 2025-05-18 05:21:55+00:00
I can 100% empathise with this.

I have HA, but I used it for a custom application that relies on some integrations with Home Automation stuff (Lights, Sensors)

As an accidental outgrowth of that I was also able to automate the lights to aid my child in keeping a good bedtime routine.

But its certainly not the reason I bought all the doohickeys.
by thayne | 2025-05-18 05:22:21+00:00
Client certs have a few advantages over API keys.

First of all, it gives the server more certainly that the other side of the TLS connection is the authenticated user, and not a MitM[1].

Secondly, if the message is intercepted, the secret key isn't compromised, and the secret key can be kept more secure than an API key that has to be sent with every request.

It also allows the signing party to be different from the verifying party. To be fair JWTs using asymmetric crypto also have this property.

And client certs, often using a private CA, are frequently used for server-to-server communication.

You are right about browsers not having good support for client certs, but there isn't any fundamental reason that couldn't be better.

As far as public key infrastructure, I agree that for client certs it isn't quite as useful as it is for server certs, but there are situations where it could be useful. Suppose a server for example.org makes a request to example.com. With a client cert signed using PKI, example.com can know that the request actually came from example.org, without having any previous establishment of a trust relationship between the two parties. That is a relatively niche use case, but I could see it being useful in federated protocols.

[1]: or at least if it is a MitM, it has access to the private key for the cert.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-18 05:24:08+00:00
> Much of the system was still in 68K code, so to enable its continuing use, and to allow the running of existing 68K apps, it came with a built-in 68K emulator.

I'm basically used to compatibility layers for applications, but it remains wild to me that they shipped a system where the OS relied on the same translation.
by vaylian | 2025-05-18 05:25:03+00:00
> If the code is

> obj[Symbol.dispose]()

> they are notating it as `[Symbol.dispose]()`.

So

`obj[Symbol.dispose]()` is the same as `[Symbol.dispose]()`? That doesn't seem right, because we might also have `obj2` or `obj3`. How does JavaScript know that `[Symbol.dispose]()` refers to a specific object?
by MichaelMoser123 | 2025-05-18 05:25:04+00:00
"What do you think about user XYZ?" or "What do you think about the comments of user XYZ?"

It starts a whole lot of SQL queries that find and aggregate data & statistics

It must have a very interesting and well written system prompt for this type of questions.

(gives me second thoughts about my personal approach to privacy)
by viccis | 2025-05-18 05:25:12+00:00
Scala was absolutely killing the "we need JVM because all our Hadoop era tech uses it but we're a new generation of JVM data tooling and so we need a language in which the functional programming based abstractions we're using for our data processing are first class language features" niche for a while in the late 2010s.

Was a really big part of Kafka and Spark ecosystems until they supported Python well enough that a lot of people just stuck with that instead of teaching their devs to write Scala.
by innocentoldguy | 2025-05-18 05:26:23+00:00
I found an old, unopened Apple box containing a Japanese Apple II Plus while cleaning out my in-laws house last month. I also found a fake-leather carrying case for it (also unopened). Both are from 1979.

It was interesting to discover that the Apple II Plus' ROM didn't support Kanji, but there were third-party add-on cards that added Kanji support. The Apple II Plus I found had a Multitech Kanji Card with it. Multitech later became Acer.
by elcritch | 2025-05-18 05:27:08+00:00
What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though.

> The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their decisions is what makes it so useful for novices to spend time with experts. Often there’s an underlying pattern that the novice can pick up through careful observation, even if neither the expert nor the novice can properly articulate this pattern.

That explains part of it well. It's also an effect you can observe with graduate students of nobel prize winners tending to be "related" to professors who won nobel prizes or were part of their labs, etc. There's lessons imparted far beyond the structured material which is often available.

Things like mindset, culture, and more are shared this way.

Remote work is great, but it does limit these free form personal interactions which can be so invaluable. I'm a big fan of the potential for VR and AR to enable these experiences with remote work.
Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?
by scratchyone | 2025-05-18 05:29:33+00:00
Hey all, there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe). I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

I see a lot of success stories but I don't know how much they can be trusted. Those of you who have built small single-use indie tools, do you find that anybody at all actually subscribes? A lot of the stuff I wanna try involves AI so I'd have to make sure subscription profits offset the cost of providing free demos.
by 01100011 | 2025-05-18 05:30:14+00:00
Switching microcontrollers means you have a lot of work to do to redo the HW design, re-run all of your pre-production testing, update mfg/QA with new processes and tests, possibly rewrite some of your application.. and you need to price in a new part to your BOM, figure out a secure supply for some number of years... And that just assumes you don't want to do even more work to take advantage of the new chip's capabilities by rewriting even more of your code. All while your original CPU probably still does fine because this is embedded we're talking about and your product already does what it needs to do.
by lmm | 2025-05-18 05:31:03+00:00
> I thought transport companies are the ones doing IC cards?

Well, a number of smaller transport companies are turning away from IC cards citing the cost of the equipment. I don't know at which point in the stack the greed is coming in - whether it's the IC committees, Sony with the underlying technology, some other player or all of them at once - but it's happening. JR East can probably sustain Suica for decades but you'll notice they've been making a hard push into traditional credit cards and banking; they've seen which way the wind is blowing.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-05-18 05:32:21+00:00
The same properties we get with physical things (ownership): - sell - repair - pass it to our kids - no dependency on big corp one day figuring out they don't like me and banning me from all the things I purchased from them - no possibility for hardware to be broken because "you did something we didn't like" - emulate or reverse engineer the software, even the damn drm, when the company breaks it

These kind of things that you can do with physical items

That kind of stuff
by Aurornis | 2025-05-18 05:32:39+00:00
> At one point, that kitchen light automation reached over 700 lines of YAML Now you know why it's broken

> If I had to count, I’d guess I have maybe 15 working automations across all my half-baked instances. That's it.

There is a big home automation channel in one of the Slacks I’m in.

It has been a running theme for years that people get Home Assistant, start trying to automate everything, frustrate their families, and then get forced to de-automate parts of the house because everyone around them is so fed up with it.

The endless debugging and tinkering is only fun for the person doing it, not the test subjects dealing with it. Even the tinkering gets old after a while and people end up with half-baked automations that they just live with, vowing to get back to it some day when the spark returns.
by thayne | 2025-05-18 05:33:56+00:00
It's a nightmare for using a custom CA for server certs too.

You can't just add a new CA, you have to rebuild the entire keystore. And then you need to do it again every time you update the JVM, or risk missing updates to the default keystore.

For some reason the keystore is required to be protected by a password, even if it doesn't contain any secret keys.

The documentation for the tools that manage keystores is incomplete and sometimes out of date.

The whole thing is a relic from another time and could really use some modernization.
by swyx | 2025-05-18 05:34:30+00:00
1. yeah this is nice, making it easier to generate workflows is always good. i think the challenge is always versioning and proper error handling - if the diagram the user sends in doesnt properly model the work done, then you're SOL.

2. (sorry to bring it up but have to ask) how does Diagrid/Dapr compare to Temporal? i browsed your docs but there wasn't much that came up. is Dapr strictly dag based?
by Negitivefrags | 2025-05-18 05:35:07+00:00
If you are going to inherit something, it's certainly a better position that they were using something open like Home Assistant than if they were using a bunch of proprietary / cloud based things.

At least you have the capability of getting things into a working state without the original owner, which may be impossible otherwise.

Now of course the best case scenario is when the "smartness" is only additive to the home, and not required for it.

In my case, if Home Assistant isn't working, the house just works like a normal house with all the wall switches functining as you would expect.

If I ever sold the house, I would give the new owner the Home Assistant instance, disable all my automations, but also tell them that I'm not going to help them at all with supporting it. The most likely scenario is that they wouldn't want to use it or care about it, but at least the house works just fine without it.
by philipswood | 2025-05-18 05:35:20+00:00
You don't need to wait for AR/VR. For computer work the real space of interaction is currently the screen. Unstructured pair programming for two remotes with a shared screen and audio and chat is a way more effective interaction than most things you could do together at the office.

Even better if both of you have two screens - so besides the shared space, you have a separate work area where you can Google things, ask the AI, spelunk the codebase for related relevant features or try one-liners.
by potamic | 2025-05-18 05:38:10+00:00
This is really cool as far as the application goes, but I do have a question on how you plan to compete/differentiate, if at all. I fed the same image to one of the flagship LLMs and was able to generate, more or less, the same dapr scaffold. You might probably be able to fine tune towards dapr use case better, but if one of the flagship models that people already use is going to come close, then it becomes a hard sell.

I suppose it's also a general question about the many new AI applications in the market, because these flagship models are getting really good by the day, and seem to be eating up into each and every of those use cases.
by Larrikin | 2025-05-18 05:41:34+00:00
Scala screwed up by having no filter. Implementing every idea someone with a PhD thought of from the entire history of programming seems like a good idea until you have to use the language. Everybody doing whatever they want because of the freedom and no guidelines didn't help. And build times killed it

Kotlin feels like it has a much better plan and it seems like so far it won't suffer the same death.
by Gibbon1 | 2025-05-18 05:42:20+00:00
Why should we punish someone that bought a car before EV's were commonly available? That's punishing people after the fact. Which is morally wrong.

The fundamental idea is the state doesn't actually want the money. It wants manufactures to stop making cars that emit CO2. If someone already has a car like that perhaps the state can buy it back.
by findalex | 2025-05-18 05:42:36+00:00
...must function unfastened from current PsyOps doctrine which prohibits communicating any PsyOps type message or meme to US domestic audiences.

PsyOps doctrine is an interesting way of saying "the law"... at least until NDAA 2012: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736.