MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Roguelazer | 2025-06-18 23:00:03+00:00
> *Up to 15–50% slower decision-making in offices with high flicker (and high CO₂)

just throws me right off the argument in an article when the fine print notes that a cited study is confounding the thing the author cares about ("sensitivty to flicker") with a much simpler and better-understood explanation (CO₂ poisoning)
by reisse | 2025-06-18 23:00:45+00:00
Even if they did (which is questionable for me, because although a lot of embedded did jump to Wayland pretty fast, the maintaners never stated their goal is any less than replacing the whole X), they had a lot of time to pivot and rethink the design. I believe the general consensus that Wayland is the future of Linux on desktop was formed in 2013-2014, yet the feature gaps are still being patched.
by woooooo | 2025-06-18 23:00:55+00:00
They were funding the Houthis for what, 10 years before the current fracas? And then the Houthis made peace pretty quickly.

Their big picture strategic posture WAS to try and have a deal with us and normalize, but we've made it clear that we won't have that. Nurturing a bunch of proxies in the region is kind of their only option if they want to have allies.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 23:01:17+00:00
Hi there, flashlight nerd here.

There's a third way: a switched-mode power supply with regulated output current. This is used in most better-designed flashlights (which doesn't always correlate to price) and can be used by anything else that needs to drive an LED as well.

The article doesn't discuss what technique should be used for "constant current reduction"; it probably shouldn't be a linear regulator where efficiency is a priority.

PWM is less annoying if the frequency is very high (several kHz), though I'll leave it to people who research the topic to speak to health effects.
by manquer | 2025-06-18 23:01:52+00:00
10,000 hours of what are we comparing ? .

Compilers already do better than me million hours for every program I write because I am not crafting assembly code.

Computers save billions of hours compared to doing it by hand with an abacus or pen and paper.

Productivity of humans is always dependent on tools they have access to, even with agents become that much productive so will humans who use tools

——

Projecting doubling rate over so many generations is no different than saying earth is flat just because it feels flat in your local space. There is no reason to believe exponential doubling holds for 10 generations from now.

There is just one example in all of history that did that over 10 generations , Moore law . Doubling for so many generations at near constant rate is close to impossible , from the times of the ancient tale of grain and chessboard, people constants struggle with the power of the exponential.

——

I would say current LLM approaches are fairly close to end than beginning of the cycle, perhaps 1-2 generations left at best .

The outlay on funding is already at $50-$100 B/year per major player. No organization can spend $500B/year on anything. I don’t see any large scale collaboration in the private sector or in public like space station / fusion reactor for allocating resources to get to say a 3rd gen from now.

Comparing it with semiconductor tech the only other exponential example we have, the budget for foundries and research grew similarly and those are today are say $10-20B for leading edge foundry, but doesn’t keep growing at the same pace.

Constraints on capital availability and risk when deploying it is why we have so few fab players left and remaining players can afford to stagnate and not seriously invest .
by xyzzy123 | 2025-06-18 23:02:22+00:00
This is not quite true, what you are describing is "dumb" fuzzing. Modern fuzzers are coverage guided and will search for and devote more effort to inputs which trigger new branches / paths.

https://afl-1.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about_afl.html

But yeah in general path coverage is hard and fuzzing works better if you have a comprehensive corpus of test inputs.
by red369 | 2025-06-18 23:02:53+00:00
I should add that even now, I probably wouldn't recommend just going out and buying just any laptop over the Framework. They're still the company moving the most in the direction I like.

For people who just don't want to think about this stuff (generally not HN readers), I'd suggest trying to find the minimum Apple laptop which would get you by for a few years. Their base level computers feel like amazing value, but the prices to upgrade RAM and SDD are brutal at purchase, and it's impossible afterwards.

For anyone who I think would have the appetite, refurbished corporate laptops are very solid, quite repairable, and good value.

I think those both those options are actually very high bars to beat, so if Framework hasn't jumped straight to beating those yet, that's still not necessarily a terrible thing.
by mos_basik | 2025-06-18 23:03:37+00:00
God, every time I see a screenshot of Firefox 4 I get hit with a nostalgia blast. I was in highschool and I remember getting hyped up about the UI overhaul from teasers Mozilla was putting out. Felt like Christmas when I hooked up to the dorm wifi at the table in the lounge and got the update notification.
by rtkwe | 2025-06-18 23:04:37+00:00
I think they have to for tunnels to work. They rewrite the headers so the target server doesn't have to have any special config to recognize abc.example.xyz as being itself.

I think in theory you could get it without it but that would be a lot more work on the recipient side.

Me I'm less worried about that so I accept the convenience of not having to setup a reverse proxy and poke a hole in my router.
by mattigames | 2025-06-18 23:05:28+00:00
I still believe the Matrix Online videogame had a lot potential, it just needed a better game loop, I think some new Matrix game taking ideas from games like Helldivers, GTA V and Cyberpunk could become a hit, where there are 2 parallel worlds, the Matrix and reality, and some things you do in one can help you in the other, e.g a way to discover from the matrix where the sentinels are in reality, the overall aim of the game would be to gain territory on "reality", and you would gain "exploits" that help you gain territory faster, meaning destroying robot bases and liberating human farms, plus recruiting some of them. On the monetization side the publisher can of course just do the popular thing and sell skins (that only show in the Matrix of course), for both cars and characters, maybe paint jobs for your ship would work fine too.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-18 23:07:25+00:00
https://www.amiunique.org/

> your browser shares a surprising amount of information, like your screen resolution, time zone, device model and more. When combined, these details create a “fingerprint” that’s often unique to your browser. Unlike cookies — which users can delete or block — fingerprinting is much harder to detect or prevent.

Ironically, the more fine tuned and hardened your device, OS, and browser are for security and privacy, the worse your fingerprint liability becomes.

more idle thoughts - it's strange and disappointing that in the vast space and history of FOSS tools, a proper open source browser never took off. I suppose monopolizing from the start was too lucrative to let it be free. Yet there really is little recourse for privacy enthusiasts. I've entertained the idea of using my own scraper, so I can access the web offline, though seems like more trouble than its worth.
by jbs789 | 2025-06-18 23:10:16+00:00
Interesting idea. Once you have the questions and get some buy-in… have you considered how you’d deal with an employee solving the problem and modifying the model before you get your results back? It would be a sleazy thing to do but I can imagine sneakiness around how folks interpret versions or modifications etc. Wonder if you or some third party just runs the question over the model.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-06-18 23:11:49+00:00
I believe that Geoffrey Hinton is much more intelligent than I am, by a large margin.

But it stands out to me that he appears as if he'd voluntarily taken the perspective of an AI-fear evangelist (because it bolsters his reputation).

I cannot judge if it is legitimate to choose this category ("fear-evangelist"). I did it anyway, deliberately.

Generative AI, LLMs, Machine Learning: I'm not an expert in any of these fields. I heard a lecture on Neural Networks, Genetic algorithms, AI history at university, but that was in 2013.

It's interesting how some approaches that felt like moon-shots at the time turned out to be massively capable with the emergence of large transformer models. At least that's my understanding (regarding NNs).

If someone says to me: "you are replaceable by AI", I don't fret much. It might be correct.

But to be honest, I am also frustrated about the fact that AI gloom and doom (be it white-collar job elimination or paperclip singularity) hasn't changed much since 2022 or so.

Agree that it feels we are at the beginning of a disruptive period, where work that was previously considered inseparable from human domain experts and specialized programmers, is being challenged by AI.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 23:11:57+00:00
> even the simplest ones strobe

The simplest LED sources running from AC mains power strobe at mains frequency, which is very visible and very annoying.

Fancy LED sources don't strobe at all. I'm using an LED panel intended for videography as a room light; any flickering could show up as scanlines in video, so most lights intended for that purpose are flicker-free.
by restalis | 2025-06-18 23:12:10+00:00
"Isn't 10-15% faster compression, and 5-10% faster decompression, a very nice «feature»?"

Although much code can be optimized to get it to run 10-15% faster, if that comes at the expense of legibility then such "feature" get rejected nowadays. Translating an existing codebase into a language that makes things more difficult¹ and (because of that) has (and most likely will have) fewer engineers willing to working in it looks very much akin to applying legibility-affecting optimizations to me.

¹ ...and not only. I've already described in other comments some of the issues I see with it as a software development tool, here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31565024 here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33390634 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42241516
by const_cast | 2025-06-18 23:14:12+00:00
It makes complete sense that people want something more out of a job than money. However, you should not be looking for emotional attraction to a job, because that's asking for trouble. The thing is too many people tie their identity to their job, which then means that they're limiting their career opportunities and quality of life for people who fundamentally do not care about them. It's self-destructive.

What we should care about is, how long is the commute? Do I have to commute every day? Is the work stressful? Can I potentially work less than 40 hours? Will I be treated with base line respect? You know, things that tangible increase your quality of life.
by nemosaltat | 2025-06-18 23:14:41+00:00
It looks like senior officers are a bit over-represented in this survey, not surprising since it came from the US Naval Institute. Senior Partridge seems to be the only one willing to admit that Down Periscope does a surprisingly good job of capturing the inanity and absurdity of submarining. I’d argue Office Space, mentioned in a sibling comment, underrepresents the suck for the Wardroom, Nukes, and possibly MTs.
by diggan | 2025-06-18 23:14:52+00:00
I guess we all knew this was happening, but it's hard to "prove" that they track you across devices without resorting to anecdotes. This seems to be a framework for performing studies + a large-scale study in order to get some more concrete proof that it is actually happening in practice, and the fingerprinting isn't just used for other things like anti-abuse.

> Prior studies only measured whether fingerprinting-related scripts are being run on the websites but that in itself does not necessarily mean that fingerprinting is being used for the privacy-invasive purpose of online tracking because fingerprinting might be deployed for the defensive purposes of bot/fraud detection and user authentication. [...] a framework to assess fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing ad changes from browser fingerprinting adjustments - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696410.3714548

Unfortunately I don't have access to the paper myself, so not sure what details they share beyond that.
by shanemhansen | 2025-06-18 23:15:09+00:00
I've wondered about PWM flicker when I started trying to figure out why so many modern car headlights seem like they are strobing to me.

Initially I thought it might be related to the alternator.

I still don't know why I perceive these headlights as having an annoying flicker or why. I'd love it if some (informed) commenter could clear it up for me. Am I imagining it?
by reisse | 2025-06-18 23:15:55+00:00
> Modern users have high DPI displays, variable refresh rates, multiple monitors, and panels with HDR color space support. X11 was just never going to work well for this. KDE Plasma 6.3, on the other hand, handles any of these situations quite well and I've been using it on a daily basis.

Everything from your list except HDR worked in X11 years before it started to work in Wayland compositors. Maybe not perfect, but better than any Wayland compositor could do the same until only a year or two ago.

The amount of time it took to get at least feature parity with X11 in Wayland stack is ridiculous. I'm not really sure it wouldn't be better if all that time went into X11.
by rkagerer | 2025-06-18 23:16:09+00:00
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.

I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
by toast0 | 2025-06-18 23:16:16+00:00
> Nah, LED lighting generally uses at least 200 Hz at a minimum.

Eh, they use what they can get away with. Nobody is out there policing flicker rates. Especially when you add a dimmer into the mix, there's a lot of room between good and bad, and when you're at the hardware store buying bulbs, there's not much to indicate which bulbs are terrible.

Lots of people don't seem to notice, so the terrible ones don't get returned often enough to get unstocked, and anyway, when you come back for more in 6 months, everything is different even if it has the same sku.
Show HN: Unregistry – “docker push” directly to servers without a registry
by psviderski | 2025-06-18 23:17:10+00:00
I got tired of the push-to-registry/pull-from-registry dance every time I needed to deploy a Docker image.

In certain cases, using a full-fledged external (or even local) registry is annoying overhead. And if you think about it, there's already a form of registry present on any of your Docker-enabled hosts — the Docker's own image storage.

So I built Unregistry [1] that exposes Docker's (containerd) image storage through a standard registry API. It adds a `docker pussh` command that pushes images directly to remote Docker daemons over SSH. It transfers only the missing layers, making it fast and efficient.

docker pussh myapp:latest user@server

Under the hood, it starts a temporary unregistry container on the remote host, pushes to it through an SSH tunnel, and cleans up when done.

I've built it as a byproduct while working on Uncloud [2], a tool for deploying containers across a network of Docker hosts, and figured it'd be useful as a standalone project.

Would love to hear your thoughts and use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/unregistry

[2]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud
by rcxdude | 2025-06-18 23:18:13+00:00
>There are two ways to dim LEDs: linear regulation and some sort of pulse modulation. Linear regulation is wasteful and you're pretty unlikely to encounter it, especially in battery-powered devices such as phones or laptops. Pulse modulation is common.

The other reason is LED brightness and color is quite non-linear with current, so PWM gives a much more straightforward dim than adjusting a current smoothly.
by oersted | 2025-06-18 23:18:18+00:00
True, actually people forget that quite good LLMs existed 2-3 years before ChatGPT, from Google, Microsoft, Facebook… OpenAI itself open-sourced GPT-2 all the way back in 2019 and had a GPT-3 API service for years before ChatGPT.

The breakthrough that ChatGPT brought was not technical, but the foresight to bet on laborious human-feedback fine-tuning to make LLMs somewhat controllable and practical. All those previous LLMs where mostly as “intelligent” as the GPT-3.5 that ChatGPT was built on, but they hallucinated so much, and it was so easy to manipulate them to be horribly racist and such. They remained niche tech demos until OpenAI trained them, not with new tech really, just the right vision and lots of expensive experimentation.
by martinald | 2025-06-18 23:21:49+00:00
Yeah on Android it's easy to show what band your are connected on via one of the many cell diagnostic apps in the 'top icon' bar. If you're on LTE800/NR700 in a pretty built up area and you have no data then 99% of the time it is congestion. If you're on higher bands which have more bandwidth (though even these days 2100/2300/2600 can get pretty full) then it's less likely to be congestion.
by winkelmann | 2025-06-18 23:22:47+00:00
> Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what.

I think a no-brainer solution here, which I am surprised isn't used, is to just immediately kick the account when a well-known signature, such as CheatEngine, is detected. If the program isn't even attempting to get around VAC, there is no point in doing the whole "delayed ban" thing.
by Zak | 2025-06-18 23:23:09+00:00
> I totally can tell the reds are off.

How do the reds look to you?

I looked at the photometric reports from a couple Waveform models on their website and the R9 (saturated red rendering) was in the 90s for both with tint almost exactly on the blackbody line. The 2700K did have a bit worse R9 than the 4000K so I could imagine it doesn't look exactly like an incandescent.
by amatecha | 2025-06-18 23:23:20+00:00
depends. I have a pretty good stash of compatible devices going back a few years (as I've been tinkering with meshtastic since 2022), and some are on very old firmware versions. If "SHTF" unexpectedly and I needed to deploy them to as many community members as possible, a good percentage of them would be useless because they are not compatible with the newer versions of the firmware. (on the upside, I do stash the firmware zips on my NAS, along with tons of other OSes, drivers, firmwares, etc.)
by rjpower9000 | 2025-06-18 23:23:26+00:00
It's in between. It's more C like than the Claude port, but it's more Rust-y than c2rust. How much depends on how fine-grained you want to make your port and how you want to prompt your LLM. For inside of functions and internal symbols, the LLM is free to use more idiomatic construction and structures. But since the goal was to test the effectiveness of the fuzz testing, using the LLM to do the symbol translation is more of an implementation detail.

You could certainly try using c2rust to do the initial translation, and it's a reasonable idea, but I didn't find the LLMs really struggled with this part of the task, and there's certainly more flexibility this way. c2rust seemed to choke on some simple functions as well, so I didn't pursue it further.

And of course for external symbols, you're constrained by the C API, so how much leeway you have depends on the project.

You can also imagine having the LLM produce more idiomatic code from the beginning, but that can be hard to square with the incremental symbol-by-symbol translation.
by echelon | 2025-06-18 23:23:56+00:00
> Android phones now come with Gemini.

This is where the antitrust needs to be employed. Not against Microsoft.

Google has everyone ensnared. Search, Chrome, Android, YouTube. They own the panes of glass and all of the ingress and egress points.

Why isn't Google being dismantled by the DOJ / FTC as we speak?
by rafaquintanilha | 2025-06-18 23:27:13+00:00
When I sat down to write today, I was willing to talk about why blogging is important as a programmer. How surprised I was when realized that the first time I hit publish on an article online was exactly 10 years ago. It just felt right to finish the article and share, not looking for views, but as a testament of what I really meant in the post.
by api | 2025-06-18 23:29:01+00:00
One way of looking at it is that there are about the same number of programmers today with a deep understanding of the machine as there were in the 90s. There are just 3-4X more programmers who are just after a career and learn only the skills necessary and follow what seem to be the most employable trends.

Same goes for users. There are about the same number of computer literate users as there were back then. There’s just a new class of iPad/iPhone user who is only a casual user of computers and the net and barely knows what a file is.
by Tade0 | 2025-06-18 23:30:31+00:00
I did that once when I created a pressure mark on the screen via mishandling, bought a replacement only to find that it didn't fit due to some kind of nuance in the model name - never found the correct part.

I passed it down to family and bought a new laptop, as my attempt at repairing also damaged the plastic parts which were holding the bezel in place.

Overall every laptop I had suffered mechanical damage of some sort and occasionally it was just something I had to live with, as I didn't want to chance e.g. soldering.

With my Framework I know any regular repair is a 30min job, as I assembled and disassembled it several times already.
by homebrewer | 2025-06-18 23:31:15+00:00
> at least 200 Hz at a minimum

> You can't perceive that

I very easily can. I had to get rid of an otherwise good monitor a few years ago before I knew it used PWM to control the backlight (and before I even knew PWM was used at all for this functionality — I only had experience with CCFL backlight before that).

It was really annoying to look at, like looking directly at cheap fluorescent lighting. Miraculously, setting brightness to 100% fixed the issue.

By googling around, I found that it used PWM with a modulation frequency of 240 Hz, with a duty cycle of 100% at full brightness, which explained everything.

I can also easily perceive flickering of one of my flashlights, the only one that uses PWM at a frequency of a few hundred hertz. Other flashlights either run at multiple KHz, or don't use PWM at all, and either one is much easier on the eyes.

Some of us really do perceive this stuff, which can be hard to believe for some reason.
by MichaelThatsIt | 2025-06-18 23:31:31+00:00
Ay love it. There’s quite a few similar ideas on r/cyberdeck. I just wasn’t satisfied with their look. I wanted something very clean. Something that blends in and could theoretically be used on a plane without drawing too much attention, but still nice to look at.

That guy commented in the Reddit thread I posted and I’m hoping to collab with him on the framework version if he’s down.