MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hadlock | 2025-06-13 18:53:59+00:00
Had the iPad not launched immediately opposite it, I can envision a world where HP goes through two or three revisions and has a solid device with it's own "personality" much like how Microsoft has their "Surface" line of glued-together tablets and "laptops" which sorta compete with the iPad and Macbook Air even if they hardly market them. The fact that Microsoft eventually succeeded in the space seems to indicate HP could have as well. I can see the business case where the new CEO isn't interested in rubber stamping a new product line that's going to lose money for him every quarter for the next three years against the glowing sun that is the iPad. There are better ways to burn political capital as a C level.
by legitster | 2025-06-13 18:54:16+00:00
I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design.

We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind.

Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market instead of the adoring consumer market that Palm had collected.
by kragen | 2025-06-13 18:54:44+00:00
Looks relatively safe to me, though it doesn't seem to work because debian:latest doesn't have vim in it (so I'm skeptical of your implicit claim of having tried it), and, if $user_provided_path is empty, it defaults to browsing the filesystem. But there are a lot of characters there that are specifically there to avoid footguns; without them, it would seem to work, but it would fail when $user_provided_path contained special characters.

The version I tested was

docker run --rm -it debian bash -c 'apt update; apt install -y vim; vim -- "$1"' _ "$user_provided_path"
Is there a Linux laptop that has >=15" and >800 nits screen?
by spaniard89277 | 2025-06-13 18:55:04+00:00
I have a macbook pro 16" for work. I work remotely and many times I work outdoors (in a park, in the nature) just because the laptop allows me to do this.

The combination of battery + screen is incredible.

Now, I don't like MacOS, and it's quite expensive (trying to save for a downpayment with my spanish salary...), and I'm looking for something similar but as personal laptop.

I've searched high and low, and I found that x86 laptops improved a lot, but the screens barely reach 500 nits most of the times, which makes working outdoors a very unpleasant experience.

Does this even exist? I just want something to install linux mint, throw it in my backpack (don't worry about weight) and be able to work it from anywhere.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-13 18:55:40+00:00
> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.

What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit since then.
by runeblaze | 2025-06-13 18:55:54+00:00
Yeah like I very much respect their work, and there is some genuine beauty in having this policy such as "have access to > 100k USD in the last 365 days, this tier is for you" or the fact that they seem dedicated to also support small indie creators. However this does differentiate them from true FOSS solutions.

Note that small game devs have many types, and I imagine these "boutique" pricing solutions can work for many.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-06-13 18:56:01+00:00
The idea that spacetime is emergent and not fundamental dates back to the 60s and has seen some pretty neat stuff along the way, like Bekenstein and Hawking discussing information problems in the 70s that hinted at a deep connection between gravity and thermodynamics. Then in the 90s we had Jacobson deriving General Relativity from the first law of thermodynamics and in the 2000s we had Verlinde combining this with holography. It's not a "solved" problem by any stretch, but some of the greatest physicists of their generation have meddled with this and I think there are almost none left who would refute the basic idea. It's the details that people are still arguing about - which now include this paper.
by kevinsync | 2025-06-13 18:56:11+00:00
I was fully "in" on webOS :( Still got a Palm Pre, Pre 2, Pre 3 and TouchPad in a box, and an LG webOS 2.0 OLED that died in the basement.

Apps were built sort of like PhoneGap, but intentional and supported rather than a middleware work-around. webOS introduced the card concept that we all use now, along with a very coherent design language, and the devices were cool (to me, albeit a bit flimsy) with full keyboards (I was super sold on that but have long-since changed my mind after switching to iOS).

I came from a long line of "alt" devices though, Sidekick 1, 2, 3, Helio Ocean, etc, so you can see where my sensibilities lie HAHAHA

I would also get freakin' roasted by literally everybody I knew every time they saw it for being a hold-out and not getting an iPhone, but iOS just wasn't there yet as far as I was concerned. Apple/Android hadn't cornered the market yet and it was just a time with a lot of options (Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc).

Anyways, when I heard HP was buying Palm (and AT&T did a deal for Pre 3 exclusivity, I think), I assumed it would be a great thing for the mass adoption of what seemed like a really exciting future for mobile. Then HP poured gasoline on it and killed it with fire.

RIP late-oughts Palm, we barely knew ye!
by seadan83 | 2025-06-13 18:56:25+00:00
> But getting someone's SSH keys and then running off and doing other things is a very normal part of any focused attack in which attackers use some foothold to start pivoting into your systems.

Though, if someone gets that far, couldn't they also install a key logger on the users system? At that point - whether it's just password or a password enabled SSH key, anything the user does is all compromised regardless.
by layer8 | 2025-06-13 18:57:23+00:00
> all things that exist are things that can be written down. And therefore there is a single countable list that includes all things that might possibly have any mathematical existence at all. Anything not on that list does not truly exist.

The universe (in the cosmological sense) can be written down as a single countable list, and anything different would be impossible? Or are you saying that it does not truly exist? I’m not sure how that makes sense.
by jamesdutc | 2025-06-13 18:57:53+00:00
> The python dict() is already high-quality and high-performance

Yes, the CPython `PyDictObject` has been subject to a lot of optimisation work, and it is both high-quality and high-performance. I should not have implied that this is not the case.

However, there's a lot of ongoing research into even further improving the performance of hash tables, and there are regular posts discussing the nature of these kinds of improvements: e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176713

I have colleagues who have wanted to improve the performance of their use of `dict` (within the parts of their code that are firmly within the structural/Python domain,) who have wanted to integrate these alternate implementations. For the most part, these implementations do not guarantee “human ordering” so this means that they can provide these tools only as supplements (and not replacements) of the Python built-in `dict`.

> moving your data into an environment that lets you make more assumptions and be more restrictive with your data and operate on it there. It's how numpy, polaris, and pandas work.

Yes, the idea of a heterogeneous topology of Python code, wherein “programme structuring” is done in pure Python, and “computation” is done in aggregate types that lower to C/C++/Rust/Zig (thus eliminating dynamic dispatch, ensuring contiguity, &c.) is common in Python. As you note, this is the pattern that we see with NumPy, Polars, pandas, and other tools. We might put a name to this pattern: the idea of a “restricted computation domain.” (I believe I introduced this terminology into wide-use within the Python community.)

However, not all code shows such a stark division between work that can be done at high-generality (and, correspondingly, low-performance) in pure Python and work that can be done at low-generality (but very high-performance) within a “restricted computation domain.) There are many types of problems wherein the line between these are blurred, and it is in this region where improvements to the performance of pure Python code may be desired.
by andsoitis | 2025-06-13 18:57:56+00:00
> The Silurian Hypothesis asks whether signs of truly ancient past civilizations would even be recognisable today.

A hypothesis is a tentative explanation for an observation or phenomenon that is based on prior knowledge and can be tested by gathering and analyzing data.

Given that, is there something that we're unable to explain properly without invoking the Silurian Hypothesis? Asked another way: what does this hypothesis help with that is otherwise hard to explain?
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-06-13 18:57:56+00:00
I actually think if there was anybody who could have competed effectively against Apple at this phase -- on branding -- Palm was it. It had recognition and association with the kind of product. And a patent portfolio, along with it.

I seem to recall there was rumours of the time of Apple sniffing around Palm as an acquisition target, even? I get the impression HP made this purchase simply on account of a strategic move to stop Apple from doing the same, and to get the patent portfolio that came out of it.

And the Palm Pre really was a decent phone, and the software relatively compelling... they just couldn't keep up on the HW manufacturing side.

At the time this was potentially a solvable problem, Apple hadn't become the juggernaut it is now.

I also recall that Jobs was famously pissed at Zuckerberg for launching Facebook on WebOS before iOS?

EDIT: I'd add to this that Palm had the talent at the time, too. Consider Mattias Duarte was the VP at Palm who headed up WebOS UX.. and then went on to direct the same thing for Android at Google, out of which came Material Design, etc. etc.
by pipeline_peak | 2025-06-13 18:58:04+00:00
Palm had the worst combination, the monolithic hardware/software approach of Apple but without the branding and services to make that approach a desirable platform.

Imagine using a Motorola Droid without the services and app ecosystem provided by Google Android and oh wait, the sterile corporate branding only a dinosaur like HP could provide.......lovely.

Watching your brainchild deteriorate when there's physically nothing you can do sounds stressful, especially something you believe could've saved your company. At the same time, I don't think he wants to admit that there never really was anything he could've done.

How would a slightly cheaper Palm compete with Android? It would've been like a pretty Zune.
by mlinsey | 2025-06-13 18:58:05+00:00
It was a hardware device launch, not a web product; pushing back the launch date by months or dropping the price in half with only two weeks to go (when the launch devices have been manufactured, sold to retail partners, and are probably being shipped to stores already) would only be done in the event of a true catastrophe (something along the lines of a gross safety problem), one big enough that leadership should have flagged it beforehand.
by bluGill | 2025-06-13 18:58:35+00:00
The price was likely too high, though that is debatable. However the real take away is if you want something like this to work out you need to invest in to for years. There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points having different predicted ranges!).

They didn't have the app ecosystem - no surprise. However the only way to get that ecosystem is years of investment. The Windows phone failed a couple years latter for similar reasons - nice device (or so I'm told), but it wasn't out long enough to get a lot of apps before Microsoft gave up on it.
by kaamuli | 2025-06-13 18:58:49+00:00
Before I start - Yes, I know the differential equation in the video is wrong. I’ve already fixed it by tweaking the prompt and the script so the inputs depend on what’s being asked. The original issue was that blocks like Sum were being pasted in without matching the right number of inputs and outputs.

I’m a 2nd-year aero-engineering student at Imperial College London, I enjoy problem solving (did BPhO - gold and UKMT Gold) I'm a full-stack dev (or atleast trying to be lol) who hacked together Bloxi, an AI copilot that sits on top of Simulink and turns plain-English prompts into working control-system models and can easily debug them in real time. I felt the pain myself this term, watching top-tier students burn hours wiring blocks instead of engineering. With today’s multimodal LLMs finally able to “see” diagrams, this is the first moment an assistant like Bloxi can exist and the fastest way to give millions of engineers the same productivity leap coders just got.

I built this mainly to get comfortable with LLMs and “prompt-engineering,” and I think I’ve hit the point where I’m done tinkering—especially now that MathWorks have announced they’re working on their own version. So I figured I’d share what I’ve got in case anyone wants to take it further and also just to like give it out to the world innit.

How it works

Two scripts + simple backend: 1. One builds the Simulink model. 2. The other handles the chat + simple UI. 3. Backend that glues together the OpenAI API and frontend

Drop in your own OpenAI API key and you’re off. I used it to debug and build a few uni-project models, and it’s been surprisingly handy.

At first it just spat out a finished Simulink file, but I wanted that ChatGPT “walk-through” vibe make it feel 'magical'. So I added a couple of for loops: one to drop in blocks step-by-step, and another to wire them up.

Since raw code isn’t visible in Simulink (to the best of my knowledge), within one of my scripts I had it walk through the simulink file and screenshot each stage leveraging the fact openAI's API is multimodal, pipe them through the LLM, and let it spot inconsistencies. Works better than I expected. Perhaps someone can do better or find a better way?

Youtube video of me using it: https://youtu.be/TX0fviaFSyg

Here’s the GitHub link if you want to play with it, poke around or build on it: https://github.com/Kaamuli/Bloxi

To use download & open scripts then just do openChatbox().
by jfengel | 2025-06-13 18:59:12+00:00
The SLS was very effective as a subsidy to large aerospace and defense contracting firms.

That's not sarcasm. We do a lot of things that are strictly wastes of money, in order to ensure that we have more than we need of something. It's why we subsidize agriculture: we don't want "just in time" food production. We want too much of it, even if it means wasting some of it.

I don't know if we want to continue to subsidize Boeing, but on the other hand, I think America would feel weird if we didn't have a domestic airline manufacturer. Sure, we could buy them elsewhere, but do we want to?

(Answer: not if it's from the company that keeps screwing it up. But we can't just conjure a new one from scratch, one that doesn't mess up.)
by MPSFounder | 2025-06-13 18:59:13+00:00
It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).
by evanelias | 2025-06-13 18:59:34+00:00
No, I do not believe it is even remotely plausible that they have ever made a majority of their revenue from licensing violation fees, especially today, when their total annual revenue is over $57 billion.

Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than 150,000 employees.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices. I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's plenty of data available from their earnings statements. If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it would be easy to cite a source.
by bunderbunder | 2025-06-13 18:59:44+00:00
I suspect that making business mistakes illegal would ultimately cause more harm than the problem such a move is trying to solve.

And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind, "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like, "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies changes to the existing product portfolio.
by phkahler | 2025-06-13 19:00:05+00:00
>> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed.

There are aspects of management that are independent of the business being managed. But somehow in the 90's CEOs and business schools turned that into something like "management is a generic function independent of the business being run. With an MBA and you can run Coke GM or Intel all the same."
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-13 19:00:07+00:00
If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms.

Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who's developed apps will point out that you shoudn't spend too much time on the tablet version. Just add some borders/sidebars and ship it. The markets not big enough to do more and the tablets are only viable today thanks to re-use of the phone hardware and software ecosystems.
by svat | 2025-06-13 19:00:29+00:00
The "More from A.O. Scott" at the bottom of the article links to:

• "Life Isn’t Perfect. But This Poem Might Be." March 21, 2025 (“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” by Adrienne Rich, 1951) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/21/books/adrienn...

• "I Would Follow This Poem to Hell and Back" Feb. 21, 2025 (“my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” from SELECTED POEMS, copyright ©1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/21/books/gwendol...

• "I Swear This Poem Didn’t Make Me Cry" Jan. 23, 2025 (“From a Photograph,” from NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright ©1962 by George Oppen) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/24/books/george-...

• "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did." Dec. 18, 2024 (“Romantic Poet,” by Diane Seuss, 2024) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/books/romanti...

• "A Poem About Waiting, and Wishing You Had a Drink" Nov. 1, 2024 (“Party Politics,” from “The Complete Poems,” by Philip Larkin. originally 1984?) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/01/books/philip-...

• "A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date" April 11, 2024 (“Having a Coke With You,” by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-o...

So it appears that this one is part of a series (previously called "Close Read" as in the last link above: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/arts/close-read.htm...): every few weeks / months, A. O. Scott writes about some poem he's liked, in this format (all of them say "Produced by Aliza Aufrichtig, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Emily Eakin").
by goostavos | 2025-06-13 19:00:42+00:00
I similarly half-joke about the same thing. Being "replaced by AI" would be the kick in the pants to finally make a run of it.

In Seattle, I feel like I could get really far on a dumb, single-issue platform: "I will fix the potholes on 1st ave." I won't talk about anything except that. I'll only try to accomplish that. And then I'll leave.
by seadan83 | 2025-06-13 19:01:03+00:00
It kinda is good personal policy IMO for passwords you have to type to be positive affirmations. I used 'Fuckthis1!' for a moment; funny enough it was not the most moralizing thing to type all the time! OTOH, 'H@ppyH@ppyJoyJoy!!' was always a small mood lift.
by bluGill | 2025-06-13 19:01:27+00:00
I can find countless examples of this both ways. Some people are great CEOs able to turn around a company/industry they knew nothing about before. However there are a lot of bad CEOs out there. And being in a company/industry for decades is a good way to turn a bad CEO into a mediocre one which is an improvement I guess. Sadly I have no clue how to make a good CEO - and see no evidence anyone else does.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-13 19:01:47+00:00
So classic they still use it! iOS now offers a lot more multitasking options, but for the most part when you swipe away from an app it's still good ol' Mr. Screenshot.

And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is being done still to make this even more seamless. For example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to define UIs, because rendering such UIs can be done by the OS outside of the app process.

This means you can have an actual live UI while the actual app process is suspended. They literally don't have to wake the process until you tap on a button.

It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can define a much more coarse-grained idea of "alive" without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.
by Kneecaps07 | 2025-06-13 19:02:12+00:00
I still miss my Palm Pre. I've sat here since it died and watched Android and iOS slowly adopt the UI that my Pre had 15 years ago. We were swapping between apps with cards and swiping them away a decade before anyone else.

I had multiple friends end up buying the Pre and the non-slidey Pre (I can't remember the name) because they saw what I had thought it was so cool.

Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no shared code, but who knows.
by tough | 2025-06-13 19:02:20+00:00
you should always pre-vet any message you send and sign with your name.

it doesnt really matter where the message or how was created, only that you're 100% ok with its contents reaching its destinatatary.

that still puts some limits to how much you can -spam- and should make you not want to -spam- but only send real messages, but you can certainly use AI to help you research/generate those leads initial messages

i have not tried to do this, but i wouldn't see how its problematic?