MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linksnapzz | 2025-07-19 20:21:41+00:00
...and Turbochannel was originally the bus for the MIPS R3000-based Ultrix workstations; the Alpha firmware needed to be able to interpret MIPS machine code to speak to TC expansion cards.

Somewhere, I have a Turbochannel FDDI card taken from an AlphaStation 3000-an obsolete I/O adapter for a forgotten network protocol, running on a defunct CPU, with firmware written in the native language of an even more defunct CPU.
by int08h | 2025-07-19 20:21:45+00:00
> In that sense, Rust enables escapism: When writing Rust, you get to solve lots of 'problems' - not real problems, mind you, but fun problems.

If this is true for Rust, it's 10x more true for C++!

Lifetime issues are puzzles, yes, but boring and irritating ones.

But in C++? Select an appetizer, entree, and desert (w/ bottomless breadsticks) from the Menu of Meta Programming. An endless festival of computer science sideshows living _in the language itself_ that juices the dopamine reward of figuring out a clever way of doing something.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-19 20:22:22+00:00
Ah I see.

> A more precise way to phrase what he's getting at would be something like "all types that _can_ implement `Copy` should do so automatically unless you opt out", which is not a crazy thing to want,

From a memory safety PoV it's indeed entirely valid, but from a programming logic standpoint it sounds like a net regression. Rust's move semantics are such a bliss compared to the hidden copies you have in Go (Go not having pointer semantics by default is one of my biggest gripe with the language).
by dejawu | 2025-07-19 20:23:01+00:00
I've similarly thought about building a language that compiles to Rust, but handles everything around references and borrowing and abstracts that away from the user. Then you get a language where you don't have to think about memory at all, but the resulting code "should" still be fairly fast because Rust is fast (kind of ending up in the same place as Go).

I haven't written a ton of Rust so maybe my assumptions of what's possible are wrong, but it is an idea I've come back to a few times.
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 20:23:01+00:00
The shell is an interface. The computer is the tool. Then we find that we have workflows that are actually routine. And we create scripts to handle them. Then we find that they are contextual, and we created task runners to provide the context.Then our mental capacity is freed, while the computer takes care of the menial stuff. And everything is good.

That is generally how it goes for power users. And people that takes the time to RTFM.

But now, I see people that don't want to determine their workflows. It's just ad-hoc use, spending their time on local decisions that doesn't matter that much instead of grasping the big picture and then solves it. Maybe it helps them looks busy.

So I don't want an agent for Linear. What I want is maybe a bash alias "isc" (for "issue create"), that pops up nano where I write the issue in git commit format (title + blank line + description). Upon saving, the rest is done automatically, because it can determines the project based on some .trackerrc I put in the root of the project. Or maybe a "linear-issues" emacs command and a transient interface (again, the correct project can be determined automatically).
by forrestthewoods | 2025-07-19 20:23:16+00:00
> Is it possible though? Is it possible to have isolated WSLs (per programm)?

Maybe. But my experience is that there is very little “program code” and it’s mostly “library code”.

And if you did have a program that required WSL and you followed the UNIX model of bash chaining programs then you’re now mandating the “meta program” be run under WSL.

I treat WSL as a hacky workaround for dealing with bad citizens. It’s not a desirable target environment. It exists as a gap stop until someone does it right. YMMV.
by bamboozled | 2025-07-19 20:23:18+00:00
I'm having actual coding conversations that I used to only have with senior devs, right now, while browsing HN, and code that does what I asked is being produced.

I’m using Opus 4 for coding and there is no way that model demonstrates any reasoning or demonstrates any “intelligence” in my opinion. I’ve been through the having conversations phase etc but doesn’t get you very far, better to read a book.

I use these models to help me type less now, that’s it. My prompts basically tell it to not do anything fancy and that works well.
Show HN: A rudimentary game engine to build four dimensional VR evironments
by teemur | 2025-07-19 20:23:33+00:00
I think it's finally time to lock version 0.2 of my 4d side project. (Since previous Show HN a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100760 I scrapped lots of stuff and concentrated on making a javascript "game engine")

The sole purpose of this project is to explore whether it's possible to make the human brain spatially aware of four dimensions using Virtual Reality. It’s my first ever game project, my first time using Unity, first time writing C#, and my first anything with WebXR, so please be gentle! To manage expectations, it isn't visually pleasing yet and it's not easily approachable. To get anything out of this, you likely need a pen and a paper and draw 3d slices of 4d objects _many_ times.

The project is essentially a rudimentary engine where you can use JavaScript to define 4D objects and some limited behaviors. You can then explore these spaces in a browser (with or without a VR headset), moving and rotating through all four dimensions—including double rotations on planes like xz and yw.The game is a webxr project, meaning you can just play that on the browser, even without VR headset. Note, however, that the keyboard input is a bit limited.

As a demo, I've built a simple maze game where you try to find gems before time runs out. The challenge ramps up, and I'm currently stuck trying to comfortably navigate Level 6, which involves moving around four separate tesseracts. Here is a page where I have tried to visualize what is going on at level 6: https://www.brainpaingames.com/blog/updates/2024/07/28/Hyper...

I have no expectations that this will any day be anything but a niche project of mine, but I thought here might be someone interested in playing around. And If anyone has any ideas how the pedagogy of learning to operate in 4 spatial dimensions could be made somehow more achevable, I'm all ears.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-07-19 20:23:56+00:00
It's depressing to see and hear that New Vector is rewriting the flagship client about every 5 years or so, with each rewrite taking multiple years. Each time the new client is hailed as the saviour, and then after a while, denounced as obsolete. Soon again, the new saviour is right around the corner.

That is not the way you create high-quality software in a cost-efficient manner.

While Matrix has a value as the pretty much only open-standard IM system with even moderate levels of user adoption, all this makes it hard to actually love it or even to be enthustiastic about it.
by pyman | 2025-07-19 20:24:10+00:00
I see two things people are not happy about when it comes to LLMs:

1. The message you sent doesn't feel personal. It reads like something written by a machine, and I struggle to connect with someone who sends me messages like that.

2. People who don't speak English very well are now sending me perfectly written messages with solid arguments. And honestly, my ego doest’t like it because I used to think I was more intelligent than them. Turns out I wasn't. It was just my perception, based on the fact that I speak the language natively.

Both of these things won't matter anymore in the next two or three years. LLMs will keep getting smarter, while our egos will keep getting smaller.

People still don't fully grasp just how much LLMs will reshape the way we communicate and work, for better or worse.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-19 20:24:25+00:00
Exactly. We've talked about fixing this, but doing so without breaking this encapsulation would require being able to declare something like (syntax is illustrative only) `&mut [set1] self` and `&mut [set2] self`, where `set1` and `set2` are defined as non-overlapping sets of fields in the definition of the type. (A type with private fields could declare semantic non-overlapping subsets without actually exposing which fields those subsets consist of.)
by umanwizard | 2025-07-19 20:25:08+00:00
I think you are misunderstanding what Copy means, and perhaps confusing it with Clone. A type being Copy has no effect on what machine code is emitted when you write "x = y". In either case, it is moved by copying the bit pattern.

The only thing that changes if the type is Copy is that after executing that line, you are still allowed to use y.
by jononor | 2025-07-19 20:25:14+00:00
Superhuman capability within the tasks that are well represented in the dataset, yes. If one takes the view that intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems (ref F. Chollet), then the amount of data alone might not take us to superhuman intelligence. At least without new breakthroughs in the construction of models or systems.

R1 managed to replicate a model on the level of one one they had access to. But as far as I know they did not improve on its predictive performance? They did improve in inference time, but that is another thing. The ability to replicate a model is well demonstrated and quite common practice for some years already, see teacher-student distillation.
by jrockway | 2025-07-19 20:25:36+00:00
This must be consumer vs. enterprise. For consumers, they're going to buy the item that is $1 less at the time of purchase, even if it costs them hundreds of dollars over the lifetime of the printer. For enterprises, they have accountants tracking the total cost of ownership, so they aren't going to optimize like this. HP is in both businesses; cheap inkjets for people that want to print stuff at home, cheap laptops for corporations that need to give their employees a Windows laptop with 25 minutes of battery life. I am sure the TCO on the cheap laptops actually saves customers money, at least when Windows is required.

(I have been issued an HP laptop before. They certainly don't spend money on the screen, keyboard, battery life, cooling, or industrial design. You can add your own memory though!)
by kragen | 2025-07-19 20:26:14+00:00
I didn't realize that the Secure Boot certificates that allow us to boot Linux at Microsoft's pleasure are things that expire. So all Microsoft has to do to kill end-user Linux is... nothing.

How the hell did we get ourselves into this situation? After Microsoft spent years secretly threatening people with lawsuits for running Samba and Linux VFAT, and describing open source as "cancer"?
by dzaima | 2025-07-19 20:26:15+00:00
Thanks for the link to the postgres discussion! An incident report would definitely be interesting.

I haven't reported the missing messages thing anywhere as I assumed that was just expected (IIRC (and this is a big IIRC) it was mentioned a long time ago (i.e. entirely unrelated to this) by TravisR on Discord bridge problems as a possible cause for missing messages).

Here is one event in an affected room, made by a t2bot.io account on July 6, to which t2bot.io accounts can reply to, but which gets an "Event not found." error when requested by me, @dzaima:matrix.org: (and for reference t2bot.io functioned properly on other rooms during that time, so overall t2bot.io↔matrix.org federation should've been fine; and for reference there's a third homeserver that federated with t2bot.io fine in that room just fine too; and to be clear the room works fine now)

https://matrix.org/_matrix/client/v3/rooms/!WpdazzauuDxyGNAiCr:matrix.org/context/$BM9s8e3vUhk_iHfdg7D_s7CsQ5COFSPdlJdygz7TKvU
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-19 20:26:51+00:00
As the person making the trade, you give something so that you can get something of greater value to you. The thing we’d be giving up is 2% of our economic output, and the thing we’d be getting is, I think, a massive improvement to people’s quality of life.

> But if it’s confirmed that basic income discourages work and provides little long-term career benefits, I think interest in the idea will wane rapidly.

It’s deeply unfortunate if it turns out true. I wish we could look past the things we value as proxies for the things that matter so that we could see that the things that matter could be improved here.
by ajuc | 2025-07-19 20:27:31+00:00
I never understood why the piano keyboard isn't regular. It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes.

Like why do I have to remember the shape for C major and D major chords? It should be the same shape just starting at C vs D.

It's not even that hard to fix. There's 12 semitones in an octave. Just make it 6 white 6 black keys.
by dvdkon | 2025-07-19 20:27:32+00:00
I'd take the middle road, provide a pad_left/pad_right function or method with keyword arguments for specifying things like the padding character. With how often I need to pad some string (often but not every day), this would be my favourite solution.

The standard library having no solution of its own is how you end up with JavaScript and every project reimplementing their 10% of a proper standard library, only slower and with more bugs.

Though I won't probably use Python's </>/^ format modifiers in my project, I could maybe see them working out in some software that frequently outputs "monospaced" text. In a particular niche, what we think of a needless character-pinching might be seen as a crucial feature and used daily.
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-07-19 20:28:19+00:00
That's pretty standard in American hotels these days though. You don't touch anything you don't intend to pay for. It's to prevent people from drinking the booze and refilling it with water.

There are always signs, but if you goof they'll always take the charge off, but you do have to be upfront about it and tell them before checking out, otherwise you'll be charged.
by moefh | 2025-07-19 20:28:23+00:00
I always thought the canonical way to place the black keys was to divide the octave in the two parts that have the sequential black keys (C-D-E and F-G-A-B), and then simply place the black keys so they're the same distance away from each other and the edge of the parts.

That means that the white keys in each of the groups have "mirrors": for example, C is a mirror of E, D is a mirror of itself (it's the only key like that), F is a mirror of B, and G is a mirror of A.

I just looked at the keyboards I have around me (a slightly-above-low-end digital piano, a small midi controller, and a small 90s synth), and they all seem to fit that description.

ETA: note that the image in the article doesn't fit this description: for example the D is way too narrow (the black keys around it should be much further apart).

ETA2: I just noticed that this seems to be the "B/12 solution" described in the article.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-19 20:28:36+00:00
Exactly. With the bakers we have competing interests of the guy who wants the Nazi cake and the baker who doesn't want to make one. Personally, I come down on the side of whether it requires any creative effort on the part of the baker. "Print this .jpeg on a cake"--content doesn't matter. "Draw me a Nazi flag on the cake"--content matters.

There's no human looking at each transaction, there's nobody to be bothered about the content of the game, and no justification for not processing offensive stuff.
by Fraterkes | 2025-07-19 20:29:15+00:00
I think there's a lot love for the borrowchecker because a lot of people in the Rust community are working on ecosystems (eg https://github.com/linebender) which means they are building up an api over many years. In that case having a very restrictive language is really great, because it kinda defines the shape the api can have at the language level, meaning that familiarity with Rust also means quick familiarity with your api. In that sense it doesn't matter if the restrictions are "arbitrary" or useful.

The other end of the spectrum is something like gamedev: you write code that pretty explicitly has an end-date, and the actual shape of the program can change drastically during development (because it's a creative thing) so you very much don't want to slowly build up rigidity over time.
by simonw | 2025-07-19 20:29:21+00:00
This is a sensible comparison.

My "help reboot society with the help of my little USB stick" thing was a throwaway remark to the journalist at a random point in the interview, I didn't anticipate them using it in the article! https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/17/1120391/how-to-r...

A bunch of people have pointed out that downloading Wikipedia itself onto a USB stick is sensible, and I agree with them.

Wikipedia dumps default to MySQL, so I'd prefer to convert that to SQLite and get SQLite FTS working.

1TB or more USB sticks are pretty available these days so it's not like there's a space shortage to worry about for that.
by omoikane | 2025-07-19 20:29:34+00:00
See also: https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython

The "interactive notebook" link goes to the colab page.

There are many earlier threads associated with the markdown version, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21862073 (2019-12-23, 185 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26097732 (2021-02-11, 163 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31566031 (2022-05-31, 143 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37281692 (2023-08-27, 82 comments)
by matheusmoreira | 2025-07-19 20:29:45+00:00
"Bolsonaro's base" is doing nothing of the sort. They think these sanctions are awesome. They are absolutely necessary in a judiciary dictatorship where protesters are sent to jail as political prisoners. If anything, they're not nearly enough.

Bolsonaro was the one who revived brazilian nationalism against all odds. Lula and his communists likened it to Nazi Germany and made it their explicit goal to destroy said nationalism. Now that the USA is sanctioning them, they're appealing to nationalism? They shit all over the military then call upon them when their "sovereignty" is threatened? That's hilarious, comical.

I for one would very much rather see this country burn than see it governed by the unelected courts. Maybe then a nation that's actually worthy of nationalism will rise from its ashes.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-07-19 20:30:07+00:00
I have been very pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of the USPS Informed Delivery [1] program which emails me pictures of the mail parcels arriving in the next day or two.

> Today, the USPS’s OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy, while machine-printed addresses bump its accuracy to 99.5 percent.

> [...] it first started using a handwriting recognition tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10-year modernization plan, which includes investments in technology, such as AI. However, the plan has faced criticism for raising the price of stamps and causing service disruptions in some areas.

$0.78 to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the USA seems so cheap that I don't think the "rising cost of stamps" could ever even cross my mind. I'm aware that it does matter to some people, though.

I will, however, be glad if it becomes too expensive for spam mailers.

[1] https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm
by bambax | 2025-07-19 20:30:47+00:00
It's endlessly surprising how people don't care / don't think about backups. And not just individuals! Large companies too.

I'm consulting for a company that makes around €1 billion annual turnover. They don't make their own backups. They rely on disk copies made by the datacenter operator, which happen randomly, and which they don't test themselves.

Recently a user error caused the production database to be destroyed. The most recent "backup" was four days old. Then we had to replay all transactions that happened during those four days. It's insane.

But the most insane part was, nobody was shocked or terrified about the incident. "Business as usual" it seems.
by Ozarkian | 2025-07-19 20:31:07+00:00
The Million Dollar Web Page is still up!

Back during the dotcom craze, you could buy a pixel for $1. It was a 1000x1000 image, so the value was a million dollars. Some teenager did it.

Amazingly, it's still up. Although all or nearly all the links are broker or point to somthing different than what was originally there...

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
by ben_w | 2025-07-19 20:31:10+00:00
> It could be just a personal mental weakness with numbers with me that is not general, but looking at my interlocutors emotional reactions to their own numerical predictions I do feel quite strongly that this is a general human trait.

Your feeling is correct; anchoring is a thing, and good LessWrongers (I hope to be in that category) know this and keep track of where their prior and not just posterior probabilities come from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

Probably don't in practice, but should. That "should" is what puts the "less" into "less wrong".
by upofadown | 2025-07-19 20:32:58+00:00
What is important here is that when confronted with customer interest in the open ODF standard, Microsoft created an entirely different "open" standard and then used their influence to push it. This is a routine technique used by dominant players in many technical industries. The trick is to not push your standard too hard, then you risk that it becomes an actual industry standard. You need to maintain a balance to maintain both standards, thus significantly reducing the power of both.

Perhaps Microsoft is at the point where it doesn't feel all that threatened by ODF and is reducing the value of their standard with complexity. Does Microsoft even bother to produce documents that conform to either standard any more?
by jancsika | 2025-07-19 20:33:35+00:00
> If someone else consistently gives higher probabilities to events that ended up happening than you did, then that's an indication that there's space for you to improve your prediction ability.

Your inference seems ripe for scams.

For example-- if I find out that a critical mass of participants aren't measuring how many participants are expected to outrank them by random chance, I can organize a simplistic service to charge losers for access to the ostensible "mentors."

I think this happened with the stock market-- you predict how many mutual fund managers would beat the market by random chance for a given period. Then you find that same (small) number of mutual fund managers who beat the market and switched to a more lucrative career of giving speeches about how to beat the market. :)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-19 20:33:48+00:00
When I've investigated why there's drama (though there isn't actually much for blindness, afaik: HN comments by sighted people are not primary sources), I've found that it's mainly concerns about the eradication of culture – which are understandable: the way the world's currently organised, all non-normative cultural expression is penalised.