MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tritondev | 2025-08-31 15:06:28+00:00
The concept that LLMs will need to have strong isolation and that this is done with the same sort of diligence normally applied to virtual machine design makes a ton of sense. It's exactly the same reason we enforce such behaviours in operating systems.

I took a first pass at enumerating some ideas a few weeks ago: https://davehudson.io/blog/2025-08-11

My thought was to try and define this in a slightly more concrete way by thinking about analogies between the way LLMs operate and more conventional OS processes/tasks.

Building some of the core abstractions isn't too hard - I already have one that unifies the chat and tool use interfaces for 8 different LLM backends. That lets tool approvals be managed in a centralized way. I've not yet implemented a capabilities model but it feels natural, and I worked with one back in the 90s (VSTa if anyone is interested in historical OSes). A key part will be to allow one LLM to delegate a subset of its current capabilities to another (I already built the delegation tooling)
by wackget | 2025-08-31 15:06:28+00:00
My dream is a user-friendly network-level firewall of some kind which can selectively block requests to domains on the entire network level. Something like uMatrix but for your entire network.

Imagine being able to block `ads.google.com` or whatever from all of your devices at once but without having to rely on local DNS. Or being able to block `pornhub.com` from just some of your devices but not all of them.

I assume the technology to do this is readily available in the form of parental control software or enterprise/office firewalls. However on the consumer level I don't know of anything which does this effectively.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-31 15:06:29+00:00
> Btrfs is NOT constantly eating people data. You have nothing to back this statement.

Constantly may be a strong word, but there is a long line of people sharing tales of woe. It's good that it works for you, but that's not a universal experience.

> It's widely used and the default filesystem of several distributions.

As a former user, that's horrifying.

> Most of the problems are like for the other filesystem: caused by the hardware.

The whole point of btrfs over (say) ext4 is that it's supposed to hold up when things don't work.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-31 15:07:04+00:00
Find a dumb phone that:

1. Presents a mobile hotspot, and 2. Supports CardDAV so I can actually sync my contacts 3. Records calls

There were none the last time I tried, about three years ago. And that even ignores the issue of trying to dial a number from a link on a web page or in a document.
by Almondsetat | 2025-08-31 15:08:08+00:00
The ratio between nerds and "normal" consumers is pretty high, and being a nerd does not automatically mean you care about having a "mobile unix workstation" (what unix-worthy work can you actually do on a phone?), and even if you have one it doesn't mean you'll actually find a use for it. It's safe to say that the market is irrelevant, and, unlike things like woodworking, boutique manyfacturers can't really exist in this space
by crazygringo | 2025-08-31 15:08:16+00:00
You don't need short expirations for that. CRLs/OCSP already provided a mechanism for certificates to be revoked before they expire.

However, short expirations severely limit the damage an attacker can do if they steal your private key.

And they avoid the situations where an organization simply forgets to renew a cert, because automating something so infrequent is genuinely difficult from an organizational standpoint. Employees leave, calendar reminders go missing, and yeah.
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 15:08:47+00:00
What BFS did is very cool, and I hope to add that to bcachefs someday.

But I'm talking more about the internals than external database functionality; the inner workings are much more fundamental.

bcachefs internally is structured more like a relational database than a traditional Unix filesystem, where everything hangs off the inode. In bcachefs, there's an extents btree (read: table), an inodes btree, a dirents btree, and a whole bunch of others - we're up to 20 (!).

There's transactions, where you can do arbitrary lookups, updates, and then commit, with all the database locking hidden from you; lookups within a transaction see uncommitted updates from that transaction. There's triggers, which are used heavily.

We don't have the full relational model - no SELECT or JOIN, no indices on arbitrary fields like with SQL (but you can do effectively the same thing with triggers, I do it all the time).

All the database/transactional primitives make the rest of the codebase much smaller and cleaner, and make feature development a lot easier than what you'd expect in other filesystems.
by soraminazuki | 2025-08-31 15:08:50+00:00
Oh, it'll happen. Whether the replacement will be any good is another matter entirely though. The likely outcome is that it'll resemble Google's "support." Mostly automated and good for nothing besides enraging already frustrated users. Wealthy investors and executives running the show just won't care.

Unless society puts preventative measures in place, people will lose jobs and consumers will get screwed. The increased exploitation will exacerbate the wealth gap, further intensify societal conflict, and lead to chaos. But don't worry, LLMs will flood the internet with narratives praising the state of affairs so that people can feel somewhat better about all of this.
by itsafarqueue | 2025-08-31 15:09:17+00:00
Don’t bother with this if you want to get promoted. Others have discussed this in thread and are right. If you build beautiful, simplified abstractions, your skill will be taken for granted as these interfaces appear obvious once discovered (by virtue of their proximity to truth, incredibly difficult to create, easy to verify). If you are in even a reasonably large org, go the other way. Be an Architecture astronaut. Build complex, clever stuff that is deliberately high cognitive load. Get your bus-factor as close to one as possible. Go the other way only if your comp is directly tied to company performance.
by rob_c | 2025-08-31 15:10:16+00:00
>users are using it explicitly because they have lost a lot of data on btrfs

PLEASE, honestly, EDUCATE THESE USERS. This is still marked experimental for numerous reasons regardless of the 'planned work for 6.18'. Users who can't suffer any data loss and are repeating their mistake of using btrfs shouldn't be using a none default/standard/hardened filesystem period.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-31 15:10:19+00:00
I wish the nu-shell stuff was set up so that its language could be used as a Rust crate independentl of the shell? Like in your own runtime? Because it's not a bad general scripting language and kind of makes sense to me to embed in things like editors etc. Places where people would use Tcl (e.g. hw eng / fpga tools etc) or a Lisp (emacs) or an embedded Python/Lua now.

But when I looked at their crate structure it did not seem like this was possible. I don't love nushell the language but it actually fits a niche that not much else fits.
by dahart | 2025-08-31 15:10:36+00:00
The only place I’ve seen technical debt and organic complexity come from in real life is from over-engineering (Einsteins over-engineer the code, and Elvises bring in too many dependencies) and, more importantly, from changing requirements (customers & PMs & management). The changing requirements is the bigger culprit most of the time, and that doesn’t reflect directly on programmers or programmer personalities. I’ve never seen efficiency arguments make the code unwieldy. If anything, the problem is that real life Morts sometimes under-engineer, and it takes some of the other types to build up a bit. I’ve seen over-engineering far more often than under-engineering. Anyway, Mort only means short-term efficiency if you make assumptions. It didn’t in the top comment, and it doesn’t have to, you can just as easily assume efficiency is long term and includes efficiency of maintainable code and efficiency of business processes. If you care about the business outcome, why would you jump to the conclusion that it’s short term thinking?
by nullc | 2025-08-31 15:11:27+00:00
> Object level considerations do matter.

They do. And Kent expressed them and the linux kernel maintainers are amply qualified to hear out and make a call. I don't see a reason to think they were indifferent to the facts, they just weren't convinced by them. If they were they could have just said, "okay we think that this does qualify as a bugfix".

My understanding is the change in dispute wasn't over fixing the corruption introducing bug, but rather adding automated repair for cases where the corruption had already happened. I could easy see taking a position of "sad for people who are already corrupt, they can get their work around out of tree for now" (or heck, even forever depending on the scale of the impact).

Anyone who has been around for a while has seen their share of 'ate the horse to catch the spider to catch the fly to...' dance, of course the patch author is convinced that their repair is correct. They're almost always convinced of that or they don't submit it, so that carries little information. Because of this there is a strong preference for obviously minimal code in any kind of fix. Minimizing user suffering is important, but we also know every line of code comes with risk. The fact that the risk is not measurable on a case by case basis doesn't make it any less real.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-31 15:11:48+00:00
Not an expert by any stretch of imagination. But it seems to be that not only is there almost no selection pressure on increasing lifespan, bc of medical advances in healthcare there's also less evolutionary pressure on reducing diseases and infertility (i guess there should still be substantial health related evolutionary pressure from sexual selection) in modern society. Why shouldn't we expect long term deterioration of fitness of genome similar to the deer in Yellowstone before reintroduction of wolves?
Show HN: Berlin Swapfest #3 – 30 years of C-base edition
by mirshko | 2025-08-31 15:12:42+00:00
Our 3rd swapfest on board of c-base will be part of the 30 years of c-base celebrations. Berlin Swapfest is inspired by the MIT Swapfest, now celebrating their 40th anniversary.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-31 15:13:30+00:00
>YouTube could pretty much have one dedicated account manager for someone with the subscriber count of Beato who would work as a first-line of defense against frivolous/bogus copyright claims.

Are there any Youtube alternatives which actually do this, though?

I don't think it actually makes a difference whether Youtube hires the lawyer, or whether Beato hires the lawyer. It comes out of Youtube ad revenues either way. It's better for Beato to be the one to choose who he wants to represent him.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-31 15:15:01+00:00
I don’t really care to do any task traditionally associated with full fat computers directly on my phone, simply because the input methods are extremely poor for that kind of thing. If my phone could act like an ultrabook/netbook when hooked up to a screen and proper desktop input on the other hand (similar to DeX, iPadOS 26, and the forthcoming baseline Android desktop mode), that’s a more interesting proposition and probably one that a number of more typical users would find interesting too.

For example, university students whose main use for a computer is editing documents could comfortably get by with nothing but a nice-ish phone, a monitor, and a Bluetooth KB+mouse.
by genezeta | 2025-08-31 15:15:40+00:00
No, I didn't say that.

The README should have one -two, at most- simple but representative and complete example. An example that shows actual usage of something simple enough to be small. See the examples I suggested above. As a companion to that, you can put that same code in JSFiddle and link to it in the README, but keep both the code and link in the README.

As for the documentation, what I said is that the code shown should always be good code, code where names make sense. You may or may not make the effort of putting full JSFiddle examples into your documentation, but the code that you put in the docs should use meaningful names.
by omnimus | 2025-08-31 15:16:33+00:00
I am not 100% sure but my partner has the nokia “bannana” phone and i think it supports both. It for sure supports 4g hotspot and caldav but i think even carddav.

Kinda sad that it's KaiOS the FirefoxOS fork. One can only wonder what would have happened if Mozilla kept with the project till now. There is huge wave of people wanting less absorbing devices nowdays.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-31 15:17:08+00:00
I dislike Feynman, frankly. So many of his weird hand-wavy metaphorical descriptions of shit obscure more than clarify the really important elements of the physics.

To name an example: Feynman is the source of the popular idea that in special relativity we can think of a particle as having a constant 4-vector with length c and that movement changes the direction of the four vector into the spatial directions, thus "slowing" the speed through time.

This is a very strange way of thinking about this stuff because the entire point of special relativity is that there is no objective state of affairs about velocity at all. It's meaningless to talk about the velocity of a single particle because velocity is a relative quantity. Also, I'm just generally suspicious of all this "hyperbolic rotation" stuff. I mean its true as far as the mathematical structure is concerned, but most of the time metaphors which try to get us to think of a minkowski space as being a lot like a normal 4d euclidean space confuse us or at least hide the real interesting structure, which is that in a minkowski space much of the 4d structure implied by a set of events is redundant. That is, spacetime is less than space and time together, not more.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-31 15:17:52+00:00
For an archeologist that travelled the entire galaxy and prided himself on using dozens of languages, this post has a few too many typos and errors, and is at times hard to parse...

That being said, it's interesting to see professors jump on the opportunity to use LLMs and LLM assisted coding to teach! That's a breath of fresh air. In the past two years all we've heard is how screwed everyone is, how students use LLMs to cheat and so on. To see this used in classrooms is great! Kudos to the professor.

On the concept itself, I'm not convinced if it'll get enough traction. It's an interesting way of looking at the problem, but there are two things going against it - the plethora of training data in "the classical way" of software design, and ever increasing capabilities in both context usage and agentic e2e task completion.

It does, however, bring up an interesting point. With more and more LLM assisted code generation, we might see a resurgence of micro/mini services. As long as the problem you're solving for can be solved by a series of microservices, the LLMs might just be the perfect thing to build them and, importantly, maintain them. You could choose the best language for the job, the spread of responsibilities is manageable, and the scope of work should fit into the current capabilities quite nicely.
by dmm | 2025-08-31 15:17:58+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I just setup a fs benchmark system and I'll run your fio command so we can compare results. I have a question about your fio args though. I think "--ioengine=sync" and "--iodepth=16" are incompatible, in the sense that iodepth will only be 1.

"Note that increasing iodepth beyond 1 will not affect synchronous ioengines"[1]

Is there a reason you used that ioengine as opposed to, for example, "libaio" with a "--direct=1" flag?

[1] https://fio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fio_doc.html#cmdoption-...
by FromTheFirstIn | 2025-08-31 15:18:14+00:00
Blame is purely social and purely human. “Blaming” a tool or process and root causing are functionally identical. Misattributing an outage to a single failure is certainly one way to fail to fix a process. Failing to identify faulty tools/ faulty applications is another way.

I was being flippant to say it’s never AI’s fault, but due to board/C-Suite pressure it’s harder than ever to point out the ways that AI makes processes more complex, harder to reason about, stochastic, and expensive. So we end up with problems that have to be attributed to something not AI.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-31 15:18:40+00:00
I'm not sure which two large corporations you are referring to, but I'll take a guess.

My Samsung phone is not linked to my Google account and I don't have a Samsung account. I have no WhatsApp/Facebook/Meta account. I don't use Apple devices or have an Apple account.

Possibly the only apps on my phone that have an account linked with them are Telegram and AnkiDroid.
by mirashii | 2025-08-31 15:18:42+00:00
Your comment is copy pasted from the same comment you’ve posted at least 2 other times in the last 24 hours. Thats very much cookie cutter. It’s also not all that relevant to the parent comment, it’s just trying to turn things into a flame war. The comment only expressed that golang’s simplicity has prevented some of the issues they perceive in V, and you’re trying to turn it into some Go vs V and dredging up a bunch of unrelated criticisms of go.

Not every thread needs to be this us vs them mentality with other languages that you bring to the thread.
by noportro | 2025-08-31 15:19:51+00:00
> code with a high cognitive load keeps mediocre developers away.

That's true and it's a positive thing but the downstream consequences are often painful. We had a c/c++ project with complex memory management and heavy multithreadding, written that way because the superstar developer could handle the cognitive load and found the assignment intellectually challenging. That was great until they left for the next job.

We were left fighting a codebase with a big cognitive load, so we were desperately dependent on hiring more superstars just for routine maintenance. We eventually concluded that this wasn't a sustainable model and rewrote the system in plain old python. Much happier now.
by hyperpape | 2025-08-31 15:20:00+00:00
Mick Jagger had his most recent son at the age of 73. Today, that's an anomaly, but historically, older men fathering children was not at all uncommon (73 would probably be an outlier, but successful men were fathering children well past the age when women can no longer bear children). That would exert significant evolutionary pressure for men to have longer lifespans.
by rafram | 2025-08-31 15:20:22+00:00
That’s a silly response. I don’t think Rossmann is really a force for good. He kvetches about New York incessantly for years, moves to Austin with much fanfare about how much better and more free Texas is, now kvetches incessantly about Austin. When manufacturers don’t open their devices enough, he complains; when they do, he complains. No matter the subject, he is impossible to please.
by notrealyme123 | 2025-08-31 15:20:32+00:00
7 years lifetime is nothing. All iPhones have to rotate in that timeframe. That's incredible amounts of waste.

Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.
by pharrington | 2025-08-31 15:21:11+00:00
This doesn't stop with handheld computers. If Google will be able to get away with it on phones (which is FAR from guaranteed atm), they will do it on Chromebooks. Microsoft will do it on Windows. Apple will do it on Macs. Then the hardware manufacturers will only allow "trusted" developers via TPM.

Full ownership of all our computers must be norm again. It's fine if tech companies want to charge extra to sell walled gardens and market it as extra security. But they must sell computers and software that the buyer actually owns.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-31 15:21:45+00:00
Yes, free university and free healthcare are infrastructure. We already have free highschools after all. What's the moral difference between the government building a road that I get to drive on "for free" and building a hospital I get to go to "for free"?

> It's not controversial that the vast majority of people just want to be provided a comfortable lot in life by others.

It's not controversial in the same way that saying the earth is flat isn't controversial, it's just wrong.

Society "moves forward" because every day that passes there are literally billions of humans working to build/harvest/grow/research/construct/etc different things.

Nobody actually believes e.g. elon musk is out there putting rocketships together, right?

President kennedy said "lets go to the moon" then he went back to the white house to attend state dinners and sleep with whoever came near. Ten thousand nasa employees went to work every day and actually built rocketships.

(The generic argument here is something like "well elon musk gave them money to build rocketships" except then you have to ask where musk got the money to give to other people in the first place and the argument rapidly breaks down)
by mrastro | 2025-08-31 15:22:03+00:00
The inequality on dating apps is very high. Their Gini coefficients vary from 0.4 to 0.6 on most popular dating apps. Even if 100% of people were using dating apps, only the top percentiles of men would be satisfied because they can get way more short-term partners than they could without the apps.

To the extent hookups lead to relationships, it's coming from people that are willing to settle
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-31 15:22:07+00:00
It’s so strange that out of the box CalDAV and CardDAV support is rare for mobile devices. iPhones are the best somehow, with Android being heavily Google-focused and support is totally absent on non-smart platforms, which is the perfect opposite of what one might expect! It’d make way more sense if the more open platforms were built around open standards, but somehow here we are.
by immibis | 2025-08-31 15:22:16+00:00
It's a common mistake of programmers to treat business as something long-term. Saying "don't do XYZ because it'll stop working in a year once they catch on and block you. Business leaders are stupid for doing XYZ." Yeah, so that means you still made a profit for a year, and business leaders are not stupid for doing it. A year later, there could be a different thing that will work for another year. Changing what you do every year or even more often is just normal business. You don't have to find one thing that works indefinitely.

Maybe social media is like business.
by dataflow | 2025-08-31 15:22:44+00:00
It's because you're not solely managing the refcount here. Other memory locations have a dependence on the refcount, given that you're also deleting the object after the refcount reaches zero. That means you need all writes to have completed at that point, and all reads to observe that. Otherwise you might destroy an object while it's in an invalid state, or you might release the memory while another thread is accessing it.
by PandaRider | 2025-08-31 15:22:58+00:00
This is correct. To delve into a topic about cognitive load without talking about germane overhead disqualifies this article (i.e. similar to extraneous overhead in terms of effort but germane overhead is beneficial. Because it helps the coder's reading ability.)

The examples are good but every reader must not have the takeaway that every effortful code is bad (e.g. haskell is extremely hard to read at first but every developer swears it has very high intrinsic cognitive load)
by MereInterest | 2025-08-31 15:23:41+00:00
You are correct that no such permission is required to use, lend, or resell a book. It would be unethical for a seller to impose a requirement for such permission. By the poster’s analogy, it is similarly unethical to impose a requirement for permission prior to the owner’s use, lend, or resale of a computer. Since Google sells computers that cannot later be used without Google’s permission, Google is imposing such an unethical requirement.