MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-06 22:54:15+00:00
I’m okay with small dairies being pushed to close though. Their worker wages are lower (as the article mentions), and we shouldn’t be keeping them around for nostalgia. Humans don’t require bovine milk, it is not a necessity nutritionally. For small operators, this is a hobby, not a stable business with any sort of future longevity. If your identity is wrapped up being a small farmer, that’s unfortunate. Change is constant.

> The data flips the conventional assumption on its head. Large farms that employ the most immigrant workers are actually paying higher cash wages, not lower ones. Recent analysis shows median wages for dairy workers increased 33.7% between 2019 and 2022, far outpacing the national median wage increase of 7.4%. These wage increases are happening primarily on the large-scale operations that dominate milk production.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-06 22:54:38+00:00
1 extra (literally) odd bit would require a lot of changes...

What if instead of using single bytes, we used "doublebytes"?

8-bit software continues to work, while new 16-bit "doublebyte" software gets 256x the value capacity, instead of a meager 2x.

Nobody will ever need more byte space than that!

Without requiring any changes to CPU/GPU, RAM, SSD, Ethernet, WiFi ...

Magic. :)
by TuringNYC | 2025-08-06 22:54:53+00:00
I was always curious about this. In some of the star wars movies, you dont see any spin, yet they are not floating around (e.g., notice how Orson Krennic has a backdrop of a planet, isnt floating, yet the planet isnt spinning https://allfortheboys.com/ben-mendelsohn/)

I know Interstellar did not ignore the spin, but do movies like Star Wars just ignore the entire concept?
by tptacek | 2025-08-06 22:55:37+00:00
You didn't answer my question, you defined it away. Obviously, the premise of investors driving housing costs up is that they're artificially reducing supply. Allowing new housing construction increases supply. The question: assume steadily increasing supply --- how are investors making money on this scheme?

It's fine if you just don't have an answer. But then my point is: nobody seems to have an answer about how this is supposed to work.
by tahaygun | 2025-08-06 22:55:46+00:00
I was speaking English, and the doctor refused to communicate with me, saying, "This is Germany and you should speak German." He then injected me with anesthesia. When I woke up, I was deeply upset and shaken by the experience.

Afterward, I tried to leave a review detailing what happened and called the treatment(not him/her) racist. The doctor rejected my review and responded by claiming, "I have people of color employees in my practice and love speaking English."

My lawyer advised me against pursuing legal action. He said it would be a long, drawn-out process that I might not win in the end. Even now, thinking about it makes me furious.
by observationist | 2025-08-06 22:55:55+00:00
I agree, and now that we have an existence proof for the exact way things have gone wrong, we can see that these companies are exploiting numbers of customers and consumers far greater than they can responsibly handle. We need to legislate what responsible means, in this context, and apply reasonable boundaries and limits on scale. A single company that leaks nearly every person's private information online should be held to account for irresponsible practices, having damaged the entire world, but despite this happening multiple times, they hardly even get a slap on the wrist.

The status quo is untenable. We need better regulations that accommodate reality, and leave regulators no choice but to hold companies and people to account for the harms they do.
by bboygravity | 2025-08-06 22:56:05+00:00
Human blood can turn blue when consuming enough (collodial) silver?

Like when rich people consumed food and beverages from pure silver plates (100's of years ago) their blood supposedly turned purple/blueish. Hence the term (at least in Dutch) that "he is of blue blood" = he rich af.

Or that's all a myth. Not sure.
by LarMachinarum | 2025-08-06 22:56:28+00:00
while none of the arguments of the article came even close to being convincing or to balancing out the disadvantages of a non-power-of-two orientation, there actually is one totally different argument/domain where the 9 bit per byte thing would hold true, that is: ECC bits in consumer devices (as opposed to just on servers):

The fact that Intel managed to push their shitty market segmentation strategy of only even supporting ECC RAM on servers has rather nefarious and long-lasting consequences.
by godelski | 2025-08-06 22:57:05+00:00
I can confirm this. I recently graduated (PhD) and was constantly submitting fixes for my department's servers. I'm not even a networking person or anything... I do ML.

And by fixes, I mean supplying the code and everything. One example is that the listing of classes generated a link as long as there was a folder on the server. Which the folders are automatically generated via the course offering of that term. This led to lots of links to nowhere when students were trying to see the course material and syllabus from previous offerings (so it was something people did quite a bit. Click, 404, back, click next, 404, repeat...). So the for my submit I found the file providing all the links, and the few lines around there. Provided a few alternatives such as "don't provide link unless there's an index.html inside" or "don't provide link if folder is empty". I even generated the one line `find` command that could go through and purge all empty directories that were older than 6mo (or any desired time). (That would clean up for anyone looking via the cli, which was more common than you'd expect) All the work was done, just someone with permissions needed to run.

There were tons of small fixes (as well as some much bigger ones...) like this that I and others submitted. Very few ever were done. Maybe the IT guy's hands were tied but every time I walked past his office he was sitting on his couch watching Netflix on his iPad[0]. I saw 3 different IT employees in my time and none of them took action on any of those types of issues.

I think the small things just get brushed off. Thinking "oh, well it's frustrating, but only happens a few times a year and doesn't cause much harm." Which, is true. But also, isn't the beauty of scaling in CS that even though 15 minutes of my work only saves a person 5 minutes (3 times a year, every year) that I'm saving that 5 minutes for hundreds or thousands of people? Saving 30 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but saving saving 100 people 30 seconds is saving an hour. If they have to do that once a day then you're saving a full work day every week. That's only 100 people too...

But I learned an important lesson: the little things matter.

[0] Not to bash him too much. When shit went down he usually responded pretty quickly. And grad students work some weird hours...
by kyralis | 2025-08-06 22:57:18+00:00
Living in a rural area is not actually either cheap or easy. You need the skills to either profit off the land, which is not a trivial thing, or you to have a job that will allow you to afford to commute.

What incentives are you imagining, relative to reducing the housing cost burden in areas that already have many of those incentives (for instance, access to easy irregular work or income sources)?
by rmonvfer | 2025-08-06 22:57:45+00:00
This, I’ve already said it in another reply but FastAPI is 10x harder to use because of this. I’ve had to read FastAPI code many times to literally reverse engineer features because they are not documented in any way.

Documentation is for reference, tutorials are for learning, I just don’t even understand how maintainers don’t go crazy with the absolute lack of references…

And SQL Model is even worse in that regard.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-06 22:59:12+00:00
Workers in every other industry don't get to use this. It would be utterly unacceptable if the local Subway forced you to go through ChatGPT to order your sandwich. The same goes for the federal government. My tax dollars aren't going to put up with an "agentic" FOIA request, god forbid the military brass or the federal reserve gets the bright idea of pawning off their duties to a stochastic parrot.

The private industry makes even more of these boneheaded administrative mistakes when given the opportunity. If you tried adopting the same work-from-home policy of the private sector over the past 5 years, you'd be changing your stance every other week. This is why we need consummate professionals in the government and not "disruptors" who can't teach a 101 class on their favorite subject.

> At the moment, the IRS.gov login page literally doesn't work [1],

Funny you mention that. Who accidentally fired all of the federal employees responsible for that website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F
by celeritascelery | 2025-08-06 22:59:44+00:00
If ID is required, then your whole “Illegals must be tipping elections" argument just goes away. People keep making this debate in the US of “we need ID to prevent election fraud” vs “we can’t have ID required because ID can be hard to obtain”. It’s just silly. If you take a step back and make it easier to get an ID than the whole things resolves itself. The pro-ID people are happy Because only registered voters can vote and the non-ID people are happy because voting is accessible. The real question is, why are they not doing that? Every other country can do it, why not the US? Why do we have to be stuck in this silly debate forever?

And I don’t believe the whole “the mean republicans won’t let us!” narrative. Democrats controlled the executive branch 12 of the last 16 years and control half the states. If they care about voters rights, why haven’t we tried to fix this?
by sky2224 | 2025-08-06 23:00:27+00:00
If he's deciding to go elsewhere due to the current market, I think that's fair. However, probably his biggest talking point in the whole post is about how no one wants to craft artisan code anymore and how that's due to AI taking over and taking jobs. That's where I'm saying that the jump in conclusion is quite drastic given the absence of hard evidence of AI taking jobs being true (yet).
by gnabgib | 2025-08-06 23:02:04+00:00
Discussion (106 points, 1 day ago, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799468

Or (69 points, 19 hours ago, 26 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807419

Or (29 points, 1 day ago, 4 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796597
by Taniwha | 2025-08-06 23:02:06+00:00
Not really - I worked on a DSP with 9-bit bytes in the 90's (largely because it was focused on MPEG decode for DVDs, new at the time) largely because memory was still very expensive and MPEG2 needed 9-bit frame difference calculations (most people do this as 16-bits these days but back then as I said memory was expensive and you could buy 9-bit parity RAM chips)

It had 512 72-bit registers and was very SIMD/VLIW, was probably the only machine ever with 81-bit instructions
by tamimio | 2025-08-06 23:02:25+00:00
People should abolish banks; they contribute nothing good to society and are a literal Ponzi scheme, creating credit that has inflated the prices of everything, including the housing market. It's crazy how banks are taken for granted too. When was the last time you were offered to get paid in cash as an option as an employee (not some local gig you do)? Why do only two private companies (Visa/MasterCard) control payments online and offline, mostly worldwide too?
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-06 23:02:35+00:00
I'm not convinced that's true in practice. I would like to have an IPv6 network that I can connect Android devices to and on which I can connect to the devices by their host name. Android refuses to support DHCPv6, telling the local DNS server about SLAAC addresses involves awful and unreliable hacks, mDNS requires extra daemons and resolver configuration. I looked at just copying my v4 stack to v6; it doesn't appear possible.
by DannyBee | 2025-08-06 23:02:42+00:00
I think this is a cool video.

Sparse and demand-driven dataflow approaches (SSA et al) won out in compilers, in large part because they don't suffer a bound that is related to boolean matrix multiplication of number of points * number of variables. Also, because problems are often easier to reason about when done sparsely or in a demand driven fashion.

While that did not lead to completely demand driven approaches (in most compilers), it led to significant improvements in speed and ability to write compilers.

While some things still remained fairly non-sparse (pointer analysis, et al), for decades, even that has changed now, and demand driven approaches are significantly more common in all aspects of compilers.

So it is not entirely shocking that doing the same for higher order control flow might be a better approach these days :)
by takigon | 2025-08-06 23:03:59+00:00
Thanks for the feedback!

> That said, I do understand (and share) a lot of the frustration and hesitancy that people here have around AI tools

I share some of the same feelings as well. As for use cases where it can provide value, I think it can be of value if you want to read difficult academic, technical or business books with deep understanding. I think so.

> Right now it seems there are still a lot of manual steps and scaffolding.

I think you are right. I originally planned to use it as a tool for my own exclusive use, so I was able to build an environment with minimal implementation costs, but I didn't expect to get so many comments. I will improve it!
by al_borland | 2025-08-06 23:04:01+00:00
I'm not anti-capitalism. I'm against sacrificing the long-term health of a service by trying to pump it for cash in the short-term. I like slower sustainable growth that stays true to the core service, rather than business models that are at odds with the core service being provided. It's this incongruity which puts companies at odds with its users and often leads to their demise... which isn't good from a capitalism point of view. Digg 4 did that, which led to the rise of Reddit in the first place. Now Reddit is making the same mistakes. Everyone is in such a hurry to be a unicorn that no one seems to run a boring sustainable business anymore. We need more boring businesses. It provides the stability this industry often lacks.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-06 23:04:21+00:00
It just isn't feasible.

* No one wants to live next to low barrier housing (for drug addicts, that don't require drug treatment or other social programs), not just the most generous people who like you think these people should be helped, but even other homeless people! They will try their luck outside because you just put them in with a drug addict crazier than they are.

* If your city starts handing out free housing to all of its homeless, it will just attract more people in need of that housing, to the point that you started out with 50K on the street, housed 50K, and now you have 100K on the street! This is a problem with local solutions at least: the better you treat the problem, the worse the problem will get. Local resources quickly get exhausted with no visible progress made (and worse: things are worse than when you started!), even if you are technically making the country a better place.

SROs and rooming houses of the past...still had standards, they would kick out people who were causing problems. The only reason it seemed better is that enough people were afraid of losing the little housing they had to keep their problems/addictions in check enough to keep it. It was just crappy enough that no one wanted to be there who could do better, having a bunch of SROs didn't necessarily make your city a destination.
by xdennis | 2025-08-06 23:04:23+00:00
This is what happens when you write articles with AI (the article specifically mentions ChatGPT).

The article says:

> A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10

This is false. If you ask ChatGPT "Was the PDP-10 a 9 bit computer?" it says "Yes, the PDP-10 used a 36-bit word size, and it treated characters as 9-bit bytes."

But if you ask any other LLM or look it up on Wikipedia, you see that:

> Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the byte instructions, which operate on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

So PDP-10 didn't have 9-bit bytes, but could support them. Characters were typically 6 bytes, but 7-bit and 9-bit characters were also sometimes used.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-06 23:04:50+00:00
It's an interesting observation that 2^16 = 65K is a number that isn't quite big enough for things it's mostly big enough for, like characters.

And that 2^32 = 4B is similarly awkwardly not quite big enough for global things related to numbers of people, or for second-based timestamps.

But a 9th bit isn't going to solve those things either. The real problem is that powers-of-two-of-powers-of-two, where we jump from 256 to 65K to 4B to 18QN (quintillion), are just not fine-grained enough for efficient usage of space.

It might be nice if we could also have 2^12=4K, 2^24=16M, and 2^48=281T as more supported integer bit lengths used for storage both in memory and on disk. But, is it really worth the effort? Maybe in databases? Obviously 16M colors has a long history, but that's another example where color banding in gradients makes it clear where that hasn't been quite enough either.
by kunzhi | 2025-08-06 23:05:03+00:00
That's...wow. What an absolutely disappointing reply.

If "be kind" is an actual value of HN I have yet to see it in almost 15 years of being active on this forum. This community is generally speaking not kind and fulminating is de rigeur as far as I've been able to surmise.

But whatever. I won't bother you or anyone else on here anymore. Good riddance.
by jojomodding | 2025-08-06 23:05:24+00:00
The ad-hominem was maybe unwarranted, sorry. Let's get back to the subject matter by me repeating the material question in my comment above, which you ignored: "Complexity theorists routinely find out if two complexity classes are included in each other or not. Why would Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem stop them for P=NP in particular?"

PS: I read through the transcript of the YouTube video you linked (and also know the material from my CS degree education) so I do in fact know what Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem is. Note that the video is really not about P=NP at all, not any more than it is about 1+1=2. The use of P=NP in the video was just to give an example of "what is a statement."
by jdubs1984 | 2025-08-06 23:06:12+00:00
> Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request.

Bob’s manager is lazy and or an idiot.

Probably both.
by saulpw | 2025-08-06 23:06:40+00:00
It seems that every version of MS-DOS from v2.0 onward was actually developed by Compaq. I had no idea.

> That relationship had been established in late 1982. Back then, Gates had contacted Canion and asked, with some concern, if Compaq was trying to get into the operating system business. Surprised, Canion denied it. Gates told him that Microsoft was hearing worrying reports from the dealer network. People were buying copies of Compaq DOS, rather than Microsoft DOS, without buying a Compaq PC.

> Both men knew why: Microsoft DOS had never been a true copy of PC DOS, as Gates had admitted to Canion during the development of Compaq’s first machine. The differences had only increased over time, as Microsoft’s deal with IBM prohibited the same developers working on both versions. Compaq had made its own version of DOS since the beginning. With its singular focus on 100 percent compatibility, the result was a product that was more compatible with PC DOS than Microsoft’s own product.

> Word was spreading among computer buyers that Compaq DOS was better. Even people who owned other PC clones were choosing to buy that instead of Microsoft’s own public version. This could have created friction between Compaq and Microsoft. Instead, Canion did something extraordinary. Compaq withdrew Compaq DOS from sale unless it was specifically bundled with a Compaq computer. He then licensed Compaq DOS back to Microsoft.

> From Gates’s perspective, this was an incredible deal. He was able to halt all internal development on Microsoft DOS, saving time and money. From this point onward, every version of Microsoft DOS he sold was, in fact, Compaq DOS, with the digital equivalent of its serial numbers filed off. All Canion asked in return was that Microsoft never release the very latest version of DOS that Compaq provided it until after a few months’ delay. This was to make sure that Compaq always had a slight advantage in compatibility over its rivals.

> Canion even agreed to Gates’s request that they keep the entire arrangement secret, to avoid souring Microsoft’s relationships with the other clone companies. It would remain secret for almost 40 years.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-08-06 23:07:21+00:00
I remember reading the quotes asking one of the founders why they left Texas Instruments and his reply was "the prospect of vast personal wealth".

My understanding is that they had pitched the IBM PC compatible machine to TI and had been rebuffed - TI had its own mostly compatible PC offering and the no one in charge was willing to admit it was a mistake.
by 0xCMP | 2025-08-06 23:08:38+00:00
The encrypted volume has an encrypted copy of the `~/.identity` file in it's metadata fields.

The same key which encrypts the volume decrypts the metadata, but they use different IVs.

You could assume that most systems the key would be secured with the TPM so this won't be much of a big deal to the user, but otherwise when they try to login it would prompt for this password first.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-06 23:09:08+00:00
metadata.301party.com: 169.254.169.254 ipv6.metadata.301party.com: [::169.254.169.254]

Why not just one name with both A and AAAA records? ...er, and why not fd00:ec2::254? (I now suspect that there's a subjoke here that I'm missing)
by kube-system | 2025-08-06 23:09:15+00:00
Not all implementations of LLMs are "just type questions into chatgpt.com or ollama and trust the raw result", even though that is probably what people are most familiar with right now.

They can be used pretty safely when incorporated into other systems that have guardrails on them. Not simply a dumb wrapper, but inside of systems that simply use LLMs as processing tools.

For example, one extremely safe use case is using LLMs as a search tool. Ask it to cite its sources, then string match those sources back against the source texts. You are guaranteed that the sources actually exist, because you validated it.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-06 23:10:12+00:00
This works to a point. It would work well on a curated ecosystem. You could get to the point where one package with one version has everything you need. They are called SDKs.

However for NPM you will hit issues where 2 packages need a different React version and if you want to use them both you need to pick. In addition it is better for security. The lock file is a distributed checksum. Not impervious to supply chain attacks but better equipped than trusting the package author not to retrospectively bump (I guess you could have a hash for this tbat included the downloaded source code and claimed deps).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-08-06 23:10:13+00:00
ASLR has downsides as well. The address sanitizers have a shadow memory overhead that depends on the entropy in the pointer. If you have too much entropy, it becomes impossible for the runtime linker to map things correctly. Generally they'll just disable ASLR when they start, but it's one of the problems you'd have to solve to use them in production like ubsan even though that'd be extremely useful.