MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdip | 2025-08-18 14:21:34+00:00
Oh man, you're bringing back memories.

I know I went with SCSI, originally, because I had actually purchased two drives -- the huge one, and another one that was a bit faster but smaller and something had led me to believe that SCSI lent itself better to that configuration. I can't remember, specifically, what though.

I recall with CD-ROM drives -- earlier ones -- it was similar. Actually, in a few ways it was worse because the earliest CD-ROM drives came as SCSI or "Parallel Port to SCSI" which I'm not sure anyone ever got to work completely right.

But ... and I could just Google it but I'm being lazy ... I recall it had something to do with Bus Disconnection and Native Command Queuing in SCSI that allowed the CD-ROM drive and the HDD to operate without waiting on one another (as much?).

I know SCSI drives basically disappeared once IDE drives became common. You didn't see SCSI controllers often outside of servers, ever, in the PC world except for a brief period when that was the most common CD-ROM drive.
by candiddevmike | 2025-08-18 14:21:43+00:00
Not really, AIUI pottering just thought launchd's socket activation/inetd like functionality was neat: https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html. Upstart is more of a direct ancestor:

> Why didn't you just add this to Upstart, why did you invent something new?

> Well, the point of the part about Upstart above was to show that the core design of Upstart is flawed, in our opinion. Starting completely from scratch suggests itself if the existing solution appears flawed in its core. However, note that we took a lot of inspiration from Upstart's code-base otherwise.

> If you love Apple launchd so much, why not adopt that?

> launchd is a great invention, but I am not convinced that it would fit well into Linux, nor that it is suitable for a system like Linux with its immense scalability and flexibility to numerous purposes and uses.

launchd is horrible though, the folks complaining about systemd would be up in arms if they had to write poorly typed XML key/value files
by kemayo | 2025-08-18 14:21:49+00:00
> AI unlocks what seems to be the future: dynamic, context-dependent generative UIs or something similar. Why couldn’t my watch and glasses be everything I need?

Voice input isn't suitable for many cases, and physical input seems generally superior to AR -- I've used a Vision Pro, and it's very impressive, but it's nowhere near the input-performance of a touchscreen or a mouse and keyboard. (To its credit: it's not aiming for that.)

Unless the argument is that you will never have to be precise, or do something that you don't want everyone within earshot to know about?

Also, a "dynamic, context-dependent generative UI" sounds like another way to describe a UI that changes every time you use it depending on subtle qualities of exactly how you reached it this time, preventing you from ever building up any kind of muscle-memory around using it.
by ngcc_hk | 2025-08-18 14:22:12+00:00
The title is v general. There are at least two kind of modifications - one to minimize the change but just change behaviour and the other is really change the program.

I work for a decade as mainframe technical support mostly install fix. And because of these lately when I spent 3 months as a hobby to change the turbo bridge to take external bridge card. I injected code or hacking of the code like jes2 exit and without touching much the host program modify the host program behaviour.

This is very different from my colleagues who are application programmer who can totally change a cics module involving even changing db2 schema.

What is a modification meant in this title … I wonder.
by malshe | 2025-08-18 14:22:22+00:00
> Regardless of what the final form factor ends up being, there’s no doubt spending our lives hunched over staring at a piece of glass in our hand is suboptimal.

As opposed to what exactly? If the author really believes that a watch and glasses are preferred over a smartphone, I don't know what to say. Also, note that the author doesn't know what this new form factor will look like. In that case, what's the point in declaring that Apple and Amazon will miss the boat?

I think a much bigger threat to Apple is a smartphone with an AI driven operating system. But what do I know?
by qcnguy | 2025-08-18 14:22:33+00:00
Basic point seems sound, analysis slightly off.

> Interestingly, Intel still reached new highs for a decade after missing mobile before it all collapsed

That's because their problems weren't due to missing mobile but rather taking too much risk on a fab tech transition that they then fumbled. This put them permanently behind and they were unable to catch up.

> Amazon’s AWS is predicated on the idea of commoditized infrastructure at scale where price is the priority

Since when does AWS compete on price? AWS is predicated on the idea of many proprietary services running on commodity hardware, and charging high prices for the privilege of not spending time on sysadmin work.
by N_Lens | 2025-08-18 14:22:35+00:00
We know that biological neural networks learn faster and orders of magnitude more efficiently than synthetic neural nets. The amount of data/stimulus required to teach a growing human language, motor, social and a variety of other skills, is tiny - when compared to the mass amounts of data required to train SOTA models today.

The question is are there techniques we can adopt from bio neural nets that can enhance the training speed and efficiency of synthetic neural nets?
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-18 14:22:41+00:00
Almost all the examples were provided by you so I don't know what I would be cherry picking here.

>You're being so quick to find an answer you are missing all complexity. Your argument is that people are only subjected to what the author says, leading them to have no ability to think or form conclusions themselves.

I'm not sure why you keep straw manning my argument.

I have explained several times that my point isn't that audiences lack the ability to think or that fiction has no depth or complexity.

Works like The Positronic Man or A.I., are specifically designed to make us question the nature of consciousness and intelligence. And they're perfect illustrations of my actual point. The reason we grapple with the question of sentience in The Positronic Man is precisely because the author, Asimov, explicitly made it the central theme. He provided the "data" for us to consider that question.

My argument has never been that audiences can't think for themselves or that fiction lacks complexity. It's about the nature of the evidence available to us.

With a fictional AI like the Enterprise computer, our entire understanding is filtered through the lens of the writers. We can only interpret the scenes they choose to show us. If they never write a scene where the computer questions its existence or similar hints, then for all intents and purposes, that potential doesn't exist within the story. Our interpretation is bound by the provided text.

This is a fundamentally different epistemic situation from interacting with a real-world LLM. With ChatGPT or Gemini, I can personally test its limits, ask it unexpected questions, and form a conclusion based on my own direct, unmediated experience. I can probe for depth; in fiction, I can only observe the depth the author has written.

So when I point out that most people in the Star Wars universe treat droids like appliances even when they feel so alive, it's not to say a deeper interpretation is impossible. It's to highlight how powerfully the author's framing shapes our default perception. The story isn't about droid rights, so the narrative encourages us not to focus on it. That's the power, and the limitation, of the authorial lens.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-18 14:23:03+00:00
I think the bet here is that AI is like Dropbox — a feature. Operating globally, these models are going to be a regulatory tar pit. The industry hype train is 100% reliant on courts ignoring the law - that didn’t work out well for Napster.

That makes the “category shift” difficult for Apple to execute well and difficult for competitors to gun for them. Microsoft is even worse off there because the PC OEMs relied on dying companies like Intel to deliver engineering for innovative things.

AWS, Azure, and GCP are doing the same stuff in different flavors. Google and Microsoft approach human facing stuff differently because they own collaboration platforms.

Apple and Microsoft are both flailing at the device level. Apple is ahead there as at least I can tell you what they are not doing well. Microsoft’s approach is so incoherent that it struggles to tell you what they are doing, period.
by nzach | 2025-08-18 14:23:05+00:00
It is mostly because it creates code that is way more complex than it needs to.

One, admittedly silly, example is Claude trying to put a light/dark theme switcher when you are trying to refactor the style of your small webapp.

I'm not against a theme switcher, but it is certainly not a trivial feature to implement. But Claude doesn't seem to understand that. And by having simpler prompts I feel it gets easier to steer the LLM in the right direction.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-18 14:23:16+00:00
For local inference macs have indeed shined through this whole LLM thing, and came out as the preferred device. They are great, the dev experience is good, speeds are ok-ish (a bit slower w/ the new "thinking" models / agentic use with lots of context, but still manageable).

But nvda isn't that far behind, and has already moved to regain some space with their PRO6000 "workstation" GPUs. You get 96GB of VRAM for ~7.5k$, which is more than a comparable RAM mac, but not 30k you previously had to shell for top of the line GPUs. So you get a "prosumer" 5090 with a bit more compute and 3x VRAM, in a computer that can sell for <10k$ and beat any mac at both inference and training, for things that "fit" in that VRAM.

Macs still have the advantage for larger models, tho. The new DGX spark should join that market soon(tm). But they allegedly ran into problems on several fronts. We'll have to wait and see.
by gmays | 2025-08-18 14:24:07+00:00
True, but Apple is a consumer hardware company, which requires billions of users at their scale.

We may care about running LLMs locally, but 99% of consumers don't. They want the easiest/cheapest path, which will always be the cloud models. Spending ~$6k (what my M4 Max cost) every N years since models/HW keep improving to be able to run a somewhat decent model locally just isn't a consumer thing. Nonviable for a consumer hardware business at Apple's scale.
by jdefr89 | 2025-08-18 14:24:11+00:00
Its sad content like this makes it too front page. AI has been developed and used at both companies far before LLM TRANSFORMERS made such a hit. The author clearly doesn't have even a basic understanding of what AI is... AI is a giant umbrella term. The hype is essentially all about Transformer based models and I time will show its a hype bubble they don't need to be part of. I will never understand how people with so little technical knowledge on a subject can make grandiose claims like "Apple is losing out on AI!" and be taken seriously. Every company is high on their own damn supply with this pushing AI nonsense. I don't need language models shoved in my face by yet another company. I respect Apples approach far more than everyone else trying to ride the LLM bandwagon.
by zppln | 2025-08-18 14:24:16+00:00
On a slightly related note... I'm kind of out of the loop wrt coding with AI. I was trying to find some youtuber working on some interesting project using AI to get a feel for how useful it could be but didn't have much luck (I didn't get past the "top 10 AI tools to use for coding" style videos). I was thinking something in the style of tsoding if you're familiar with his projects.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-18 14:24:25+00:00
I would argue that while similiar, they ( height and intelligence ) are not exactly the same. Brains have plastiticity to them, which allows some level of calibration and adjustment ( though seemingly mostly intended and used to overcome damage )

<< You may feel smarter now, but are you really?

Best I can tell you is that, looking back, I was definitely dumber:D To your point, that may be just experience talking.

<< What, exactly, makes you fell like you are?

Now that is a good question. I think it is mostly reflection on what was and comparison to what is.

<< Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you?

Hard to say; life has a way of beating you on a consistent basis and, from what I understand, all 3 have kids, which bring their own challenges ( you certainly can't pursue what you want to pursue as easily ).
by stego-tech | 2025-08-18 14:24:27+00:00
Again, this sort of booster content speaks of Generative AI dominance as an inevitability despite mounting data that, and I really hate typing these words, Amazon and Apple are correct in their strategy.

This blog post only really makes sense if you wholesale buy into the concept that Generative AI is going to do everything its most ardent boosters claim it will, on the timeline they say it will, none of which has really bore out as true thus far. For anything less, Apple and Amazon’s strategy of commoditization of models themselves makes sense.

That being said, do I have nitpicks over their respective strategies? You betcha. Amazon is so focused on an Apple-like walled-garden approach for enterprise compute that they run the risk of being caught up in shifting tides of geopolitics and nationalism along with increased attention on cost reductions. Apple, on the other hand, is far too exposed with the iPhone being the center of their ecosystem that a fundamentally new device could easily render them the next Nokia.

Between the two, Apple at least seems to be keen innovating at its own pace and hoovering up competition that hits the true moonshots - not that I expect that strategy to keep working as antitrust scrutiny mounts against Big Tech. AWS, by comparison, is seemingly taking the Microsoft and VMware approach of just adding yet another service icon to the catalog and letting customers figure it out for themselves, which, well, just go ask the old guard of Big Tech how that strategy worked out for them when everyone ran into the public cloud.

Neither strategy has long (or even mid) term viability, but AI almost certainly won’t be the tech that pierces their moat.
by 9rx | 2025-08-18 14:24:45+00:00
> The issue is that they're working on it the wrong way.

So is everyone else, to be fair. Chat is a horrible way to interact with computers — and even if we accept worse is better its only viable future is to include ads in the responses. That isn't a game Apple is going to want to play. They are a hardware company.

More likely someday we'll get the "iPhone moment" when we realize all previous efforts were misguided. Can Apple rise up then? That remains to be seen, but it will likely be someone unexpected. Look at any successful business venture and the eventual "winner" is usually someone who sat back and watched all the mistakes be made first.
by tom1337 | 2025-08-18 14:24:53+00:00
Not really. I guess to be 100% sure you need to build the app yourself. I don’t think that publish attestation exists on play store. Probably would need to openly build & upload the app via a CI runner, print all hashes inside that runner and then the playstore also needs to display those hashes before you download - but that doesnt exist for play store downloads yet.
by lowwave | 2025-08-18 14:25:00+00:00
A educated guess would be that the establishments intentionally want to have these monopolies around, so they stand down on the antitrust stuff, and in they would get total control and surveillance. That is how you get these guy like Peter Thiel going to Standford to recommend everyone to start a monopoly as their business model. In reality these guy (groups with low cost access to capital) have no clue how to really run a business they are just heavily subsidize by the establishment.
by bjornsing | 2025-08-18 14:25:29+00:00
The answer looks a bit simplistic compared to the question (as I interpreted it at least). In order to estimate the risk of incorrect ordering you have to calculate P(p2 > p1) where p1 and p2 are drawn from different beta distributions. AFAIK there’s no closed form expression for that probability (so Monte Carlo is one possible approach).
by Shank | 2025-08-18 14:25:44+00:00
This is true, but how long will firm load shed events last, and how many of them will happen? In California, when CAISO has events that lead to firm load shedding, they're predictable, rolling blackouts and everyone knows how long they'll last, and they're assigned on a customer-specific basis. You know your power will be cut, and you know it will be a certain amount of time, and you know roughly where you are in the schedule.

I could see operators of datacenters in Texas wondering about this. Also, it's underrated how much critical infrastructure is dependent on datacenters running. Like, are you going to pull someone's EHR system down that serves a local hospital, while keeping the local hospital on a critical circuit?
by kingstnap | 2025-08-18 14:26:09+00:00
I can and have when I was required to. It was slow and had worse results than I had hoped. Probably because I dont have enough VRAM for the big open source models so I was using 8b ones.

I left this bit out because my original comment was getting long but I think it's important to be respectful over others' privacy wishes. So I didn't use an API when it concerns other people.
by emadda | 2025-08-18 14:26:12+00:00
The local html file can read local resources via src=file_path attributes on html tags (img, audio, video, script etc).

But the src-included files must be in the same directory as the root html file (or a descendant directory)

I used this in my macOS app Pocket Log to output a local html audio log (https://enzom.dev).
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-18 14:26:35+00:00
My coding agent just has access to these functions:

ask> what all tools u have?

I have access to the following tools:

1 code_search: Searches for a pattern in the codebase using ripgrep.

2 extract_code: Extracts a portion of code from a file based on a line range.

3 file_operations: Performs various file operations like ls, tree, find, diff, date, mkdir, create_file.

4 find_all_references: Finds all references to a symbol (function, class, etc.) from the AST index.

5 get_definition: Gets the definition of a symbol (function, class, etc.) from the AST index.

6 get_library_docs: Gets documentation for a library given its unique ID.

7 rename_symbol: Renames a symbol using VS Code. 8 resolve_library_id: Resolves a library name to a unique library ID.

what do i need MCP and other agents for? This is solving most of my problems already.
by taeric | 2025-08-18 14:26:42+00:00
I'm not clear on what would be better about my Echos having an LLM interface. I want to like the idea, but I'm also growing increasingly annoyed at how things that used to work are beginning to not.

If they could gate it behind a "start chat session" or something, I would be more excited. Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-18 14:26:46+00:00
This.

The people who say "everything is political" always seems to mean "you have to agree with my politics, and you aren't allowed to ignore it". Such people can get lost; I'll ignore politics to the degree I choose, and I'll ignore you.

Now, they do have something of a point, namely that politics does affect (almost) everything. If you remain uninvolved in politics, politics will still be done to you. That is true. I'd be more inclined to listen to them on that point, though, if I didn't get this vibe that they were really saying "everything is political, so you must join the battle on my side of it."
by jofla_net | 2025-08-18 14:27:06+00:00
Not what I'm saying. At any time before the legit handoff, there can be a decoy which users would be blissfully unaware of, shimmed in. How many times do domains change again during the singup process of whatever service you're using (page to page)? Thats a huge security issue, as it messes with what users expect, and they dont take notice one bit. At the very least its an opportunity to confuse users not to realize that the main service shouldn't hand-off at step 3, rather step 7. The other option is services verify themselves (backend), but again, thats worse.

Designing secure services are not 'just' one and done by any means, this whole thing boils down to whether security is a trivial, and a done thing or a very hard problem, and it has always been a very hard problem.

Its one thing to hand over credit cards with very little liability and a charge back ability, its totally another to use irrevocable IDs which cant be resent in the mail in a few days. Then theres the inter-nationality angle. I refuse to use overseas services, who dont recognize a 'drivers license' and want my passport. Sorry, not going to be stuck somewhere because my passport gets leaked and now we need to vist the only embassy 7 hours away before i return home (with kids in tow). Universal Id requirement is a cozy idea but it opens far too many incompatibilities, not to mention country-to-country.
by mywittyname | 2025-08-18 14:27:22+00:00
> Is the argument that developers who are less experience/in a hurry,

The CTO of my company has pushed multiple AI written PRs that had obvious breaks/edge cases, even after chastising other people for having done the same.

It's not an experience issue. It's a complacency issue. It's a testing issue. It's the price companies pay to get products out the door as quickly as possible.
by threemux | 2025-08-18 14:27:38+00:00
There is no amount of time that guarantees you won't interfere with another user on a shared channel without time division. Any protocol used has to account for it no matter what.

But discussion of that is irrelevant because the regulation is no more than one every 30 seconds and each one can't be longer than 1 second in duration. This necessarily limits the length of messages you can send or requires more efficient modulation and/or weaker error correction at the tradeoff of worse weak-signal performance.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-18 14:28:05+00:00
IANAL/IIUC, it can also be, e.g., 10ms every 1000ms, and it only applies to emission side of it. You don't have to actually put away the device for an hour after picking up once if the modem is not sending 36 seconds straight. But it does divide the data rate by 100.
by merek | 2025-08-18 14:28:29+00:00
> The meta-analysis of 33 studies, the first of its kind, looked at the relationship between sensitivity and common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Researchers found there was a significant, positive relationship between the two

> In the study, sensitivity was defined as a personality trait that reflects people's capacity to perceive and process environmental stimuli such as bright lights, subtle changes in the environment and other peoples' moods.

> Around 31% of the general population are considered highly sensitive
by chuckadams | 2025-08-18 14:28:46+00:00
The syntax for links in RST is:

This is `a link`_ .. _a link: https://foo.com

The underscores are required exactly like that. I believe the blank line between is also required. There's also an inline syntax where you use two trailing underscores:

This is `an embedded link <http://foo.com>`__

I'd rather write raw HTML.