MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BoxOfRain | 2025-08-27 08:58:51+00:00
More heads should have rolled over this in my opinion, absolutely despicable that they cheerfully threw innocent people in prison rather than admit their software was a heap of crap. It makes me so angry this injustice was allowed to prevail for so long because nobody cared about the people being mistreated and tarred as thieves as long as they were 'little people' of no consequence, while senior management gleefully covered themselves in criminality to cover for their own uselessness.

It's an archetypal example of 'one law for the connected, another law for the proles'.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-27 08:59:59+00:00
The Transputer as an implementation has failed, but all modern server/workstation CPUs have followed the Transputer model of organizing the CPU interfaces, starting with some later models of the DEC Alpha, followed by AMD Athlon and then by all others.

Unlike the contemporaneous CPUs and many later CPUs (which used buses), the Transputer had 3 main interfaces: a memory interface connecting memory to the internal memory controller, a peripheral interface and a communication interface for other CPUs.

The same is true for the modern server/workstation CPUs, which have a DRAM memory interface, PCIe for peripherals and a proprietary communication interface for the inter-socket links.

By inheriting designers from DEC Alpha, AMD has adopted this interface organization early (initially using variants of HyperTransport for peripherals and for inter-CPU communication), while Intel, like always, has been the last in adopting it, but they were forced to do this eventually (in Nehalem, i.e. a decade after AMD), because their obsolete server CPU interfaces reduced too much the performance.
by DanielHB | 2025-08-27 09:00:17+00:00
We literally make ethanol from corn and sugar cane. And biodielse from soy.

It doesn't make economic and enviromental sense in most parts of the world (especially corn). In some places they are net-positive on carbon emissions compared to oil-derived gasoline. Tilling the fields, growing, harvesting, processing and transporting often emits more CO2 than the equivalent gasoline produced. Especially the initial tilling of the land to convert it to farmland releases A LOT of CO2 into the atmosphere (this is a one-time thing though).

In the US all (ground vehicle) gasoline sold needs to have 10% ethanol (corn-based), in Brazil it is 20% (sugar cane based). In Brazil almost all cars support 100% ethanol fuel and it is quite common to fuel with ethanol only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

The whole bio-fuel industry is a very complex mix of economics (often requires subsidies to make sense), geopolitical (less imported oil), environmental concerns (mass scale farming soil degradation and CO2 emissions derived from it) and logistical (completely different transportation and refining process).

Fun fact ethanol freezes at a fairly high temperature and mixes with water which makes it not ideal for cold climates and boats. It is quite common for unaware boat owners to f-up their engines by buying car-grade fuel-station gasoline in Brazil.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-27 09:00:36+00:00
I quite like how link [2] he provided leads with something like "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many ways of administratively disappearing those it distrusts. It has punished tens of millions of people through its formal, but crude and opaque, criminal justice system."

US Incarceration Rate: 541 per 100k

Chinese Incarceration Rate: 119 per 100k

It leads to the amusing outcome that the US has more people incarcerated than China, in spite of China having 4x the population of the US. It's entirely possible to criticize the Chinese system without resorting to disinformation, but as you allude to, those critiques probably hit a bit too close to home. It's akin to how the Wiki page on authoritarianism [1] has been radically shifted over time to the point that "modern" definition and the definition of 20 years ago [2] are completely different. Yet the old definition is the one that literally everybody uses, but it, again, hits a bit too close to home.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...
by quietbritishjim | 2025-08-27 09:01:13+00:00
Right, but if everyone is low quality then there's no one to do that correction.

That may seem a bit hypothetical but it can easily happen if you have a company that systematically underpays, which I'm sure many of us don't need to think hard to imagine, in which case they will systematically hire poor developers (because those are the only ones that ever applied).
by rswail | 2025-08-27 09:01:16+00:00
Not only leverage, but also destabilizing those optimized businesses to harvest the capital assets from their balance sheets to pay for the leverage, while destroying the underlying business.

PE is arguably much worse than VC. VC's business model is well understood and by taking VC funding, you are committing to their expected returns.

PE is, usually, unsolicited and is designed to exploit what appears to be a "lazy" balance sheet, but which is actually a stable business producing output and providing a reasonable ROI.

PE has very few redeeming features.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-27 09:01:25+00:00
Honestly I don't quite get why they do have a problem here.

That chassis sports a proper 16-port SAS backplane so they can just use... SAS drives?

Sure, SAS 7.68Tb drives cost a bit more than some shit like 870 QVO 8Tb SATA drive, but:

you will have at least 12Gbps instead of 6Gbps of bandwidth so your storage would be faster;

you will not have a shitshow of STP so your storage would be faster;

you will not have a USB thumbdrive speeds if you exhaust the SLC cache so your storage would be faster;

you will have a better DWPD (1 vs 0.3) so your storage would be faster for a longer time.

But okay, even if you don't go the SAS way... I'm again not sure what is going on here, but besides 870 EVO (desktop SATA QLC shit) there are Kingston DC600M, Solidigm D3-S4520 and Samsung PM893 which are the enterprise SATA drives and they cost only 10% more than 870 EVO (and only 10% less than Kioxia PM6-R SAS).

Oh, by the way: don't do U.2 in 2025 and later. It would bite you later.
by pndy | 2025-08-27 09:02:54+00:00
> a highly aggressive apex species

I won't pretend that I'm some expert but I find this and similar approaches very anthropocentric, stained with pop-culture of image of aliens namely from the Independence Day and Alien (sic) series.

Why extraterrestrial life has to be aggressive at all? I'd rather imagine that if something exist out there it either have similar fears that we have or don't bother with rest of the universe and prefers an isolated existence because it already discovered that own survival is more important. And perhaps it doesn't resemble humanoids at all. Hell, maybe it even takes form of giant organisms that can freely roam through the space and just exists.

Perhaps the most boring and obvious truth is that we're alone and we exist because of sheer series of weird and improbable accidents. Pretty sure some people who work in this field believe that we're first to emerge as a sentient intelligence. So perhaps it's up to us if should reach out to the stars and explore, spread across the space. Or it might be possible that we're in a fine-tuned simulation ran by our ancestors who evolved beyond physical form and who decided to study us as we study microorganisms in a Petri dish.
by jibal | 2025-08-27 09:03:05+00:00
This is not a logically valid argument. If AGI isn't possible for any of the reasons you suggest, then human cognition isn't possible either. And you're making numerous category mistakes ... an AGI can't be "incomputable" or "undecidable" or "NP hard". A problem that we put to an AGI might be NP hard, but neither AGIs nor humans need to solve the entire class of problems, only instances of them, and they don't have to solve them optimally. Thus salesmen are able to travel.

To quote ChatGPT on this:

"Could cognition be NP-hard? Strictly speaking, no—if human brains were literally solving NP-hard problems in their general form, we wouldn’t be able to think at all.

Does cognition involve NP-hard problems? Yes—in theory, many of the domains we reason about are NP-hard in the worst case.

What’s really happening? Human cognition relies on heuristics, approximations, and exploiting real-world regularities, so we almost never hit the formal “worst cases” that define NP-hardness."
by vorgol | 2025-08-27 09:03:09+00:00
I was going to recommend that exact podcast episode but you beat me to it. Totally worth listening, especially if you're interested in software bugs.

Another interesting fact mentioned in the podcast is that the earlier (manually operated) version of the machine did have the same fault. But it also had a failsafe fuse that blew so the fault never materialized. Excellent demonstration of the Swiss Cheese Model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
by sofixa | 2025-08-27 09:03:21+00:00
> Hungary is literally in Europe. If Orban says nothing about Europe, then nothing can ever say anything about Europe.

so are the Vatican and Andorra and Belarus, so all of Europe is theocratic and/or a kleptocracy?

> Your country is choosing to stay in a union with Orban's

Because the benefits far outweigh the association with that pigshit, who will also die some day. Also, the EU can and does exert influence over countries, so some of Orban's excesses can be curbed.
by autoexec | 2025-08-27 09:03:26+00:00
Why shouldn't it include a bunch of treatments if they've been shown to be beneficial? How would it be better if people had to go to some other book and look up those same conditions using the names listed in the DSM in order to find out which treatments might be useful?

Doctors (at least the good ones) aren't usually going in blind and just doing whatever the DSM tell them to as if they were following a flowchart or checklist. The DSM (which I'm not even fully defending here, I personally it feel has all kinds of problems) is just a guide. It's not the only tool in a doctor's arsenal and they aren't obligated to follow it.
by SCdF | 2025-08-27 09:05:14+00:00
The Horizon (UK Royal Mail accounting software) incident killed multiple postmasters through suicide, and bankrupted and destroyed the lives of dozens or hundreds more.

The core takeaway developers should have from Therac-25 is not that this happens just on "really important" software, but that all software is important, and all software can kill, and you need to always care.
by Maulik_hacker | 2025-08-27 09:05:40+00:00
HEY everyone, So this is Maulik, a 14 y/o living in India and who is obsessed to build revolutionary products.

This is my my first startup namely 'Startup Solve' which is an AI-powered SaaS for early-stage founders who are seeking clarity in their journey and want to grow like crazy. It is a type of a guide which makes your startup, a business tomorrow!

Go through the URL given and feel free to explore the app!

need feedback, Best of Luck,
by vasco | 2025-08-27 09:05:49+00:00
One thing about suicide is I'm pretty sure for as many people that get stopped in the last moment there are many for which the tiny thing could've stopped them, didn't.

The same way seeing a hotline might save one person, to another it'll make no difference and seeing a happy family on the street will be the trigger for them to kill themselves.

In our sadness we try to find things to blame in the tools the person used just before, or to perform the act, but it's just sad.

Nobody blames a bridge, but it has as much fault as anything else.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-27 09:06:03+00:00
I would say plenty of both. They obviously had to inform the pilots, but the way the system didn't reset permanently after 2-3 (whatever) sessions of "oh, the pilot trimmed manually, after 10 seconds we keep doing the same thing" was a major major logic blunder. Failure all across the board, if only from the perspective of end-to-end / integration testing if nothing else.

Worryingly, e2e / full integration testing was also the main cause of other Boeing blunders, like the Starliner capsule.
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-27 09:06:45+00:00
Look inside the kitchen of Microsoft or Google. It is comparable to all the FOSS world petty squables and pfiefdom wars.

You can even see this into the abominal products they release, rife with frankesteinian cobbled together bits and pieces from different 'orgs' trying to grab a piece of the (tr)action and the wild inconsistencies in the UX.
by benjiro | 2025-08-27 09:07:07+00:00
The problem as pointed out by the author in the link, is that there simply is no storage solution that sits between a SATA HDD (cheapest 0.15 Euro/TB) > NVME (0.45 Euro/TB).

Technically, SATA SSD's need to fill this spot as a cheaper alternative but with their prices being just as expensive (often only 5% cheaper) as m.2. If SATA had a price range in the 0.30 EUro/TB, it will have been a great alternative to HDD based storage.

And you can go really crazy with bifurcation > 4/4/4/4x and then converting all those new m.2 slots to 6 SATA (ASM controller for cheap and work great). Plop, 24 SATA ports for 4W power draw.

But nobody is going to pay for SATA SSD's when they can just buy m.2 for the same price. So the result is that the SATA SSD market is "kind of dying", and manufactures look at it like 2.5" drives got looked at from HDD manufactures.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-27 09:07:16+00:00
XSS should not be a problem with many Scheme dialects and Lisps, unless you render JS from user input. This is because SXML does not treat HTML as a mere string, but as structured data (as any sane library should, but very few do). So if you get some user input and want to display that in some label or paragraph or whatever, then SXML is aware what is a tag and what is text content of the tag, due to how you build the SXML expression. This is not PHP or something.

I do not know, whether GNU Artanis makes use of SXML all the way, but I think it is very likely, since SXML is in GNU Guile's standard library.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-27 09:07:30+00:00
> It is built to overcome limitations, not impose them. In this regard, it's a perfect tool for a criminal who wants to circumvent security measures, because these are limitations.

None of those limitations actually provide any security.

In order to use your bank's mobile app, you need your bank login credentials. It does not matter how secure a bank app on your phone is or whether it requires some kind of attestation because the attacker is going to get the victim to type them into a fake app or the attacker's web page which don't require any such thing and aren't even necessarily on the same device. And then it does not matter what kind of device you require the bank app to be installed on, because the attacker will get one of those and use the phished credentials in it.

There is no security value in requiring things that are useless.

> A FOSS OS also assumes that the user values the freedom, and is competent in its technical aspects.

This is not an assumption at all. The user is not required to write their own software or install anything from outside of a trusted repository. The value of the OS to such people is that someone else can write that software, and then as it matures it makes its way into the trusted repository.

But if mere mortals can't do that, if kids need an ID and a credit card in order to learn and experiment and hobbyists hit friction and spend their time on something else, then those things are killed in the cradle and never exist to begin with. And then instead of free software made by the people who wanted to use it, you're left with only apps made by predatory for-profit corporations and scammers that make it into the official store because their scams are profitable.

> It's a bit like driving on public roads. If you want to drive yourself, you have to reveal your identity and obtain a license.

It isn't a public road, it's your own phone.
by elric | 2025-08-27 09:07:47+00:00
One of the commenters on the article wrote this:

> Throughout the 80s and 90s there was just a feeling in medicine that computers were dangerous <snip> This is why, when I was a resident in 2002-2006 we still were writing all of our orders and notes on paper.

I was briefly part of an experiment with electronic patient records in an ICU in the early 2000s. My job was to basically babysit the server processing the records in the ICU.

The entire staff hated the system. They hated having to switch to computers (this was many years pre-ipad and similarly sleek tablets) to check and update records. They were very much used to writing medications (what, when, which dose, etc) onto bedside charts, which were very easy to consult and very easy to update. Any kind of dataloss in those records could have fatal consequences. Any delay in getting to the information could be bad.

This was *not* just a case of doctors having unfounded "feelings" that computers were dangerous. Computers were very much more dangerous than pen and paper.

I haven't been involved in that industry since then, and I imagine things have gotten better since, but still worth keeping in mind.
by close04 | 2025-08-27 09:08:07+00:00
This is a matter of personal preference of course. But the way you phrased it, "a whole life in full freedom" tells me you think it's either all or nothing. If you can't enjoy the full freedom in the last years of your life, does it take away from the previous years?

For better or worse people with kids know both lives, people without kids only know one. It's like saying "you'll never know how it is to eat an entire cake". Maybe you ate much of it, that counts for something. Now you're on to the next cake. You might bite more than you can chew but this goes for everything.

The value of this freedom is the highest when you're young, experimenting, putting your life on some track. Being "free" at 65 doesn't have anywhere near the same value as it does at 20. Once you do it (almost) all, everything else becomes more of the same doesn't it? That cake I was mentioning? The first bite tasted a whole lot better than the last.

There's no right or wrong, everyone knows their preference and personal circumstances. But your explanation felt like a knee-jerk reaction.
Ask HN: How to fine tune tiny whisper for Android?
by Haeuserschlucht | 2025-08-27 09:09:09+00:00
Let's just say, my way didn't work.

So to those who actually did it, how to create a TFLITE for android that actually works on android with all the incompabilities that normally come up.

Or an onnx. Or whatever actually works to fine-tune and use the fine-tuned whisper tiny on android.
by subscribed | 2025-08-27 09:09:50+00:00
It's even better than that. Banks (for example Revolut) consider several years old phones, running ancient OS (last I checked they allowed A10) without security updates for some 7 years, so riddled with zero-click/RCE vulnerabilities, but they do not allow GrapheneOS, which is currently the safest OS in mobiles (on par/beating iOS, depending whom you ask).

Yes, banks* claim phones riddled with maximum severity security issues are secure. Also phones that are rooted but using magisk modules to conceal this fact, and use spoofed signatures from ancient hardware, but the most safe platform is not secure enough for them.

Go figure.

*not all, there are notable exceptions explicitly supporting secure platforms through the modern Hardware Attestation model.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-08-27 09:10:43+00:00
It doesn't matter if it's only some apps if those apps are critical. MyGov in Australia for example requires Play Integrity or it crashes. Your government's app does not... for now.

The grip of Google, Microsoft and Apple are tightening. Microsoft's TPM requirements for Windows 11 are ostensibly for security, but they're also a mechanism to enforce hardware/software integrity and authentication. Google wants to extend their integrity APIs to Chrome and I doubt Microsoft would object to implementing something similar.

Soon enough computing and the web may end up segregated, with there being devices authenticated and controlled by a central authority and those that are not. In a lot of ways this is already the case, I can't access the 4K Netflix streams I'm paying for on Linux because of DRM and using anything other than stock Chrome can often get you flagged for annoying captchas. But it can get so much worse than that.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-27 09:10:52+00:00
Because PC is an American thing but phones are not. Obsession for standardization, modularity, and cross-compatibility are rather unique American cultural traits that aren't nearly as strongly manifesting elsewhere. "Fits right in" is quintessentially American thing.

The entire unitized jet engines on Boeing aircraft drops right off and swaps right into another host, sometimes even to different types of aircraft. PCI soundcards come off a i386 PC and go straight into PPC Macs. AR15 pressure bearing parts don't merely interchange between examples from different time and place but its grip and stock mounting patterns are becoming a industry standard of its own. Early Tesla battery packs come apart into bunch of 18650s and could reassemble into new packs(though it's a big no-no due to RUD risks). Meanwhile, Prius power units or front seats are for Prius only; it won't go into dozen different Toyota models, at least without substantial parts changes, modifications, and reconfiguration. Bugatti Veyron uses its own custom tires that aren't even forward or backward compatible with their own successor.

Same for phones: .apk runs everywhere, Linux do not, cameras don't interchange, internal connectors don't fit together, LCDs specific to anything are default unobtainium. microSD cards works on everything, but the moment you look away, Huawei invents a new incompatible format for absolutely no reason. Apple "reinvents everything" every time but internal organizations of components are stable at macroscopic levels for few generations unlike most other manufacturers.

It's openness of PC that is unique and precious, not closed nature of everything else being odd and inconvenient.
by Hilift | 2025-08-27 09:10:53+00:00
Apple should formalize the iMessage de facto DeviceAndAccountTakeover() API call. I lost count how many zero-click it has. Tim Apple can take the privacy high road all day but it doesn't matter if the code is rotten.

https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of...

https://citizenlab.ca/2023/09/blastpass-nso-group-iphone-zer...

https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-great-ipwn-journalists-hac...
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-27 09:11:57+00:00
I heard this joke about plumbers. Plumber comes, client explains the problem, plumber takes out the wrench, hits the pipes in 3 spots, replaces one nut and asks for 200$. WHAT? 200$ for replacing a nut, complains the client. Well, yeah, it's 1$ for the nut, and 199$ for knowing what nut to replace.
Scanoss Workbench v1.19.0 – new import/export options, viewer mode, SPDX Lite
by scanosss | 2025-08-27 09:12:35+00:00
We’ve released SCANOSS Workbench v1.19.0, a developer tool for inspecting and refining SBOMs. New features include:

RAW results import (with viewer mode, no re-scan required)

Import with source inclusion for side-by-side code comparison

CycloneDX export improvements (vulnerability inclusion/exclusion, severity standardisation)

Added SPDX Lite export

Validator for scan results + various UI fixes

Release notes → https://github.com/scanoss/sbom-workbench/releases/tag/v1.19.0
by dns_snek | 2025-08-27 09:13:10+00:00
A ridiculous argument. Most often a disorder will impact activities you enjoy just as much as those you don't. Very broadly speaking, if all of your symptoms go away when you get home from work then you don't have a disorder, just a demanding, stressful job. That's certainly true for disorders like ADHD and ASD that are under attack these days.