MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rbanffy | 2025-08-29 10:20:24+00:00
There is another point to be made about insisting on the reentry - Columbia didn’t have propellant to reach the ISS, and life support couldn’t be extended until a rescue mission could be mounted. A rescue mission would be further complicated because the docking hardware was not needed for this mission and was removed, and there was no airlock for EVAs (and no EVA suit on board), again, because it wasn’t part of the mission.

If a rescue mission could have been mounted, it’d be something straight out of science fiction - tying ships together with cables and shuttling astronauts in their orange pressure suits through the side doors of two disconnected shuttles.
by wulfstan | 2025-08-29 10:20:57+00:00
Answering my own question:

If you've got a QNAP, you can install Debian 10 on some of them <https://www.cyrius.com/debian/>

If you've got a Synology, it has been done on some older devices as well <https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Synology>

So all is not necessarily lost, and I have one of each so will need to do some experiments!
by plqbfbv | 2025-08-29 10:21:39+00:00
So much this. I left another comment that touched on this.

I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months.

I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it.

Synology still scores very high on this single metric.
by kypro | 2025-08-29 10:21:48+00:00
This is good though right? There was decline in manufacturing jobs in the West over the last several decades because we could automate and outsource to cut costs. We all agree that cheap iPhones and clothes are good... Right...?

Now we get cheap services too!

Job losses to automation shouldn't be a sudden concern to people. This has been happening for decades. The only difference is that it's now impacting the more privileged in society as well.
by instig007 | 2025-08-29 10:22:24+00:00
> We going to pretend the crusades didn't happen?

> Christian and Muslim states had been in conflict since the establishment of Islam in the 7th century. In the span of approximately 120 years after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 632, Muslim forces conquered the Levant (including Jerusalem), as well as North Africa and most of the Iberian Peninsula, all of which had previously been under Christian rule. By the 11th century, Christians were through the Reconquista gradually reversing the 8th-century Muslim conquest of Iberia, but their ties to the Holy Land had deteriorated. Muslim authorities in the Levant often enforced harsh rules against any overt expressions of the Christian faith. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade

You can't play the crusades card in this context.
by Sebb767 | 2025-08-29 10:22:31+00:00
If you need a lot of (not so fast) storage, 3,5" drives are still by far the best TB per €. For a lot of NAS solutions (backups, video/movie/music storage etc.) their performance is completely fine.

Plus, we're most likely talking about Gigabit networking here, so unless your workload consists of very parallel random access, this is going to be the limiting factor anyway.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-29 10:23:11+00:00
> If AI-coding is even marginally more economically efficient (i.e. more for less) the "old way" will be swept aside at breathtaking pace (as we're seeing).

On the scale I’ve been doing this (20 years), that hasn’t been the case.

Rails was massively more efficient for what 90% of companies where building. But it never had anywhere near a 90% market share.

It doesn’t take 1000 engineers to build CRUD apps, but companies are driven to grow by forces other than pure market efficiency.

There are still plenty of people using simple text editors when full IDEs have offered measurable productivity boosts for decades.

>(as we’re seeing)

I work at a big tech company. Productivity per person hasn’t noticeably increased. The speed that we ship hasn’t noticeably increased. All that’s happening is an economic downturn.
by donkeybeer | 2025-08-29 10:23:14+00:00
He's softer on China because China correctly sees him as a loony bin to be ignored rather than try to rationalize him or "deal" with him. If you are trying to play a game with a loony bin you already lost. Even a little bit of pushback and either he has forgotten or he silently relents on whatver loony crap he was mouthing ten minutes ago.
by blauditore | 2025-08-29 10:24:09+00:00
I think the problem is that most people, especially non-engineers, are over-selling and over-promising all the time. Being honest about risks, issues, and short-comings makes a project or product look bad in comparison.

The most feasible way to get X done is saying "X is a great option, the risks are managable, and it's fairly quick". Then, it will unexpectedly take a bit longer, plus some unforeseen trade-offs will need to be made.
by gyosko | 2025-08-29 10:24:37+00:00
I really don't get it.

While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how:

- write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind)

- check/try the code

- repeat

is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 10:25:21+00:00
No the type of an object isn't known until runtime, so the compiler can't know it. Yes you know the type of the vtable, which means you know the supertype. This is true in all languages that don't use duck-typing. No you don't know the assigned values of entries in the vtable, which means you don't know the type of the object.

> Read my previous comment for the bug

No this is not a bug. The entire point of inheritance or dynamic dispatch IS that you call a function from "a different class" aka the subclass the object is an instance of. This is not a bug, this is the entire point of implementing it with vtables.
by tehryanx | 2025-08-29 10:25:38+00:00
Personally, I think there's a piece missing in the analogy. I understand that you can put some kind of human-verified mediator in between the LLM and the tool its calling to make sure the parameters are sane, but I also think you're modelling the LLM as a UI element that's generating the request when IMO it makes more sense to model the LLM as the user who is choosing how to interact with the UI elements that are generating the request.

In the context of web-request -> validator -> db query, the purpose of the validator is only to ensure that the request is safe, it doesn't care what the user chose to do as long as it's a reasonable action in the context of the app.

In the context of user -> LLM -> validator -> tool, the validator has to ensure that the request is safe, but the users intention can be changed at the LLM stage. If the user wanted to update a record, but the LLM decides to destroy it, the validator now has to have some way to understand the users initial intention to know whether or not the request is sane.
by jychang | 2025-08-29 10:25:39+00:00
I dislike the term “stochastic parrot”, because there’s plenty of evidence that LLMs do have an understanding of at least some things that they are saying.

We can trace which neurons activate for a face recognition model and see that a certain neuron does light up when it sees a face. The correct features are active for the sentence “the word parrots is plural”.

If you stop assuming the LLMs have no internal representations of the data, then everything makes a lot more sense! The LLM is FORCED to answer questions… just like a high school student filling out the SAT is forced to answer questions.

If a high school student fills out the wrong answer on the SAT, is that a hallucination?

Hallucinations are expected behaviors if you RLHF a high schooler to always guess an answer on the SAT because that’ll get them the highest score. This applies to ML model reward functions as well.
by Towaway69 | 2025-08-29 10:25:59+00:00
> IMHO, the thirty minute developer would still save 10 minutes by vibe coding. That marketing's not wrong.

For me, that's too general. Of course, perhaps for this particular, specific problem it might be true. But as this thread points out, anything niche and AI fails to help productively. Of course then comes the marketing: just wait, AI will be able to cover those niche cases also.

> want and checking/fixing what you receive is still faster than typing out the code

Then I do wonder why there are developers at all. After all that's what AI is so good at - if one believes the marketing - being precise and describing exactly what needs to be done. Surely it must be faster having two AIs talking to each and hammering out the code.

And even typing is subjective: ten fingers versus two, versus four .. etc. There are developers that can type faster than they can think - in certain cases.

There is also the developer in flow versus the stop and go using an AI prompts to get it just right. I dunno, if it comes true, then thankfully there won't be any humans to create bugs in code but somehow, I can't see it happening.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-08-29 10:27:46+00:00
>We going to pretend the crusades didn't happen?

Yes because that happened 1000 years ago and they didn't start it anyway.

>We accept people who are fleeing because we aren't heartless

There is a monumental difference between giving temporary refuge to people around your country and permanently shipping people across oceans and country borders to richer countries the make them citizens to the detriment of the natives. Not to mention that most refugees are men, you would think if it was that bad women and children would come first.

>But maybe we should export Europeans who are culturally incompatible? We tried it in the past though, and it worked out to be easier just to gas them

I don't understand how you can joke about this while advocating to bring in more people of a ethnicity and religion who in current year is openly hostile and violent towards them. Maybe you are the one with the solution but are just too ideologically comprised to realize.
by lionelw | 2025-08-29 10:27:47+00:00
How many of those languages are declarative, or domain specific?

There's no use comparing CSS and assembly. It betrays a shallow understanding of CSS. Points to ponder:

- Assembly is superlatively imperative while CSS is the opposite. The difference can be jarring for some. It's commonly felt in day-to-day frontend work that switching to CSS (declarative) from almost anything else (imperative) -- JavaScript, PHP, etc. -- requires a significant mental shift, though it does get easier with experience.

- Lot of the vocabulary and concepts used in CSS come from outside the computing world, namely design and publishing. It's somehow a rarely shared factoid, but it's a hint at how too far away from Kansas we are to be making fair comparisons.

- A pervasive mistake that coders make (and unfortunately a lot of CSS teaching material out there too) is to approach CSS as a set of explicit, atomic instructions -- a fair coder-y assumption, but a bad mental model that leads to frustration. Understand that these instructions can affect one another; some switch entire layout algorithms[0] in a given scope, changing how other instructions behave (predictably).

[0] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit...
by gwd | 2025-08-29 10:28:08+00:00
One problem with his survey -- The Lizardman Constant:

> Researchers have demonstrated repeatedly in human surveys the stylized fact that, far from being an oracle or gold standard, a certain small percentage of human responses will reliably be [nonsense]: “jokester” or “mischievous responders”, or more memorably, “lizardman constant” responders—respondents who give the wrong answer to simple questions.

> Below a certain percentage of responses, for sufficiently rare responses, much or all of responding humans may be lying, lazy, crazy, or maliciously responding and the responses are false. This systematic error seriously undermines attempts to study rare beliefs such as conspiracy theories, and puts bounds on how accurate any single survey can hope to be.

> For example, 4% of respondents may endorse the claim ‘lizard-people rule the earth’, 5% of atheists believe in God, a surprising number of adults believe you see by shooting beams from your eyes, and so on. This cautions us against taking survey results about extremely unusual people or traits too literally, or expecting perfectly accurate results, as given the lizardman constant and other crud factors, it is entirely possible that some or all of the outliers may just be the lizardman constant at work.

https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/survey/lizardman/abstract
by jjcob | 2025-08-29 10:30:01+00:00
In physics, you typically learn about error propagation quite early in your studies.

If you make some assumptions about your error (a popular one is to assume Gaussian distribution) then you can calculate the error of the result quite elegantly.

It's a nice excercise to write some custom C++ types that have (value, error) and automatically propagate them as you perform mathematical operations on them.

Unfortunately, in the real world only very few measurements have a gaussian error distribution, and the problem are systematic (non-random) errors, and reasoning about them is a lot harder.

So this means that automatically handling error propagation is in most cases pointless, since you need to manually analyze the situation anyway.
by corimaith | 2025-08-29 10:30:45+00:00
Is linking to some fringe podcasts from Zeihan really that indicative of "everyone" or just the algorithm self-selecting to your preferences? Because one could also link to plenty of channels critiquing the West.

But if we look at MSM CNBC, NYT, CNN, etc, none of them are saying "China is going to collapse", and if anything I'd probably vouch there are more articles praising China than there are ones critiquing it.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-08-29 10:31:57+00:00
I work in the refurb division of an ewaste recycling company[0]. Due to the certifications we have (and the lack of MS licensing), we can't install Windows on anything we sell. I started off installing Debian on things I list, but switched to Mint. I've fallen in love with the OEM install option they have[1]. It sets up a pre-OOBE environment, letting me run things like fastfetch to get the system specs, then click the 'prepare for shipping to end user' command to trigger the user and password setup on next boot (so I don't have to set and write a password on a postit note on the laptop, and hope it doesn't get lost).

[0] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling

[1] https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...
by balamatom | 2025-08-29 10:32:20+00:00
"But with Google is easier!" When you were trying to teach your folks about Google, were you taking into consideration dependence, enshittification, or the surveillance economy? No, you were retelling them the marketing.

Just by having lived longer, they might've had the chance to develop some intuition about the true cost of disruption, and about how whatever Google's doing is not a free lunch. Of course, neither them, nor you (nor I for that matter) had been taught the conceptual tools to analyze some workings of some Ivy League whiz kinds that have been assigned to be "eating the world" this generation.

Instead we've been incentivized to teach ourselves how to be motivated by post-hoc rationalizations. And ones we have to produce at our own expense too. Yummy.

Didn't Saint Google end up enshittifying people's very idea of how much "all of the world's knowledge" is; gatekeeping it in terms of breadth, depth and availability to however much of it makes AdSense. Which is already a whole lot of new useful stuff at your fingertips, sure. But when they said "organizing all of the world's knowledge" were they making any claims to the representativeness of the selection? No, they made the sure bet that it's not something the user would measure.

In fact, with this overwhelming amount of convincing non-experientially-backed knowledge being made available to everyone - not to mention the whole mass surveillance thing lol (smile, their AI will remember you forever) - what happens first and foremost is the individual becomes eminently marketable-to, way more deeply than over Teletext. Thinking they're able to independently make sense of all the available information, but instead falling prey to the most appealing narrative, not unlike a day trader getting a haircut on market day. And then one has to deal with even more people whose life is something someone sold to them, a race to the bottom in the commoditized activity (in the case of AI: language-based meaning-making).

But you didn't warn your parents about any of that or sit down and have a conversation about where it means things are headed. (For that matter, neither did they, even though presumably they've had their lives altered by the technological revolutions of their own day.) Instead, here you find yourself stepping in for that conversation to not happen among the public, either! "B-but it's obvious! G-get with it or get left behind!" So kind of you to advise me. Thankfully it's just what someone's paid for you to think. And that someone probably felt very productive paying big money for making people think the correct things, too, but opinions don't actually produce things do they? Even the ones that don't cost money to hold.

So if it's not about the productivity but about the obtaining of money to live, why not go extract that value from where it is, instead of breathing its informational exhaust? Oh, just because, figuratively speaking, it's always the banks have AIs that don't balk at "how to rob the bank"; and it's always we that don't. Figures, no? But they don't let you in the vault for being part of the firewall.
by bawolff | 2025-08-29 10:32:43+00:00
> Suppose that respondents had an average of fifty family members and co-workers, so that plus their 100 closest friends makes 150 people.

Say what now? Am i just really socially isolated? Seems insane to me to assume the average person is close enough to 150 people to know how much each of those 150 people use AI and if they are "psychotic".
by ekidd | 2025-08-29 10:32:55+00:00
> In my company I feel that we getting totally overrun with code that's 90% good, 10% broken and almost exactly what was needed.

This is painfully similar to what happens when a team grows from 3 developers to 10 developers. All of sudden, there's a vast pile of coding being written, you've never seen 75% of it, your architectural coherence is down, and you're relying a lot more on policy and CI.

Where LLM's differ is that you can't meaningfully mentor them, and you can't let them go after the 50th time they try turn off the type checker, or delete the unit tests to hide bugs.

Probably, the most effective way to use LLMs is to make the person driving the LLM 100% responsible for the consequences. Which would mean actually knowing the code that gets generated. But that's going to be complicated to ensure.
by lgeorget | 2025-08-29 10:33:07+00:00
I know that's not your point and I'm not saying this to cherry-pick your argument but in case that's particularly relevant to you, Debian Trixie ships with Kicad 9 : https://packages.debian.org/trixie/kicad. If you're stuck with an earlier version, maybe you have a dependency blocking your updates.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 10:34:03+00:00
> If you're talking about conversion rules, explicit cast from void* to T* makes more sense than implicit since it is a downcast.

Yes, but you also need to specify the type in C. ((void *)p)->foo only works in New B not in C.

> IMO these are a mistake

Forgetting to check bounds does always result in these problems in C, this is not specific to VLAs. I find them useful.

> Exceptions are problematic in their implementation

Ok, but that means to me having these in the language is only a downside.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-08-29 10:35:27+00:00
> Even better, there is a little-advertised utility called extrepo that has a curated list of external repositories users might want to enable for Debian. To enable the Mozilla repository, for example, a user only needs to install extrepo, run "extrepo enable mozilla" as root (or with sudo), update the package cache, and look for the regular Firefox package. In all, extrepo includes more than 160 external repositories for applications like Docker CE, Signal, and Syncthing. Unfortunately, the extrepo utility does not have a separate "list" command to show the available repositories, though running "extrepo search" with no search parameter will return all of its DEB822-formatted repository entries.

TIL. What a superpower!
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-29 10:35:31+00:00
You us missile effector(s) against individual satellites. Hence why clouds of smaller satellites are more survivable.

If kinetic, then a bunch of space debris are created. Some larger pieces, some smaller. If those intersect with other satellites, they may generate additional debris (see Kessler Syndrome, what parent was talking about).

But on the other hand, low earth orbits (where Starlink et al operate) will decay much faster than higher orbits, so it's a {wait time} problem rather than a {have to cleanup manually} problem.

And also space, even Earth orbits, is big. Satellites manage not to hit each other most of the time. A limited strike (e.g. the previous US or Chinese demonstrations) probably won't cascade.
by xscott | 2025-08-29 10:36:33+00:00
I agree with your point in general, and I'm curious if it's a problem in Lobster. Here's one in Rust:

let i = 1; let j = 1; print!("i: {:?}\n", !i); print!("j: {:?}\n", !j); // pretend there's a lot of code here // spooky action at a distance let v = vec![1, 2, 3]; v[i];

You might think those two print statements would print the same value. They do not.
Show HN: OpenAI is the new mainframe. I built the 'mouse' for the Personal AI
by Iger | 2025-08-29 10:37:23+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the creator of Sein.

I have a thesis: the current state of Cloud AI is a lot like the timesharing systems of the mainframe era. We're accessing massive, centralized models through terminals, and our data is often the price of admission.

I believe the "PC revolution" for AI is already here, but we're missing a key component. The "Personal Computer" is already in our pockets: our phones and PCs. They have powerful chips capable of running incredible local AI. What they lack is the right input device—a peripheral designed to seamlessly feed our thoughts and experiences into this personal AI.

That's the philosophy behind Sein Clip. It's not another computer. It's the 'mouse and keyboard' for the Personal AI era.

How it Works: The Sein Clip is a small, wearable device obsessed with one thing: high-fidelity audio capture. It uses a custom-tuned, dual-microphone array to capture the nuances of your voice far better than a phone in a pocket ever could.

It then securely transmits this data to the Sein app on your phone or PC. This is where the magic happens. The app leverages your own device's powerful processor (like the Apple Neural Engine) to run our local-first AI models. Your phone becomes your private AI server.

The core functionalities—transcription and basic emotional insights—happen 100% on your phone, completely offline. For extremely demanding tasks, there's an optional, user-controlled connection to external models, but the system is always private by default.

The Business Model: It’s simple: you buy the hardware (the "mouse" for your thoughts), and the companion app with all its local AI software is yours forever. An optional subscription is for those who choose to use the "mainframe" (cloud) for a power boost.

I'm launching on Kickstarter soon. I'd love to hear the HN community's thoughts on this thesis—that our phones are the new PCs of the AI era, and what we need now are the right peripherals to unlock them.

Pre-launch page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sein/sein-the-first-wea...