MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jabl | 2025-08-26 05:41:30+00:00
> Or is it that wiring distances (1ft = 1nanosecond) make dense computing faster and more efficient?

Contrary to other posters, I'd argue this effect is relatively small. A really good interconnect fabric might give you ping-pong times on the order of 1 microsecond, which is still 1000 times larger than a nanosecond. Most of the delay will be in the switches and the end nodes, not in the signal traveling over the wire or fiber. Say for a large-ish cluster with a diameter of, say, 100 feet (something like 7 rows of racks, each row 100 feet long, give or take), if liquid cooling allows you to double the density, you could condense it to a diameter of 100/sqrt(2) = 70 ft (about 5 rows of 70 ft each). As a ping-pong involves a signal going both ways, the worst-case increase in signal delay would be (100-70)*2 = 60 ft or 60 nanoseconds (in reality somewhat more since cables have to be routed). So about a 6% increase if we assume the baseline is 1 microsecond. Measurable, yes, but likely very small effect on application performance vs. a ping-pong microbenchmark.

Now where it can matter is that by packing the components more closely together, you can connect more chips via backplane and/or copper connectors vs. having to use optics.
by troupo | 2025-08-26 05:41:59+00:00
> But what can — and I’ve experienced firsthand — happen, is that the US retailer will eat some/all of the tariff in order to not lose the customers business (or even just out of goodwill).

Please show me retailers that have 30%+ margins that let them happily absorb all of the tariff. Walmart's margin is 3-4%.

Even if they absorb just some of the tariff, it means the customer still ends up paying more.
by oarla | 2025-08-26 05:42:22+00:00
So what were the same folks who downloaded Audio Hijack doing on versions 1.5 or older at the end of the 15 day trial period? Download it again?

It’s great that they were able to see higher revenues and take the company forward, but I’m wondering if there were additional features that were only on the paid version and not on trial version which helped with retention and growth.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-08-26 05:43:10+00:00
There's an Android app called GPSLogger.[1] It does exactly what it says on the tin. Runners use it to track their own progress. Photographers use it to geotag their own photos.

The thing is, GPS access as a permission is a bit scary. You could imagine some dubious uses for it. Moreover, you could imagine some such dubious uses creating a public relations nightmare for Google. So, Google just forces them out of the Play Store. (Technically, it's a routine renewal, but the GPS permission causes them extra scrutiny, to the point where the author burned out and gave up.[2])

Do we expect that this author should, or for that matter will, give their identity to Google after this? Or is GPSLogger just dead after this change lands?

[1]: https://gpslogger.app/ [2]: https://github.com/mendhak/gpslogger/issues/849
by jader201 | 2025-08-26 05:43:26+00:00
> The supplier absorbing the tariff isn't sustainable, they will always ultimately pass the cost on to the consumer one way or another.

I’m not arguing that it is. But passing the price on to the customer isn’t necessarily sustainable either.

And to be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of tariffs. Just saying that, in practice, it’s not always “suppliers and retailers still get their money, and the customer pays 100% of the tariff”.

> And your $130 example still demonstrates that the consumer just ends up paying more.

That example was the case when it does follow the definition. The exceptions that followed that were when it may not.

> The whole idea is to dissuade the consumer from buying a foreign product, and choosing a domestic one instead.

Not just the customer, but the retailer or manufacturer getting goods/parts from foreign suppliers.

> But if there is no domestic alternative, then it is always just going to be a case of "pay more or don't have it".

No argument, there. I’ve already seen some small businesses make the tough choice to close their doors because of tariffs.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-26 05:43:48+00:00
> I barely write my own code anymore, aside from CSS (the LLMs have no aesthetic sensibilities).

Funnily enough, skeletoning out the CSS boilerplate is one of my favorite uses of LLMs (though, granted, I don't have much aesthetic sensibility either). I'm primarily a backend dev, though I'm competent on the front end. But I tend to be slow on the front end, because I don't do it enough to keep up with the constant churn and voodoo that is modern CSS. With LLMs I can literally just say something along the lines of "now make it pretty", and I get some CSS that is about 75% of the way there. I still have to do a bunch of tweaking/fixing, but it's a lot easier for me to fix CSS than it is to get some flexbox or whatever nonsense to work from scratch.

LLMs have caused me to write a ton more personal per projects because in the past I would have thought "I'll just waste a day getting the front end to look halfway decent", but now I can zip through that part of the project.
by ehnto | 2025-08-26 05:43:57+00:00
The cloud situation is where it's probably going to fall down at first (haha). I don't see companies choosing to offer local model integration over the possibility of using the robot as a loss leader to a long term subscription model for access to the compute/inference.

But that's going to be hilarious. Imagine your internet goes down while the bot is half way down your stairs, or the in the middle of pouring a drink. Very fun.
by danwills | 2025-08-26 05:44:21+00:00
I know it's not the same idea, but I think it's worth mentioning the adjacent concept of 'neural CA':

https://www.neuralca.org/

https://google-research.github.io/self-organising-systems/di...

https://google-research.github.io/self-organising-systems/is...

I can see why Mordvintsev et al are up to what they are doing, but to be honest I'm struggling with understanding the point of using a neural-net to 'emulate' CAs like OP seems to be doing (and as far as I can gather, only totalistic ones too?).

It sounds a bit like swatting a fly using an H-bomb tbh, but maybe someone who knows more about the project can share some of the underlying rationale?
by shazbotter | 2025-08-26 05:44:27+00:00
> This is an undeniable truth.

Well, I disagree. What evidence do you have to demonstrate that a) this is true and b) it's so unassailable that one could not deny it?

Because it sure reads like, "I have a worldview. I will assert that it is true and talk down to anyone who does not accept my worldview as truth." It's a way to paint your discussion partner as an intellectual lesser, while adroitly dodging critique. You'll have to do better than just asserting something is true because you said so.
by joelthelion | 2025-08-26 05:45:05+00:00
I think this might backfire in that it might be enough to prompt technical people to seriously start looking for alternatives.

I personally will be extremely unhappy if I no longer can run dns66, newspipe or Firefox with ad blocking on my phone.

I think I might also start spending less time on my phone, which would be a good thing for me and a terrible thing for Google (in aggregate of course).
by konart | 2025-08-26 05:45:36+00:00
Consumers are interested in everything new.

The problem is - linux (outside on server land and maybe SteamOS) is everything but (regular) user friendly.

When people buy a new phone the expect a smooth experience without any major inconveniences and uniform UI. And apps. Lots of apps. Full of features and mature UI. Linux mostly have none of it.
by dijit | 2025-08-26 05:46:15+00:00
Selection bias dictates that if this happens you won’t notice it.

I can think of a few times people have been waiting for a refresh of something only to be slightly disappointed that not much or nothing changed: even when there was really nothing wrong.

Hardware-wise: The Volvo X60 and X90 series of cars.

Software wise: Chrome, perhaps, only one major visual change in 15 years.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-26 05:47:21+00:00
Right, governments have found it very convenient to let Big Tech do most of the data collecting that would be politically problematic if they collected it themselves directly.

One doesn't have to be Einstein to realize why governments everywhere haven't cracked down on Big Tech's excesses/privacy breaches etc. ages ago.

You only have to look at the UK/Apple fiasco to see to see how desperate governments have become for user data. In this case the UK Govt. was so desperate for user data it overstepped the mark. (At least until now most other governments have been prepared to sit on the sidelines and just sap Big Tech for user info whenever they want it.)
by dendrite9 | 2025-08-26 05:47:22+00:00
It seems unlikely that we can grow enough coffee in Puerto Rico and Hawaii to make up for the difference. It might be good for those producers though.

Do you mean the lion's share of food imports or imports in general? Lots of seafood is processed elsewhere and imported the US. Strangely it appears ground beef is imported to the US even though we are a net exporter of beef.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-26 05:47:56+00:00
I tend to think its putting the memory on the package. Putting the memory on the package has given the M1 over 400GB/s which is a good 4x that on a usual dual channel x64 CPU and the latency is half that of going out to a DRAM slot. That is drastic and I remember when the northbrige was first folded into the CPU by AMD with the Athlon and it had a similarly big improvements in performance. It also reduces power consumption a lot.

The cost is flexibility and I think for now they don't want to move to fixed RAM configurations. The X3D approach from AMD gets a good bunch of the benefits by just putting lots of cache on board.

Apple got a lot of performance out of not a lot of watts.

One other possibility on power saving is the way Apple ramps the clockspeed. Its quite slow to increase from its 1Ghz idle to 3.2Ghz, about 100ms and it doesn't even start for 40ms. With tiny little bursts of activity like web browsing and such this slow transition likely saves a lot of power at a cost of absolute responsiveness.
by jabl | 2025-08-26 05:49:40+00:00
A cool (ha ha!) solution was the old Cray XT3/4 supercomputers, which were air cooled. But instead of a battalion of tiny fans, each cabinet had a single huge fan at the bottom, blowing air vertically through the cabinet (the boards were mounted vertically). No redundancy, sure, but AFAIU it was reliable enough to not be a problem in practice.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-08-26 05:50:22+00:00
This is the same argument people make between Apple and Android.

Can I use an Android phone without using Google? Yes, of course you can. There are plenty of secure OS's like Graphen, Lineage, Calyx and many others. Do people really care enough to use them? Hardly any, which proves my point.

Same thing here. Most people will just pay the fee to get the seats. Some might just opt out and not get them. Others will shop around and find some legacy cars that are older that have them but don't require a subscription.

At the end of the day? There's ALWAYS a choice. How hard do you want to look to avoid the subscription? Is it really worth your time and effort? Some would say yes, the vast majority really DGAF. People have been lulled into not caring about stuff like personal privacy and having a say in what's being peddled to you.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-26 05:50:48+00:00
Calling soup drink doesn't clarify anything. There's a lot of soup that is not drink. But "allow" vs "white",, "deny" vs "black", one is 100% more descriptive than the other

Arguing that allow/deny or allow/block is less descriptive is basically an argument of "I want things to stay the same because I'm old" or "I like to use jargon because it makes me look smarter and makes sure newbies have a harder time" (and those are the BEST two reasons of all other possibilities)

for those reasons, it's expected that using "black" instead of "deny" will have more support as programmers age and become more reactionary on average, but it doesn't make it any less stupid and racially insensitive
by adrian_b | 2025-08-26 05:50:48+00:00
The range reduction of sin/cos is slow only because of the stupid leftover from the 19th century that is the measuring of the phases and plane angles in radians.

A much better unit for phase and plane angle is the cycle, where range reduction becomes exact and very fast.

The radian had advantages for symbolic computation done with pen and paper, by omitting a constant multiplicative factor in the derivation and integration formulae.

However, even for numeric computations done with pen and paper, the radian was inconvenient so in the 19th century the sexagesimal degrees and the cycles continued to be used in parallel with the radians.

Since the development of automatic computers there has remained no reason whatsoever to use the radian for anything. Radians are never used in input sensors or output actuators, because that can be done only with low accuracy, but in physical inputs and outputs angles are always measured in fractions of a cycle. Computing derivatives or integrals happens much more seldom than other trigonometric function evaluations. Moreover, the functions that are derived or integrated almost always have another multiplicative factor in their argument, e.g. frequency or wavenumber, so that factor will also appear in the derivation/integration formula and the extra multiplication with 2Pi that appears in the derivative (or with 1/2Pi that appears in the integral) can usually be absorbed in that factor, or in any case it can be done only once for a great number of function evaluations. Therefore switching the phase unit of measurement from radian to cycle greatly reduces the amount of required computation, while also increasing the accuracy of the results.

A mathematical library should implement only the trigonometric functions of 2Pi*x, and their inverses, which suffice for all applications. There is no need for the cos and sin functions with arguments in radians, which are provided by all standard libraries now.

For reasons that are completely mysterious for me, the C standard and the IEEE standard of FP arithmetic have been updated to include the trigonometric functions of Pi*x, not the functions of 2Pi*x.

It is completely beyond my power of comprehension why this has happened. All the existing applications want to measure the phases in cycles, not in half-cycles. At most there are some applications where measuring the phases or plane angles in right angles could be more convenient, i.e. those might like trigonometric functions of (Pi/2)*x, but again not even in those cases there is any use for half-cycles.

So with the functions of the updated math libraries, e.g. cospi and sinpi, you hopefully can avoid the slow range reduction, but you still have to add a superfluous scaling by 2, due to the bad function definitions.

Similar considerations apply to the use of binary logarithms and exponentials instead of the slower and less accurate hyperbolic (a.k.a. natural) logarithms and exponentials.
by ehnto | 2025-08-26 05:51:01+00:00
Well I think wheels match the use case there, a small bot close to the ground with just the one job. I think there will be many wheeled bots to begin with. But long term I don't see that form factor scaling to "able to do all tasks around the house".

It's super easy to come up with scenarios that a wheeled bot can't cope with, but again "good enough, cheap enough" will probably see lots of wheeled bots on the market. I am just trying to show why the pioneering companies would be interested in bipedal bots, it's a long term play.

Lastly, the elephant in the room is that basically all general purpose bots are a euphemism for military bots that will need to operate in unknowable conditions.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-26 05:51:08+00:00
Again, I would challenge your assertion that this was a personal attack. This comment i responded to, to me, seemed to be coming from a place that has never managed such things on a public facing web interface. it does not seem possible to me to make such a comment without such prior knowledge. I will admit that i did not articulate my comment as such,as sibling comments sufficiently have done, and it probably came off as unnecessarily snarky, and for that I apologize - I do not see it as a personal attack though, at least not on purpose, and dont see it as being flag worthy. but that’s fine, I dont mod here, and dont pretend to know how it is to mod here. so in the future i guess i’ll just avoid such impossible to discern scrutiny if i can.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-26 05:51:48+00:00
> Food is about 90% domestically produced [1], so tariffs are inconsequential there

Prices are determined at the margin. Domestic producers suddenly have less foreign competition. That lets them raise prices. (Which is what we’re seeing, though not at an accelerated rate to what food prices were doing in ‘24 [1].)

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS
by snapplebobapple | 2025-08-26 05:52:15+00:00
I don't think it's that misguided. The incentives are so perverse here that, if the government isn't abusing it, they are acting incompetently. it would almost be better if they just had the actuary provide an expected life and expected cost chart and we agreed to pay the potential MAID recipient's estate 10% of the savings remaining on the day the chose to go, if they choose MAID.
by 7bit | 2025-08-26 05:52:19+00:00
You added too many steps.

For personal use of backing up othe local computer you ONLY need Veeam Agent for Windows Free. You install it and then configure your backup.

The step where you took a wrong turn was probably to also install Veeam Backup and Replication? That's basically the orchestrator, but you only need this in an enterprise environment where you have multiple servers to backup. In that scenario you can use the same Agent to backup standalone Windows Servers or Computers.

But in your case that is not needed. You install the Agenda and use just that to backup to (ideally a ReFS) disk or SMB share. I can only suggest to retry it. With ReFS and the forever incremental backups are very, very fast.
by tgma | 2025-08-26 05:52:21+00:00
It is possible, sure, but I have a feeling it goes unrecognized how prophetic and precise his concerns were, and that this is very similar to his original issue with the closed-source printer software he was not allowed to fix, and he does not get credit for his predictions, as people simply pass by, and not connect it to the Free Software issue, when issues like this happen; meanwhile he takes all the downsides of being brash and anti-corporate, which is taken advantage of by the Corporate Open Source crowd.
by Zak | 2025-08-26 05:52:57+00:00
> this is a clear win for the average user.

In the short term, yes. In the long term, it means Google can ban any app it doesn't like, and it means governments can compel it to do so.

Governments being able to ban software without easy workarounds could have far-reaching consequences affecting people who don't even use the software in question. This is a Bad Thing even if it helps keep a few people from getting scammed.
by tkgally | 2025-08-26 05:53:04+00:00
I can’t remember exactly when I started using Audio Hijack, but it might have been from that very first release with the free-trial bug, as I used it to record streaming radio programs beginning around 2002 or 2003. I still use it now. In fact, it’s running on my Mac at this very moment, capturing a live stream from BBC Radio 3.

There aren’t many other applications I have used for so long and with as much satisfaction as Audio Hijack.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-26 05:53:27+00:00
Well I think flat earthism is less crazy. Flat earthers believe in a physical phenomenon, they just don't have the ability to verify their hypothesis in person. This is really how science works. Where they do wrong is ignoring evidence when presented but at least we're taking about a physical thing we can see.

Religions believe in a guy in the sky who promises to look after you after you have turned to dust after you do some arbitrary things during your time on earth. Most of their followers don't even actually do these things and are pretty bad people but still believe they're going to be looked after through some creative brain twisting. For this there is no evidence and no ability to even obtain it. The only thing they have is some old books.

I think the latter is more crazy in essence. Of course most flat earthers aren't actually interested in evidence and I think most of them just say they are in order to troll.

Also flat earthers are much less of a problem in the world because there's only a handful in them and most of them are in the US where they don't really stand out in terms of craziness considering the state that country is in. It's in a post-fact state anyway for most of its population.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-26 05:54:14+00:00
> basically an argument of "I want things to stay the same because I'm old" or "I like to use jargon because it makes me look smarter and makes sure newbies have a harder time"

It’s everyone I need to communicate this to already understands what those terms mean.

Also, white and blacklisting isn’t technical jargon. It’s used across industries, by people day to day and in common media. Allow/deny listing would be jargon, because nobody outside a small circle uses it and thus unambiguously understands what it means.
by troad | 2025-08-26 05:55:35+00:00
Literally the abstract of that very study:

> Only 12.1% correctly answered ≥4 of 5 knowledge questions about the MAID law; only 19.2% knew terminal illness is not required and 20.2% knew treatment refusal is compatible with eligibility. 73.3% of participants expressed support for the MAID law in general, matching a nationally representative poll that used the same question. 40.4% of respondents supported MAID for mental illnesses. Support for MAID in the scenarios depicting refusal or lack of access to treatment ranged from 23.2% (lack of access in medical condition) to 32.0% (treatment refusal in medical illness)

Most Canadians express support for MAID but cannot correctly answer questions about it. When Canadians are actually told what's in MAID, they oppose it.

It's also worth noting that quite a lot of polling on this question is done by, or on behalf of, pro-euthanasia organisations; there is often a huge mismatch between the questions asked and the actual legislation proposed and passed (in a very motte-and-bailey kind of way).
by Yokolos | 2025-08-26 05:55:36+00:00
When governments across the globe are becoming more authoritarian, we need to protect our ability to run whatever app we want. Otherwise they'll ban communication apps when we step out of line and protest, as we've seen in places like Hong Kong on more locked down platforms like iOS. This isn't about power users. It doesn't matter how many links you post. The US is literally turning into an authoritarian dictatorship before our eyes. Germany's AfD now commands 25% of the vote and it keeps increasing. Far right parties are gaining ground everywhere.

We can't be handwringing about safety right now, because our right to free speech and to protest are at stake. Our democracies are at stake here.
by chii | 2025-08-26 05:56:12+00:00
> People install games from Steam or the Epic Store on their computers without Microsoft preventing that

microsoft wishes they could have the level of platform control that google/apple on mobiles have.

It's pure luck that the IBM-compatible PC was not locked down and restricted, because at the time IBM had not thought of it as being important. When it became clear that it was a lost profit opportunity, the cat was already out of the bag and so IBM had no choice.

Microsoft repeated the same "mistake". But apple learnt, and google also from apple.