MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 23:11:08+00:00
> you can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good

You can let bad be the enemy of both good and perfect.

Investment in manufacturing structures is down in ‘25 [1]. Manufacturing activity in the northeast is down, with “the new orders index dip[ping] into negative territory” [2].

Tariffs can reduce trade imbalances and incentivize domestic production. We’re not doing that. Our tariffs are too volatile. They tax manufacturing inputs. Tweets grasping for the straws of a Nobel prize cede prized export markets like India to China [3]. Cancelled licenses for nearly-complete projects add risk [4].

The policies of a degrowth leftist who wanted to reduce our industrial output and pivot to manufacturing would be virtually identical.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RX1Q020SBEA

[2] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/regional-ec...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/politics/trump-modi-in...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
by GeorgeTirebiter | 2025-08-30 23:12:31+00:00
The XROS thing sounds sort of like the PenPoint OS -- which was used with the EO 440 and EO 880 tablet + Cellphone-connected computers that came out around the same time as Newton (early 90s) - but with larger screens and cellular voice/data/fax connectivity (optional). Their tagline was "The Pen is the Point". Besides having a WACOM tablet as the pen-input device (requiring a driver), and baking in the notion that (at that time was true): connectivity was sporadic, and therefore you had to be opportunistic when you got a reliable cell signal (or were plugged into a phone jack). Those two ideas sure as heck did not require a whole new OS to support. But PenPoint built a company to market said OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector Interestingly, this company ended up being folded into EO itself, as there seemed to be no market for a pen-based OS.

The EOs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator?usesk... used the AT&T Hobbit chipset, which was a descendant from the CRISP architecture. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/30350.30385 by Dave Ditzel et al. The architecture was informed by examining millions of lines of unix C code; the arch was an attempt to execute C code well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Hobbit?useskin=vector It was a beautiful overall design. The design focused on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls. The 32-bit architecture of Hobbit was well-suited to portable computing, and almost ended up in the Apple Newton. The manual is possibly worth a peruse: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/att/hobbit/ATT92010_Hobb...
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-30 23:12:38+00:00
The JavaScript invented by Eich is nothing like the clusterfuck that is the modern JavaScript ecosystem. And modern node.js code will look nothing like the JavaScript Eich developed for Mozilla.

Equally, PHP3 is worlds apart from modern PHP.

Your point is a little like saying “motorbikes are easy to maintain because they’re based on the penny-farthing”. Times have changed and your references are literally decades out-of-date.
by tim333 | 2025-08-30 23:12:50+00:00
I was having a look after that at the current state of AI robots and they are coming along, eg. this is a figure robot folding towels https://x.com/minchoi/status/1961798845584613649

You don't have to extrapolate that much improvement for them to start having an impact and I imagine factories in China will churn them out like they do most other tech.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-30 23:13:03+00:00
> I would recommend you take an entry level CCW class.

I had to take one to get my Texas License To Carry (at the time a concealed carry license). I don't know what they teach in other states, but Texas has strict regulations on when and how to use deadly force. Including when to point a gun at someone.

Basically, not having a round chambered means you're too late to do anything with that gun other than use it an expensive blunt instrument -- or -- be possibly charged for brandishing/intimidation. Either you are being approached/charged at and are in immediate danger of bodily harm or you are not. If you are, you better have a loaded round ready to discharge.

Ofc, there is also the use of deadly force to protect the immediate and active threat to personal property. No real immediate need to have one loaded here. However, I don't think people carry because they are waiting to shoot someone trying to steal their car or other property under the Castle Doctrine. Which if someone is willing to kill another who is stealing their parked empty car, there are bigger talks to have other than if they are carrying with a load round or not. I don't usually keep a round chambered at home, my siblings have offspring that come around and even though it's a bit of a family tradition to learn to learn gun safety and shooting before age 10 -- I still don't care for the thought of a fully loaded gun not in my immediate possession.
by BlarfMcFlarf | 2025-08-30 23:13:39+00:00
You can pick any set of axis you feel like and get similar results. “Do you like X? Wow you are an X person!”. So yeah, technically better than horoscopes, more like a “warm” reading where you tell a person what they told you earlier. But it’s entirely unclear why these axis are the right ones over a million other possible ones, if these are particularly stable categories in time and context, or if the harm of encouraging people to box themselves or others into specific stereotypes has any possible benefit to outweigh the obvious harms of simplifying stereotypes.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-30 23:14:13+00:00
The first one is by Linus? And his replies (at least the ones I read) are - to me- less aggressive then the rest of the mails in that chain

The second has one offensive remark:

> Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.

which I thought he admitted was out of line and - said sorry for. Or do I misremember? I admit once again, I'm still completely uninvolved and merely saw it play out on the internet.
by tombert | 2025-08-30 23:14:27+00:00
That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand.

Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you.

ETA:

Just realized that the source for the one I posted was pretty dubious (Bill Meridian is apparently a "financial astrologer", whatever that means), so here's a more reputable one: https://northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/the-war-of-1812/
by jijijijij | 2025-08-30 23:14:35+00:00
I hoped someone had hijacked that name for an actual "amusement park for engineers", coincidentally hitting all the right key words, but in terms of trademark protections occupying a completely unrelated commercial domain. Would be really, really funny if Anduril (not the amusement park) sales and marketing folks would have to append "not the amusement park", when speaking about Anduril (not the amusement park).
by koverstreet | 2025-08-30 23:14:58+00:00
No, the problem wasn't following the rules.

The patch that kicked off the current conflict was the 'journal_rewind' patch; we recently (6.15) had the worst bug in the entire history upstream - it was taking out entire subvolumes.

The third report got me a metadata dump with everything I needed to debug the issue, thank god, and now we have a great deal of hardening to ensure a bug like this can never happen again. Subsequently, I wrote new repair code, which fully restored the filesystem of the 3rd user hit by the bug (first two had backups).

Linus then flipped out because it was listed as a 'feature' in the pull request; it was only listed that way to make sure that users would know about it if they were affected by the original bug and needed it. Failure to maintain your data is always a bug for a filesystem, and repair code is a bugfix.

In the private maintainer thread, and even in public, things went completely off the rails, with Linus and Ted basically asserting that they knew better than I do which bcachefs patches are regression risks (seriously), and a page and a half rant from Linus on how he doesn't trust my judgement, and a whole lot more.

There have been many repeated arguments like this over bugfixes.

The thing is, since then I started perusing pull requests from other subsystems, and it looks like I've actually been more conservative with what I consider a critical bugfix (and send outside the merge window) than other subsystems. The _only_ thing that's been out of the ordinary with bcachefs has been the volume of bugfixes - but that's exactly what you'd expect to see from a new filesystem that's stabilizing rapidly and closing out user bug reports - high volume of pure bugfixing is exactly what you want to see.

So given that, I don't think having a go-between would solve anything.
by danabramov | 2025-08-30 23:15:12+00:00
You can think of ATProto like this.

Each user has a "website" with JSON of their own content (e.g. all my posts, all my likes, all my follows, actually live in a sqlite database hosted somewhere). It's not really a website but more like a git repo — one per user.

And then, there's a protocol for how to aggregate information from all such "websites" in the network into a stream of changes. Apps subscribe to that stream of changes and update their local databases (which act as app-specific caches) in response to those events.

When I make a Bluesky post, I'm really writing JSON into my sqlite file. This change gets broadcasted to all interested apps which update their own databases (which may or may not care about specific content type like "Bluesky post"). Obviously forks of Bluesky backend do index Bluesky posts (and then return them in the same UI), but you could imagine other backends that only care about other content types, or that record Bluesky posts but in a different database structure, and ofc can present a different UI for it.

Yes, you can run your own node — multiple types of nodes. You run your own PDS (https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds) to store own data (that's the "website" in my analogy), or you could run a Relay (https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l) that collects all PDS changes into a stream, or you could run an AppView (any backend that listens to Relay or PDS, basically your own app).
by bigyabai | 2025-08-30 23:15:46+00:00
I just explained it to you and you ignored my comment. Here is a simplification if it helps:

1991-1994: They nuke Moscow.

1994-present day: American strategic deterrence takes over.

If any part of that is unclear to you then I urge that you reread the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances and return to the discussion with the rest of the context.

Anduril does not manufacture strategic deterrents. If you think they're the solution to the Budapest Memorandum then you're the sort of armchair YouTube General that the Army filters out in officer school. It's not hard to understand, anyone can Google the difference between strategy and tactics.
by liampulles | 2025-08-30 23:17:36+00:00
I'm starting to build a bit of antagonism to all-encompassing frameworks (e.g. Spring, Larvel, Phoenix, etc.), because while they are productive to build new things with, I seem to always have the same issue on legacy projects built with them.

It always seems to be a challenge to upgrade dependencies for these projects. Its usually because (in building the thing) one can't fully follow the "prescribed" way of doing things with the god framework, because each project has to deal with a niche infrastructure environment and/or business context that requires some hack or additional dependency. Then when you need to, say, upgrade a language version, you can't follow the god framework's guide for doing this (if there even is a decent one) because it will break your workaround. So you end up with this hodgepodge which never gets updated until it reaches a critical point where it cannot continue to run on your infrastructure, and it forces a big migration project.

Using a selection of libraries to build up the elements of a web service, and creating your own high-level abstractions for utilizing them, does require an additional time investment, but it leaves you in more control to do upgrades piece by piece, and to pivot the way things work when it is needed.

I feel like the Go ecosystem follows the latter approach more than most, and it was bit of a mindset shift for me at first, but I've grown to appreciate it.
by XorNot | 2025-08-30 23:17:40+00:00
Yeah you might want to take a look at what's happening in Europe then. Because your options are "have an effective conventional military force, ideally enough to deter an invasion" and "have nuclear weapons and threaten Armageddon at the smallest of provocations" (which was correctly identified as impractical during the Cold War: would the US trade the Eastern Seaboard to protect Berlin? Fairly obviously no...)
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-30 23:17:58+00:00
My bank's two-factor authentication system lets the user select the communications method before logging in, so I set my phone number to a 555 exchange, making it invalid, and it hasn't cause any trouble. A teller did once notice it, but agreed it was a good idea.

There's no way the legal system could require a phone number, because the government overplays their support for the homeless, and being able to work with people that don't have phone numbers is a big part of that.
by JdeBP | 2025-08-30 23:20:26+00:00
That's backwards. People in that age bracket grew up with computers where the em dash was not in the character set at all, and typewriters and terminals only had a minus key.

The people who grew up with the em dash are the younger HTML generation of 30 years ago where &mdash; was at least a reasonably convenient character entity even if they were using computers with the various 8-bit character sets that did not contain it.
by hereme888 | 2025-08-30 23:20:50+00:00
Let's see how it performs in the real world. The website makes some outlandish claims, like 1.86 TOPS/W leads the industry... NVIDIA's comparable RTX 6000 Pro gives out 6.67 TOPS/W. Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 Ultra has like 100 TOPS/W.
by usernamed7 | 2025-08-30 23:21:35+00:00
There is always a choice.

To be clear, i am talking about: you apply, they send you a response (sometimes automated) telling you to do a couple hours of work, and only then will they decide if they want to speak with you.

This a great way to waste one's limited time on a role that might not even be a fit. If they aren't even willing to spend 15 minutes talking to you first, i would encourage everyone, at any level, to bounce. If they are at all serious, they'll speak with you first.

And I'll also highlight: you never know when they are using you for their own goals, like AI training. Or if it's a ghost job. Or if they aren't hiring for your state. Lots of stuff can come up that would make your work null & void.

To prevent burn out, you really have to guard your time. companies can structure things to be highly optimized for them, and very expensive for you.
by ednite | 2025-08-30 23:21:44+00:00
While I’d personally love for this to turn out to be alien tech, history suggests natural explanations usually win out. Still, it raises good questions.

I asked ChatGPT for a summary:

"3I/ATLAS is an interstellar visitor that doesn’t behave like any comet we know. It’s huge, gives off unusual gases, and shows strange chemistry that has some scientists wondering if it could even be artificial in origin. More answers should come as it swings close to the Sun in late 2025. In short: a massive interstellar object with a CO₂-dominated tail, odd nickel-without-iron chemistry, and an orbit strangely aligned with our Solar System — raising more questions than answers."
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-30 23:22:08+00:00
I think that if people want to write some new program or documentation or whatever else and prefer to use different words, that is OK as long as it is still clear (rather than becoming confusing due to it; but sometimes the difference words can result in less confusion instead, which is good), but this does not necessarily justify changing existing things (there are reasons to do it but it is not always the good idea to do), and should not ban words due to this.
by dom96 | 2025-08-30 23:22:26+00:00
> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to.

I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.
by jibal | 2025-08-30 23:22:45+00:00
Well of course that's completely ahistorical. The motivator was eliminating block terminators. Python's predecessor, ABC, was a teaching language; programs were small and refactoring was not a thing. Heck, copy-paste was hardly a thing, and there certainly were no auto formatters. Indented code was a step up from BASIC, the teaching language prevalent at the time.
by ajuc | 2025-08-30 23:22:57+00:00
I like to make truth tables for understanding piles of ifs. Like there's 5 ifs with 5 different conditions - so I make 5 columns and 32 rows, and enumerate all the possible combinations of these 5 ifs and write what happens for each. And then what should happen.

Of course, the disadvantage is the exponential growth. 20 ifs means a million cases (usually less because the conditions aren't independent, but still).

Then I have a flat list of all possible cases, and I can reconstruct a minimal if tree if I really want to (or just keep it as a list of cases - much easier to understand that way, even if less efficient).
by koverstreet | 2025-08-30 23:25:27+00:00
1 - you absolutely can and should walk reverse mappings in the filesystem so that from a corrupt block you can tell the user which file was corrupted.

In the future bcachefs will be rolling out auxiliary dirent indices for a variety of purposes, and one of those will be to give you a list of files that have had errors detected by e.g. scrub (we already generally tell you the affected filename in error messages)

2 - No, metadata robustness absolutely varies across filesystems.

From what I've seen, ext4 and bcachefs are the gold standard here; both can recover from basically arbitrary corruption and have no single points of failure.

Other filesystems do have single points of failure (notably btree roots), and btrfs and I believe ZFS are painfully vulnerable to devices with broken flush handling. You can blame (and should) blame the device and the shitty manufacturers, but from the perspective of a filesystem developer, we should be able to cope with that without losing the entire filesystem.

XFS is quite a bit better than btrfs, and I believe ZFS, because they have a ton of ways to reconstruct from redundant metadata if they lose a btree root, but it's still possible to lose the entire filesystem if you're very, very unlucky.

On a modern filesystem that uses b-trees, you really need a way of repairing from lost b-tree roots if you want your filesystem to be bulletproof. btrfs has 'dup' mode, but that doesn't mean much on SSDs given that you have no control over whether your replicas get written to the same erase unit.

Reiserfs actually had the right idea - btree node scan, and reconstruct your interior nodes if necessary. But they gave that approach a bad name; for a long time it was a crutch for a buggy b-tree implementation, and they didn't seed a filesystem specific UUID into the btree node magic number like bcachefs does, so it could famously merge a filesystem from a disk image with the host filesystem.

bcachefs got that part right, and also has per-device bitmaps in the superblock for 'this range of the device has btree nodes' so it's actually practical even if you've got a massive filesystem on spinning rust - and it was introduced long after the b-tree implementation was widely deployed and bulletproof.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-30 23:25:50+00:00
That's what I do use, when a phone number is needed. The only placed that seemed to notice was OpenAI, but my GPU has 16 GB of RAM, so I run all my inferencing locally, using open models, which is a good idea anyway.

The bigger problem with Google Voice is that Google's email gateway for SMS is awful. It cuts off outgoing messages after two carriage returns, strips out single carriage returns, and won't send me group messages, instead sending me a link to the message, and even that only rarely, usually not even notifying me that I received a group message.

I've found a few alternatives, and I wouldn't mind paying a few dollars a month for one, but every one I've looked into requires I upload a copy of my photo ID, and I'm definately not going to do that.
by tomrod | 2025-08-30 23:28:37+00:00
> A professor sets up a challenge between a mathematics major and an engineering major

> They were both put in a room and at the other end was a $100 and a free A on a test. The experimenter said that every 30 seconds they could travel half the distance between themselves and the prize. The mathematician stormed off, calling it pointless. The engineer was still in. The mathematician said “Don’t you see? You’ll never get close enough to actually reach her.” The engineer replied, “So? I’ll be close enough for all practical purposes.”

While you nod your head OR wag your finger, you continuously pass by that arbitrary epsilon you set around your self-disappointment regarding the ineffability of the limit; yet, the square root of two is both well defined and exists in the universe despite our limits to our ability to measure it.

Thankfully, it exists in nature anyhow -- just find a right angle!

One could simply define it as the ratio of the average distance between neighboring fluoride atoms and the average distance of fluoride to xenon in xenon tetrafluoride.
by saurik | 2025-08-30 23:28:59+00:00
Anyone can construct a service like Coinbase, and in fact there are numerous such sites available; at this point, you can even use PayPal! You don't even have to continue using the same one you started with: you can buy Bitcoin with PayPal and then sell it with Coinbase. It seems like a very strange definition of centralized to say that this causes any kind of centralization on Bitcoin...
by quag | 2025-08-30 23:30:49+00:00
Ok, I'll bite. From the article I can't really figure out what collaborating by contract (CBC) is, how it works in practice or how to introduce it to an organization.

A search in Google for "Collaborate by contract" gives three results, all from the same person, all in the last few weeks. Including this new article it's 1776 words in total on CBC. It doesn't seem to be real or something that has been tried out in an organization. It appears to be Al Newkirk's idea for a system that could work, but has not been tried.

Specifically, I'd like to see an example of a contract and who agrees to it; what the journal of contracts looks like; what happens when after an agreement everyone learns something that they didn't know when the agreements were made; what are the leaders committing to and what happens when they fail to deliver that?

Links found on CBC: https://www.alnewkirk.com/bidirectional-accountability/ https://www.alnewkirk.com/understanding-collaborate-by-contr... https://www.alnewkirk.com/maybe-its-time-to-change-the-way-w... https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/1n04s5z/comme...