MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timr | 2025-08-28 02:50:31+00:00
> It's possible for such biases to persist for a long time: In general, older climate models tended to overestimate the amount of CO2 that would be emitted but underestimate the effects it would have.

I didn't want to get into this because it clouds the topic at hand and makes it sounds like I'm debating the quality of the models, but you're just objectively wrong -- it's well-known that some of the major climate models have "run hot":

https://www.science.org/content/article/use-too-hot-climate-...

In addition, every publication (including this one) that use modeling results show a wide dispersion around the mean.
by kragen | 2025-08-28 02:50:49+00:00
I have a Compose key binding in https://github.com/kragen/xcompose which maps Compose Space Minus to "—" with two thin spaces on each side of it, because I prefer the spaces. But HN rewrites the thin spaces to regular spaces, so on HN I just use "—" without the spaces, the way ChatGPT does, which is Compose Minus Minus Minus, and is in the standard Compose key bindings (if you map your keyboard to have a Compose key at all).

Examples within the last week include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44996702, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989129, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991769, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989444. I typed all of those.

I never use space-hyphen-space instead of an em dash. I do sometimes use TeX's " --- ".
by tern | 2025-08-28 02:50:52+00:00
from https://are.al.are.na/

> With Areal, Dinamo designed an updated version of Arial especially suited for Are.na, but which still honors the original. Stem thicknesses were streamlined, more characters added (), a monospace version drawn, dark mode functionality optimized. You probably wouldn’t have noticed these changes if you hadn’t read this statement. It’s possible you still won’t. But to us (Are.na and Dinamo) Areal’s existence is satisfying in the way that rewriting an entire front-end is satisfying. As stated in this text block from 5 years ago, “the reason you would create something is because you love it enough to see it exist.”
by rramadass | 2025-08-28 02:52:34+00:00
The release dates for them should explain it (from wikipedia); MFC - 1992, VCL - 1995 and C++Builder - 1997

So VC++/MFC was already established by the time VCL/C++Builder came along. Also it was aimed mostly at the Delphi/Object Pascal crowd whereas most Win16/32 C SDK crowd found the transition to VC++ more natural.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-28 02:53:22+00:00
The key step change for space demand is probably when launch cost decreases (in terms of $/mass) and availability increases (in terms of max freq of launches) enough so as to make private industry space resource extraction and processing profitable.

Once there's a usable supply chain at the top of the gravity well (or on bodies with lower gravity), a lot of other launch demand is unlocked, because you can do truly interesting things (colonization et al).
by xenotux | 2025-08-28 02:55:00+00:00
> Role power is by far the least effective.

To be frank: it sounds nice, but I don't think that's really true. It's the power of "who's going to decide my promotions", "who is going to advocate for my team and get us more resources", "who approves my expenses", "who is going to protect me if something goes wrong", etc.

This doesn't give the manager a pass if their ideas are objectionable, but if they're credible, it's a huge advantage. Small disagreements disappear and people fall in line behind your vision, get excited about it, and make things happen.

In contrast, in an IC role, you can successfully push for initiatives, but you're always working against that dynamic. The merit of your idea aside, folks might simply feel that you're pushing them in a direction that's less likely to get them rewarded or recognized within their reporting chain. That takes extra effort to overcome.

Being very visibly anointed by some VP helps, but that's tapping into the exec's leverage, not yours. And that approach has downsides; I worked with more than one architect / uber-TL person who were universally disliked and feared. The perception was that they showed up to make your life worse by putting extra work on your plate, without having much skin in the game.
by notpushkin | 2025-08-28 02:55:25+00:00
Adding a library has nothing to do with that. You can implement it yourself in a few lines of code, especially if you only need one path, like configs. You do need to research for caveats (e.g. check $XDG_CONFIG_HOME on Linux and not just put it into ~/.config) but it’s not rocket science.

And if you choose to just trust library authors, you are putting their ideas there instead. There’s that Rust crate that uses XDG on macOS, for example.
by userbinator | 2025-08-28 02:55:49+00:00
We don't overclock or overvolt or play other teen games with our hardware.

But doesn't the hardware "overclock" and "overvolt" automatically these days?

This reminds me of the Intel CPUs with similar problems a year ago, and AFAIK it was caused by excessive voltage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41039708
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-28 02:56:25+00:00
Indeed, I write very reliable Python every day. A lot faster than the Rust straitjacket too.

We had sentry installed so I know exactly how many exceptions were happening, rare to zero. Lots of tests/constraints on the database as well.

That said I like a nice tight straitjacket at other times. Just not every day. ;-).

P.S. Python doesn’t have the billion-dollar-mistake with nulls. You have to purposely set a variable to None.
by viccis | 2025-08-28 02:56:25+00:00
Good. It's a crutch for poorly composed sentences or for prose intending to imitate the affect of poorly composed sentences. There's not a single sentence under the sun that needs an emdash. Commas and parentheses can do it all, and an excess of either is a sign of poorly edited prose.

I don't buy the pro-clanker pro-em dash movement that has come out of nowhere in the past several years.
by gardnr | 2025-08-28 02:56:59+00:00
Memory Bandwidth:

Nvidia DGX: 273 GB/s

M4 Max: (up to) 546 GB/s

M3 Ultra: 819 GB/s

RTX 5090: ~1.8 TB/s

RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell: ~1.8 TB/s
by chatmasta | 2025-08-28 02:57:44+00:00
No, I'm comparing 4chan to Kiwi Farms. Neither of them have positive reputations. But between the two of them, Kiwi Farms is clearly worse, if only because it's more fringe and has no "base" of support. There is a large cohort of people who are not very familiar with 4chan but will support it philosophically based on right-leaning tribalism and its reputation as a bastion of free speech. Nobody knows Kiwi Farms and anyone who looks them up will find little redeemable about them.

All I'm saying is that if, for example, 4chan has 50% probability of mustering support from the political right, then Kiwi Farms has 25%. And together they have less chance than 4chan would have by itself.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-28 02:57:54+00:00
Just wait until the US' low orbit sensing/networking satellite cloud is fully deployed (with radar, GMTI, AMTI).

That's the vital strategic asset, because suddenly the US will have ASAT-tolerant space sensing capability (by virtue of decentralization and numbers) while other countries will still have exquisite assets.

Starlink is interesting, but the above is a game changer at the level of when the Key Holes were launched or the GPS constellation was completed.
by teleforce | 2025-08-28 02:58:19+00:00
I think the UMA is the secret sauce for faster PC/laptop that people tend to overlook since You Can Never Has Enough RAM (TM).

I'm planning to buy HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop with AMD Ryzen Strix and it seems to be a very good alternative to Apple M series laptop [1]. It can support up to 128 GB RAM (up to 96 GB VRAM) and should be able to run GPT-OSS 120B model.

[1] HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14" Mobile Workstation PC:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/zbook-ultra.html
by ryao | 2025-08-28 02:59:16+00:00
I was referring to POSIX functions when talking about stubs versus unimplemented functions. Messaging in a programming language is a different animal; one that I have yet to fully understand. Objective C for example resolves messages to function calls, so they look like function calls to me. I would love to know how they differ, but I have never dug into it.
by e808 | 2025-08-28 02:59:41+00:00
I agree whole heartedly. My aging father went through a process of trying to call in a repair/replacement on a oven on a extended warranty, and the level of run around and hoops he had to take to get them to process and actually perform the service was incredible, things like having to pull out the oven and take a pic of the serial number and send it via email to several addresses, pictures of the receipt, contract, etc. Its a good thing he kept good records. Eventually after several weeks of back and forth and 3 failed repair attempts, they sent him a check for the full amount for replacement.
by frollogaston | 2025-08-28 03:00:04+00:00
TLM is fine. TPM is the awkward one. I don't understand what hierarchy (if any) there is to TPMs, they kinda float around and ask people to do stuff. Some projects get passed around to different TPMs like hot potato. The skilled TPMs stick around and make things happen, but even then idk how that works because they lead people without having any actual reports.
by fragmede | 2025-08-28 03:00:17+00:00
What's the woo-issue? If you go on a $30,000 retreat to find yourself, first off, where'd you get $30 grand to do that with, but if you're going to spend that much on that, does it really matter what mystical energy the shaman believes in? So it's machine elves vs Gaia vs we're living in a simulation. It's not like there are numbers for this kind of thing. Before I went in, I scored 78 on the "how lost am I", and then at place A, for $30,000, and 1 month, I was only scoring 20 on the "how lost am I" scale, so $517 per point. Place B is $300 per point on the "how lost am I" scale, but takes more time.
by raybb | 2025-08-28 03:01:36+00:00
Looks really nice for it's niche.

I very recently started considering the options around and really wanna give a shot to the federated version called Mobilizon. It seems to be gaining quite some popularity according to the stats but it's mostly in Europe.

There is a US instance though with some decent amount of activity.

https://mobilizon.us

It's still a little rough around the edges but the devs (french nonprofit that made peertube) just got money to fix that up so I really hope they make good headway. I'm gonna start a group on there soon and hopefully that'll lead to some useful bug reports and feedback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilizon
by ramses0 | 2025-08-28 03:01:39+00:00
I'll use them in macros fairly frequently: vawy'f => function name, vi{y'b => body, vi(y'a => args

...or y'x to keep something kindof handy that I can drop in at the right place (sometimes with a macro...)

qadi('xpq => @a => @@...

(Record macro "a", delete inner parentheses, paste from the "x" register, stop recording => play macro "a" => play last macro...)

If I keep "x" clean/protected then I can delete or edit the rest of the time all willy-nilly and not worry about clobbering what I'm trying to paste into the right spots.
by kragen | 2025-08-28 03:04:12+00:00
I agree in that narrow sense—but shutting down social media sites denies the sites' users their human right of expression, as well as other basic human rights*. The fact that the site operator doesn't necessarily suffer this harm† seems like an irrelevant distraction, and I have no idea why you brought it up, or why you keep repeating it, if you agree that the site users are being illegitimately harmed.

______

* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.

† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-08-28 03:04:27+00:00
I don't think blogging is dead. It just moved on to different places. Non-tech majorly moved to 3rd party sites like Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, Bearblog, Substack and ghost etc. And technical Folks moatly to SSGs.

And it's not the only method anymore. We are far more connected as far as social media is concerned so it might feel like blogging is dead.

I mean, most posts I click are individual blogs here in HN. WordPress blogs kind of things just moved to 3rd party sites like medium etc I mentioned above. Hosting WordPress blogs were easier then. Now it's using Medium, Substack where you can make money as well.

I wrote about this a while ago. Where I share a lot more links of independent blog scenes- https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...
by acdha | 2025-08-28 03:05:16+00:00
> That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

There’s a subculture effect: this has been trivial on Apple devices for a long time—I’m pretty sure I learned the Shift-Option-hyphen shortcut in the 90s, long before iOS introduced the long-press shortcut—and that’s also been a world disproportionately popular with the kind of people who care about this kind of detail. If you spend time in communities with designers, writers, etc. your sense of what’s common is wildly off the average.
by tomhow | 2025-08-28 03:05:27+00:00
I don't really know or care what any of this is meant to mean, but you can't comment like this on HN, regardless of the topic. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043113 and marked it off topic.
by woooooo | 2025-08-28 03:06:44+00:00
Yeah, but that is a continuum and not binary. Xi isnt personally in a room pulling levers that control everything.

There are thousands of bureaucratic orgs and corporations making their own calls, deepseek and qwen were both trained on nvidia hardware, while several chip startups and SMIC ramp up.

The nature of those calls is influenced by culture. If you have a culture of MBAs, you get Intel's actions over the last 15 years.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-08-28 03:07:35+00:00
I hope these people are able to find other ways to protect the public from disease, even if not at CDC.

I respect their decisions, but our country deeply needs scientists so committed to the Hippocratic oath that they’d rather resign than contribute to endangering public safety.

Those who do not seek power are most fit to hold it.

I have nothing really to say other than this is saddening to read.
by guessmyname | 2025-08-28 03:07:53+00:00
In my native language, I tend to use more sophisticated, academic, or professional vocabulary. But when I speak or write in English, I usually stick to simpler words because they’re easier for most people, both native and non-native speakers, to understand. For years, I’ve avoided using the kind of advanced vocabulary I normally would in my native language when writing in English, mainly because I didn’t want it to come across as something written by a bot.

And in writing, I like using long dashes—but since they’ve become associated with ChatGPT’s style, I’ve been more hesitant to use them.

Now that a lot of these “LLM buzzwords” have become more common in everyday English, I feel more comfortable using them in conversation.

“Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?!” — Sofia Vergara (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t34JMTy0gxs)
by Insanity | 2025-08-28 03:08:06+00:00
Do you mean fall of Rome (empire) or fall of Rome (republic)?

Fall of Rome’s republic was deliberate and for personal gain / profit.

Edit:

And I’m not saying it’s a one-to-one comparison, like a bad sequel film.. I’m saying that it’s comparable at a layer of abstraction. The fall of two large “empires” with a ton of influence on the world.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-08-28 03:09:06+00:00
When politicians of certain stripes wanted to spend money on renaming SF schools to atone for "past trauma" and canceling math because it's "not equitable" - that somehow wasn't a travesty. Spending some money on design is apparently the most evil thing imaginable though.

Thankfully the tiger moms of SF stood up for their kids and got the grifters kicked out. Let's stand up to lowbrow idiotic articles like this one too.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-08-28 03:09:22+00:00
Wasn't Arial designed to be very Helvetica-like but not having to be licensed? The C# / Java situation of typefaces as it were.

Arial is the gateway drug to Helvetica. Pretty soon you're debating the relative merits of Johnston Sans to Akzidenz Grotesk to Univers to DIN 1451 to Bahnschrift to Overpass...

Anyway - Arial has a certain charm, and I know that normcore 90's web design has had a resurgence in the past decade. And I am an Are.na user. But even still, I don't really get why one would go to such lengths to recreate something that is the typeface version of a polo and khakis...
by coder543 | 2025-08-28 03:09:23+00:00
You were complaining about speed. Yes, a PC can have the same ports, and then you get much faster speeds than Thunderbolt can provide.

Why would you ever want a DGX Spark to talk to a “normal PC” at 40+ Gbps speeds anyways? The normal PC has nothing that interesting to share with it.

But, yes, the DGX Spark does have four USB4 ports which support 40Gbps each, the same as Thunderbolt 4. I still don’t see any use case for connecting one of those to a normal PC.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-28 03:10:30+00:00
> Being very visibly anointed by some VP helps, but that's essentially tapping into the exec's leverage - an illusion of IC influence.

Of course that’s the play. Even a lind manager can’t get major initiatives through without getting the buy in from their manager. When I was working for startups, the director (1st company I had influence at) and the CTO at the second had been convinced of my idea and gave me the authority to pull who I needed to get it done.

Fast forward past BigTech to where I work now - a third party AWS consulting company, after convincing the powers that be of the market, I had it escalated to be one of the companies initiatives for the year.

But more so in BigTech, promotions aren’t completely on your manager. At least at AWS you had to have recommendations by I believe two or three people one level ahead of you and it had to go through a committee.

From talking to a couple of L4s that I mentored when they were interns and when they came back, they were both complaining about the promotion process even though their manager supported them.
by tern | 2025-08-28 03:10:37+00:00
Most of the responses here are extremely cringe. Allow me to make a case for this piece:

Are.na is a 12+ year old online community primarily for artists and designers. The developers have been able to keep the community high quality and fresh by consistently making tasteful choices—everything from not running ads to ignoring design trends and avoiding attention-jacking.

There have been many, many clones, and you'll find that they seldom last or stay interesting to their core audiences.

Their usage of Arial is a throwback to their roots (in early del.icio.us and websurfing culture), and works well for the intended purpose of allowing the website to take a back seat to the content. From my perspective, it feels both "cool"—irreverent, contextually aware—and functional, and as such I think it's both a great brand move and a great design move.

Now: imagine you're building a product over decades, and you're committed to using a font that's old, limited and owned by Microsoft. No monospace version. Limited character set. No modern features like variable weights. And someone comes along and is like: "I'd love to re-draw the font so that you can have modern features, a clear license that's tailored to your needs, and as a bonus it'll be a great story and we can write an article about the process for marketing."

"We re-drew Arial." Hilarious! And what's more, we have more degrees of freedom for future designs, and maybe the font looks just slightly better.

That's what happening here. It's not satire, just good fun and functionality.
by ryao | 2025-08-28 03:11:34+00:00
The curiosity of learning is infeasible given that there are >15,000 programming languages. You might say to only learn the major/influential languages, but I have found my curiosity to wane with every additional language that I learn. So far, I have either used or dabbled in C, C++, FORTRAN, SML/NJ, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, POSIX Shell, Assembly and SQL stored procedures. That is not to mention different dialects/versions of those, and the fact that assembly itself is a catch all category in which I have dabbled in multiple languages too. I am also not including languages for which I spent a minuscule amount of time (say a few hours), such as D (as in DTrace), Objective-C, Perl, COBOL and LISP. Then there is the misadventure into C# I took before I actually understood programming where I got stuck and dropped it. I am also not sure if I should mention AWK, as I only use it to select the Nth field in a bunch of lines of text when doing shell scripting and nothing else. Thus, I have used it many times, yet know almost none of its syntax.

Every few years, someone tells me I should learn another language, and in recent years, there just is no desire in my mind to want to learn yet another language that is merely another way of doing something that I already can do elsewhere and the only way I will is if I am forced (that is how I used Go).

That said, I do see what you are saying. C++ for example has an “support every paradigm” philosophy, so whenever someone who has learned C++ encounters a language using a paradigm that C++ assimilated, there is a huge temptation to try to view it through the lens of C++. I also can see the other side too: “C++ took me forever to learn. Why go through that again when I can use C++ as a shortcut to understand something else?”. C++ is essentially the Borg of programming languages.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-28 03:12:40+00:00
Question for the audience, because I've always been curious.

Have there ever been any historical plans for a permanently-transiting interplanetary craft?

A large craft is built, accelerated up to speed (since time wouldn't be a factor, high Isp/low-thrust engines could be used), then left looping between Earth and X at constant high speed, with smaller (and shorter-term) craft accelerating to meet it (e.g. underway replenishment with crew and fuel transfer) or decelerating at the destination.

Heck, if you've got something optionally-crewed, you could have it continuously burning for years to build up speed.

Or do solar system astrodynamics make waiting and then burning like hell from orbital speeds during optimal transit windows more efficient?