MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Taek | 2025-08-09 08:14:51+00:00
Yeah, I spent a ton of time yesterday comparing o3, 4.5, 5, 5 thinking, and 5 pro, and... 5 seems to underperform across the board? o3 is better than 5 thinking, o3 pro is better than 5 pro, 4.5 is better than 5, and overall 5 just seems underwhelming.

When I think back to the delta between 3 and 3.5, and the delta between 3.5 and 4, and the delta between 4 and 4.5... this makes it seem like the wall is real and OpenAI has topped out.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-09 08:16:18+00:00
Computer Science in academia is pretty out of line with a lot of skills that are actually used on a daily basis by professional software developers.

You can teach fundamentals all day long, but on their first day of work they are going to be asked adhere to some internal corporate process that is so far removed from their academic experience that they will feel like they should have just taught themselves online.
by maxglute | 2025-08-09 08:16:29+00:00
Hoping for open source watch OS some day, so many OEM / white label cheap smartwatch/fitness bands. Already exists for cheap cloud cameras. Could be the F91W of our time.

Also I'd gladly ditch USB C for a few programmable media buttons. Standardize on some sort of bogo pins and buy 20 adapters or split cables to keep the water proofing.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-08-09 08:16:41+00:00
Oh Sandstorm, what could've been...

Taking from https://sandstorm.org/about

> Kenton Varda [NB: kentonv around here] launched Sandstorm in 2014 via an Indiegogo campaign, before co-founding Sandstorm Development Group with Jade Wang to develop Sandstorm as both a Software-as-a-Service [...]

> In early 2017, Sandstorm Development Group ran out of funding and the team primarily joined Cloudflare. [NB: Where kentonv works to this day, leading the Cloud Workers team. Arguably related?] [...]

> In 2020, a group of Sandstorm enthusiasts began a community effort to revive development of Sandstorm. [...] As of 2022, Sandstorm Development Group has been completely dissolved, and development of the Sandstorm project has transitioned to a community-run model.

kentonv actually posted a recap of the history, including the tragic passing of Ian "zenhack" Denhart who was leading the community effort https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org
by snops | 2025-08-09 08:18:22+00:00
It can, it just needs the two resistors, which is the cheapest possible thing the standards committee could have asked manufacturers to do.

USB-C gets complicated at the high end, but for basic functionality I think the standards committee did a very good job at making the cheapest way to do it the correct way, e.g. a USB-C to 3.5mm audio adaptor can be entirely passive, it just needs the right resistor in it.
by exe34 | 2025-08-09 08:18:25+00:00
> All people are greedy, not only rich ones, that’s human nature.

An yet in the current discussion, only the rich get to profit from it.

> However high taxes ensure that it’s becoming more difficult to become rich, and only rich can get richer.

> Personally I think it’s better when more people can become rich, not fewer.

They won't get rich without food, education and housing. They're barely surviving because the rich keep sucking any chance of building wealth out of them. When inequality is low, more people become rich. When it is as high as it is currently, more people remain poor.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-09 08:20:23+00:00
There is a major carbon credit opportunity that I hope is financially engineered by the right people.

Restoring the kelp forest would sequester more than €1.5B worth of carbon every year. That’s because the kelp grows so rapidly and then is sucked down into the deep sea. Ideally the ecosystem itself would somehow receive money for its services—but short of that, some foundation on behalf of the ecosystem —and short of that, some organization that’d be prepared to use the money to reinvest in other ecosystems.
by general1726 | 2025-08-09 08:20:25+00:00
It is still true and it is a big deal on EVs which are using calipers instead of drums for braking; i.e. Tesla. Problem is that their brake calipers would rust (due to lack of usage) and then seize on major braking and would not disengage anymore.

Use it or lose it kind of situation with brakes on EVs
by scotty79 | 2025-08-09 08:20:39+00:00
It would be super funny if it was sufficient.

This all reminds me of the bias term of a perceptron.

And with transformers we started with not having any and the network repurposed one of the inputs for that which annoyed people because now dropping this particular input makes the whole thing be unreasonably affected but also annoyed some other people because weight on that input was unreasonably high because it sort of balanced all others.

So initially people (from hanlab) tried to affix this input so it doesn't get dropped. Then they (from openai this time) decided to just skip the input by providing learnable bias inside of the network (doing the thing that classical perceptron does) and now this guy proposes further optimization just by setting bias to 1 everywhere, which might work perfectly fine since we don't really care about absolute values because ultimately we just pick largest one and don't care what it was. So in training all other weights just get scaled by the bias so it can be 1. It's little like doing physics calculations with speed of light set to 1.

If you have simple feed forward network of perceptrons where ultimately in the end you just pick the largest output and don't care about absolute values then maybe you'd also be fine with just setting all perceptron bias terms to 1 and excluding them from the learning.

Is bias learnable in biological neurons? Doesn't activation potential threshold (or whatever it's called) rely on some chemistry and isn't the same for all neurons?
by lhl | 2025-08-09 08:21:18+00:00
For fungible things, it's easy to cost out. But not all things can be broken down just in token cost, especially as people start building their lives around specific models.

Even beyond privacy just the availability is out of your control - you can look at r/ChatGPT's collective spasm yesterday when 4o was taken from them, but basically, you have no guarantees to access for services, and for LLM models in particular, "upgrades" can completely change behavior/services that you depend on.

Google has been even worse in the past here, I've seen them deprecate model versions with 1 month notices. It seems a lot of model providers are doing dynamic model switching/quanting/reasoning effort adjustments based on load now.
by MissTake | 2025-08-09 08:23:10+00:00
Is it just me, or is Sandstorm just not maintained any more?

The most recent closed issues were self closed rather than as the result of development, while meanwhile the open issues continue to pile up with virtually no code changes made to the tree…

It’s a shame because it seems like it could have been a thing. Sadly though it’s hard to justify time investment into a platform like this if you know there’s little to no chance of getting any issues fixed.
by LtWorf | 2025-08-09 08:26:02+00:00
My office has some nice perks!

1. It's extremely cold and dark! I must wear extra clothes when going inside and I get depressed at wasting a day of nice weather in what looks like a WW1 bunker.

2. Terrible accessibility for disabled people! (such as myself)

3. Filthy toilets!

4. Internet is slower than at home!

5. Half the team lives somewhere else so all meetings are on teams anyway!

6. They couldn't afford a decent headset so I get pain in my head after 5 minutes, but I don't have a laptop so I can't move to a meeting room.

The HR really can't understand why after all these great perks I insist on wanting to work from home. I am such an illogical person!
by imtringued | 2025-08-09 08:28:54+00:00
>As far as I am aware, FPGAs can only be reprogrammed a fixed # of times, so you won't get very far into the open sea before you run out of provisions

That's not true unless you're talking about mask programmed FPGAs where the configuration is burned into the metal layers to avoid the silicon area overhead of configuration memory and even in this case the finite number is exactly one, because the FPGA comes preprogrammed out of the fab.

Almost every conventional FPGA stores its configuration in SRAM. This means you have the opposite problem. You need an extra SPI chip to store your FPGA configuration and program the FPGA every time you start it up.

The big problem with SNNs is that there is no easy way to train them. You train them like ANNs with back propagation, which means SNNs are just an exotic inference target and not a full platform for both training and inference.
by reify | 2025-08-09 08:28:55+00:00
I love that sound

I always create an alias to make that sound and another for the matrix phone sound when I connect to the internet.

the sound files are available here: https://www.soundjay.com/dial-up-modem-sound-effect.html

for the matrix:

alias wifion="nmcli dev wifi connect 'wifi-name'" && paplay /path/to/soundfile/matrix-phone.wav

for the old dial up tones:

alias wifioff="nmcli d disconnect wlp3s0" && /path/to/soundfile/dial-up-modem-02.wav

linux has loads of these sounds in /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo
by sofixa | 2025-08-09 08:29:29+00:00
OS is still pretty terrible. From janky kid focused UX, to trying to hide errors and information from you (e.g. you try extending your screen to an iPad, and it just says it failed. No information whatsoever about why or what you could do, just fuck you), to basic features missing (did you know you can't have a different scroll direction between scroll button and touchpad? There are two toggles in two menus, but they just change each other).
by manarth | 2025-08-09 08:29:51+00:00
The flightpath suggests it overflew California Institute for Men at around 900m.

The track doesn't start immediately from Saint Gabriel so it could have also overflown El Monte jail and West Covina jail.

Good way to airdrop supplies?

> https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N4182F/history/20250726/
by JimmyBiscuit | 2025-08-09 08:31:31+00:00
I have a Garmin Instinct 2 Solar. The Solar feature is more of a gimmick, unless youre out in the sun the whole day for weeks it doesnt really make a difference.

But it doesnt matter much, the battery lasts 3 weeks. Its a great watch if you like the old-style digital watch screens
by meindnoch | 2025-08-09 08:34:14+00:00
>Computer Science in academia is pretty out of line with a lot of skills that are actually used on a daily basis by professional software developers.

80% of software development boils down to:

1. Get JSON(s) from API(s)

2. Read some fields from each JSON

3. Create a new JSON

4. Send it to other API(s)

Eventually people stopped pretending that you need a CS degree for this, and it spawned the coding bootcamp phenomenon. Alas it was short-lived, because ZIRP was killed, and as of late, we realized we don't even need humans for this kind of work!
by user32489318 | 2025-08-09 08:38:20+00:00
It’s great to have non-US alternatives, but when non-US alternatives become extreme self-centered as EU tends to be(come), I start questioning if this a solution I’m willing to adopt. Current direction “of protecting the children” will easily put a filter on what you will be allowed to see and find; censorship is just too easy to implement behind the closed doors
by imtringued | 2025-08-09 08:38:33+00:00
A spiking neural network encodes analog values through time based encoding. The duration between two transitions encodes an analog value with a single connection in a similar manner to PWM. You need fewer connections and the gaps between transitions are larger.

For those who don't know why this matters. Transistors and all electrical devices including wires are tiny capacitors. For a transistor to switch from one state to another it needs to charge or discharge as quickly as possible. This charging/discharging process costs energy and the more you do it, the more energy is used.

A fully trained SNN does not change its synapses, which means that the voltages inside the routing hardware, that most likely dominate the energy costs by far, do not change. Meanwhile classic ANNs have to perform the routing via GEMV over and over again.
by self_awareness | 2025-08-09 08:39:12+00:00
We probably can agree on lots of things, about inefficiencies in current system and the like, but some elementary things between us are too far apart.

The ideas you identify as solutions, for me are the problems.

You can promote artificial redistribution all you want, but I will want to stop it however I can. If a global redistribution system would be implemented, then all your wealth would go to Africa and Russia, and you will be left with nothing. I'm sure this is not what you want, which in my POV makes you a hipocryte. If you don't agree that your wealth should go to Africa or Russia then we're in the area of choosing who is worthy of getting money and who isn't. And this is not at all different from a rich guy deciding where to put money to. So wealth redistribution from my POV just means that a poor guy wants to be in charge of the money now. But after he'll be in charge, it only means that he'll be the new rich guy. Nothing changes at all.

Pro-redistribution people are always talking about cash flowing from someone else to them. It's always the same story. And this is against what I stand for with all my determination, because I don't like thievery. Especially legal thievery.
by procaryote | 2025-08-09 08:39:17+00:00
> The symptoms were confusing: streaming worked perfectly with cURL and Postman, but failed completely with node-fetch and browser fetch.

It would have been helpful to mention what "failed completely" means. Did you get garbage data? Did the connection close abruptly? Did the connection hang and not deliver data? Did it deliver the data, just with a significant delay?

Paying attention to these things also tends to make it easier to debug.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-08-09 08:40:37+00:00
The author must be too young to recall the '80s properly.

To some, Reagan's confidence was comforting because nuclear annihilation felt imminent. To others, that confidence intensified the fear.

One can cherrypick songs (and I am about to!) but many in the '80s were depressing and goth-oriented, and many in the '90s were cheerful and dance-oriented.

The mood in the '90 was euphoric: the Cold War was over and the Internet was creating a Global Village. It was the 'End of History'.

• 1984 Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now https://youtu.be/watch?v=TjPhzgxe3L0

• 1985 Russians https://youtu.be/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs

1989: Hooray, the Berlin Wall comes down!

• 1990 Power of Love https://youtu.be/watch?v=YOdh430r9kE

• 1991 Right Here, Right Now https://youtu.be/watch?v=MznHdJReoeo
by diggan | 2025-08-09 08:41:34+00:00
> both pretty good indicators that there's more to the story

Happy to share if you have some specific questions rather than insinuations :)

I'm not saying it wasn't reckless, but I also don't think the "It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience" part is fully accurate, but that's just anecdotal and based on personal experience.
by diggan | 2025-08-09 08:42:22+00:00
> That doesn't mean that driving safely in all conditions you may find yourself thrown in is easy

Absolutely, I agree. But I also didn't claim I'm now a professional airline pilot able to handle all situations, only that the "It's not so easy to land a plane in real life, even if you have a lot of flightsim experience" part isn't accurate based on my own experience.
by quitit | 2025-08-09 08:42:27+00:00
In Australia the public pay phones have free nationwide calling and SMS, and double as wifi access points.

They've proven useful for natural disasters and victims of domestic violence/coercive control.

Since these phone booths tend to also show street advertising, it might be a way of preserving that revenue stream, while providing a reason for communities to want to keep the mostly redundant phone booths.
by akkad33 | 2025-08-09 08:43:00+00:00
> struct Foo { x: f64, y: f64 } // Struct struct Foo(f64, f64) // Tuple Struct let f = (1.0, 2.0) // Tuple enum U { Foo(f64, f64) } // Enum Tuple enum V { Foo { x: f64, y: f64 } } // Enum Struct [ 1.0, 2.0 ] // Size-2 Array &[ 1.0, 2.0 ] // Slice vec![1.0, 2.0] // Vec

I don't know, I'm not too bothered by this. If you take struct tuple and struct, Yes synctacticqlly they are different but functionally they are quite similar. You have values lying in memory. There's no reason to prefer one to the other except convenience. Program behaviour will not change. This is not the the case for fsharp classes and records and structs. Same way Fsharp has two types of lists. It also has an array type and all these are different but they look the same. In rust case they all have different names but behaviour wise they are same: data stored in contiguous memory with some differences in what you can do with them. I do like fsharp as a language but it can't go full on its promises because of dotnet. One glaring one is nulls. The language itself claims to be null safe. Except if you use dotnet types like strings. Then the compiler doesn't warn you. Honestly Kotlin does this better with non nullable types and null chaining
by sofixa | 2025-08-09 08:43:01+00:00
Unless you compare base models (entry level MacBooks are very price competitive, but then upgrades are very expensive), they blow Apple devices on performance and price/performance. An HP Omen or Asus ROG Zephyrus with 1-2TB SSD, 32-64GB RAM, powerful CPU, and a proper NVIDIA 4/5070-5080 (which is better at gaming and AI than M chips, or if you need "unified memory" for bigger AI models, AMD APUs are pretty good) for less than a similar memory and disk (let alone performance in most tasks) MacBook.

Battery life is worse though. Depending on the use (3-4h gaming, 7-8h regular use) still plenty though.
by senko | 2025-08-09 08:44:04+00:00
> Wayland is soon older than X11 was when Wayland got started

Wayland was started in 2008, X11 in 1984 (according to Wikipedia). That makes X11 41 and Wayland 17 years old, respectively. X11 was 24 when Wayland was started.

That's without considering X11 was not a fresh start (it's 11th version of an existing protocol, so it did have some baggage), and that there was an explosion in complexity in hardware, software, security and networking for the past 30 or so years.

The functionality surface area that's "table stakes" for Wayland is a lot larger than it was for X11.
by masklinn | 2025-08-09 08:44:52+00:00
> My favorite is type="module" which competes with the higher level attribute nomodule="true". Anyways it looks like <script> has taken a lot of abuse over the years:

It "conflicts" in the same way noscript[1] and script "conflict" no? They're basically related features, but can't really be made exclusive because the mere act of trying to do so wouldn't work: as the link indicates, executing code in a !module browser reserves the type (requires a specific set of types) so you can't use that as a way to opt in !module browsers.

[1] an other fun element with wonky parsing rules besides
by cluckindan | 2025-08-09 08:45:06+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_drugs_and_the_arch...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava
by hulitu | 2025-08-09 08:46:36+00:00
> lightweight window managers are preferred over heavy desktop environments, the primary desktop option is Xfce, and MATE and Enlightenment are also available, plus many others

I would expected CDE as a first class citizen and maybe OpenLook.

And it says that it it maily for 32bit SPARC and 32bit X86 and later that "Important: 32-bit hardware support now completely removed.".
by akkad33 | 2025-08-09 08:47:12+00:00
One thing I would say is if you're writing a normal Rust application or library and do not care about c interoperability, you could get by without being aware of anything other than the first 2 types. However in Fsharp you are forced to learn about all other ways of doing things, plus how C# does things, because it is almost impossible to do anything useful without interoperating with C# and dotnet
by meindnoch | 2025-08-09 08:47:58+00:00
Context: https://youtu.be/ngZ0K3lWKRc

Miyazaki is repulsed by an AI-trained zombie animation which reminded him of a friend with disabilities. So the oft quoted part is about that zombie animation.

When he the team tells him that they want to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do, he doesn't say anything just stares.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-09 08:48:24+00:00
Yeah everyone who runs a home lab that others use will eventually run into this.

Having a uptime SLA for your "hobby" is a huge pain in the ass and absolutely sucks the fun out of it.

For me it was the constant requests for new media or midnight complaints about jellyfin being down.

If you want to learn infra ops just get a job in the field and get paid for it.
by germandiago | 2025-08-09 08:49:07+00:00
Hello everyone. I have been using Sandstorm and put it to good use in the last few years.

I used it with Wekan for project management and I also run Dokuwiki for self-hosted docs. It has been zero maintenance for me so it has been great.

However, the packages ecosystem seems unmaintained. It is a pitty because I think the tool has a ton of potential and I really liked it.

I am considering moving to Yunohost or something similar but right now my little server hosts, together with other services, Sandstorm and I think Yunohost needs to monopolize the server.

So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.
by speedytrain144 | 2025-08-09 08:51:09+00:00
This tool shows how your portfolio will change over time with different holdings and returns (expressed as average annual return) on each of those holdings.

You can also share portfolios, for example here's mine and what I think each asset will return (TSLA -> 25% BRK.B/SPY -> 10%, etc).

Curious to see what your ideal portfolios are and what kind of returns you are expecting

https://anotherchart.com/?d=zN4IghiBcDa0gKgZQDIEEQBoCMAGLWMA...
by josephg | 2025-08-09 08:55:34+00:00
Of course, lots of people are employed despite giant holes in their knowledge of CS fundamentals. There’s more to being an effective developer than having good fundamentals. A lot more.

But there’s still a lot of very important concepts in CS that people should learn. Concepts like performance engineering, security analysis, reliability, data structures and algorithms. And enough knowledge of how the layers below your program works that you can understand how your program runs and write code which lives in harmony with the system.

This knowledge is way more useful than a lot of people claim. Especially in an era of chatgpt.

If you’re weak on this stuff, you can easily be a liability to your team. If your whole team is weak on this stuff, you’ll collectively write terrible software.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-09 08:55:40+00:00
Absolutely, but we are a dying breed in the same way that nobody really knows how to build nuclear power plants anymore.

Most CS grads will end up in a position that has more in common with being an electrician or plumber than an electrical engineer, difference is that we can't really automate installing wires and pipes to same degree we have automated service integration and making api calls.
by pyman | 2025-08-09 09:00:38+00:00
Except in Brazil, pay phones have disappeared across most of America, especially in the US. The last time I was in New York I only saw a few left.

This post made me realise how much work and cost goes into keeping a public phone running, including painting, repairs, cleaning, replacing vandalised parts, paying for electricity, and even sending people out to collect the coins. (I didn't even know collecting coins was an actual job)