MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yesfitz | 2025-08-12 20:33:41+00:00
This reads like an episode of The Thick of It[0]. If it weren't real, it'd be funny.

As to the efficacy of the recommendation:

From The Verge's coverage[1]:

"The Environment Agency didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK’s drought-affected areas."

And Tom's Hardware's[2]:

"Perhaps more pertinently, the advice rings hollow because it's likely not very sensible. While it's true that data centers do consume large amounts of water through evaporative cooling (where it's used), the vast majority of this power draw comes from CPU and GPU computation, not the storage of pictures and emails. Once the data is stored, the storage devices generate very little heat and are often spun down (placed into low- or no-power states) and called upon only when needed."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It

1: https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files...

2: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/uk-government-ine...
by mdasen | 2025-08-12 20:33:52+00:00
As someone mentioned, this is a different Bell Laboratories, but even the AT&T spinoff isn't part of AT&T anymore. Bell Labs is now Nokia Bell Labs.

AT&T spun off their technology unit (Bell Labs and Western Electric) as Lucent Technologies way back in 1996. If you're old enough, you may have seen phones that said "Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations". Lucent was bought by the French company Alcatel to create Alcatel-Lucent in 2006. Alcatel-Lucent was bought by Nokia in 2016. So now we have Nokia Bell Labs. Since 1996, we've seen Bell Labs change hands once a decade so maybe next year we'll see a new owner of Bell Labs.

I kinda agree that it seems like a great trademark, but it just never went anywhere. AT&T flubbed its early lead in computing, Unix-like operating systems were pushed by others, and any association with the future that the Bell Labs trademark had just faded. Nostalgically, I love the trademark. But I wouldn't think that anything coming from Bell Labs was cutting edge tech that I wanted (as a consumer, sys admin, or software engineer; in the same way that Nokia makes some great wireless networking hardware, but they aren't making something that I want).

I'm not saying that AT&T and Bell Labs didn't have a huge impact on computing. Bell Labs gave us Unix and C. But it's been a long time since Bell Labs was associated with the next big thing in computing - or the next big thing that anyone wants if they're not coming from the standpoint of telecom infrastructure.

Sometimes companies that were incredibly important just fade away - and their trademarks with them. Motorola and Nokia were once synonymous with cutting edge mobile devices. Today, Nokia has exited the mobile device market and Motorola is a Lenovo brand and a tiny player. Yes, for some years HMD Global bought the rights to the Nokia name from Microsoft (who had the rights for 10 years), but that's now expired and the devices are now HMD branded. Bell Labs just kinda faded away despite us remembering it fondly alongside our Polaroid cameras and Nokia phones.
by logicprog | 2025-08-12 20:34:06+00:00
I think that's definitely true — these tools are only really taking care of the relatively low skill stuff; synthesizing algorithms and architectures and approaches that have been seen before, automating building out for scaffolding things, or interpolating skeletons, and running relatively typical bash commands for you after making code changes, or implementing fairly specific specifications of how to approach novel architectures algorithms or code logic, automating exploring code bases and building understanding of what things do and where they are and how they relate and the control flow (which would otherwise take hours of laboriously grepping around and reading code), all in small bite sized pieces with a human in the loop. They're even able to make complete and fully working code for things that are a small variation or synthesization of things they've seen a lot before in technologies they're familiar with.

But I think that that can still be a pretty good boost — I'd say maybe 20 to 30%, plus MUCH less headache, when used right — even for people that are doing really interesting and novel things, because even if your work has a lot of novelty and domain knowledge to it, there's always mundane horseshit that eats up way too much of your time and brain cycles. So you can use these agents to take care of all the peripheral stuff for you and just focus on what's interesting to you. Imagine you want to write some really novel unique complex algorithm or something but you do want it to have a GUI debugging interface. You can just use Imgui or TKinter if you can make Python bindings or something and then offload that whole thing onto the LLM instead of having to have that extra cognitive load and have to page just to warp the meat of what you're working on out whenever you need to make a modification to your GUI that's more than trivial.

I also think this opens up the possibility for a lot more people to write ad hoc personal programs for various things they need, which is even more powerful when combined with something like Python that has a ton of pre-made libraries that do all the difficult stuff for you, or something like emacs that's highly malleable and rewards being able to write programs with it by making them able to very powerfully integrate with your workflow and environment. Even for people who already know how to program and like programming even, there's still an opportunity cost and an amount of time and effort and cognitive load investment in making programs. So by significantly lowering that you open up the opportunities even for us and for people who don't know how to program at all, their productivity basically goes from zero to one, an improvement of 100% (or infinity lol)
by adolph | 2025-08-12 20:34:09+00:00
Yeah, Raspberry Pi has done a great job with documentation and SDKs for SBC and their line of MCU.

I don't think Raspberry Pi would have been started outside the margins of the smartphone market economies of scale. Sure RPi are pretty big now but the smartphone market created a world where low power CPUs and a lot of other components are available at all. My recollection is that as RPi got further away from standard chips, they struggled balancing retail availability while servicing their commercial contracts.

RISC-V, to me, seems more of an IP hedge for chipmakers who may find themselves constrained in designs or distribution in the future because the IP is controlled by potentially unfriendly companies or jurisdictions. Sure, there are some licensing fees/certifications that are friction, but the goal is independence even at the cost of redundant effort in chip and compiler design.
by t0mas88 | 2025-08-12 20:34:44+00:00
For me it has a big positive impact on two sides of the spectrum and not so much in the middle.

One end is larger complex new features where I spend a few days thinking about how to approach it. Usually most thought goes into how to do something complex with good performance that spans a few apps/services. I write a half page high level plan description, a set of bullets for gotchas and how to deal with them and list normal requirements. Then let Claude Code run with that. If the input is good you'll get a 90% version and then you can refactor some things or give it feedback on how to do some things more cleanly.

The other end of the spectrum is "build this simple screen using this API, like these 5 other examples". It does those well because it's almost advanced autocomplete mimicking your other code.

Where it doesn't do well for me is in the middle between those two. Some complexity, not a big plan and not simple enough to just repeat something existing. For those things it makes a mess or you end up writing a lot of instructions/prompt abs could have just done it yourself.
by jmull | 2025-08-12 20:34:46+00:00
I think rationalist cults work exactly the same as religious cults. They promise to have all the answers, to attract the vulnerable. The answers are convoluted and inscrutable, so a leader/prophet interprets them. And doom is neigh, providing motivation and fear to hold things together.

It's the same wolf in another sheep's clothing.

And people who wouldn't join a religious cult -- e.g. because religious cults are too easy to recognize since we're all familiar with them, or because religions hate anything unusual about gender -- can join a rationalist cult instead.
by random3 | 2025-08-12 20:35:14+00:00
smile

maybe take a look at the guidelines

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

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-12 20:35:23+00:00
Are you familiar with ship of theseus as an arugmentation fallacy? Innuendo Studios did a great video on it and I think that a lot of what you're talking about breaks down to this. Tldr - it's a fallacy of substitution, small details of an argument get replaced by things that are (or feel like) logical equivalents until you end up saying something entirely different but are arguing as though you said the original thing. In this video the example is "senator doxxes a political opponent" but on looking "senator" turns out to mean "a contractor working for the senator" and "doxxes a political opponent" turns out to mean "liked a tweet that had that opponent's name in it in a way that could draw attention to it".

Each change is arguably equivalent and it seems logical that if x = y then you could put y anywhere you have x, but after all of the changes are applied the argument that emerges is definitely different from the one before all the substitutions are made. It feels like communities that pride themselves on being extra rational seem subject to this because it has all the trappings of rationalism but enables squishy, feely arguments
by pat-storyborn | 2025-08-12 20:35:25+00:00
Tale Craft is a Marketplace of AI Companions for kids, They are rooted in stories generated by parents or downloaded from Marketplace itself. Parents have a whatsup parent channel to "Heroes" who their kids talk to via voice or text chat. Companions can channel parents thougths via this whatsup channel o upladed knowledge. Included in marketplace are also themed songs, coloring books and audiobooks - which parents can also generate themself from app.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-12 20:36:10+00:00
1.apple controls the hardware. they only need to focus on supporting a handful of skus. windows needs to support way more which they don't directly control

2. The software development toolchain is highly focussed

3. they committed. there are no more intel cpus so developers can either adapt or die. windows by contrast has x86 and arm builds going forward. that means a larger surface area for developers to target and they will avoid that kind of pain if they can.

4. microsoft management is all over the place and lacks the focus that apple has. Apple doesn't do everything right but when they want to do something well. it shows. even their failures are polished.
by churchill | 2025-08-12 20:36:18+00:00
I read the book referenced - Robert Lightizer's No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers - and it was eye-opening, if somewhat misguided.

In it, the author blames China's industrial ascent for America's deindustrialization, the hollowing out of cities like Detroit, the fentanyl crisis, the looming challenge to American power in the Pacific, the intimidation of America's allies, etc. Basically: China bad, turned into a political doctrine.

My rebuttal is simply a rehashing of what I said in an earlier comment [0] which is simply logical, no matter how you see it:

For most of human history, everyone lived at a subsistence level because we all had to farm our food, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our own houses, etc.

Specialization is what makes the luxury and wealth of the modern world possible: you do one thing all day long and convert it to cash, then exchange value with people who do other stuff to get what you want. And since they're operating at scale, they can build more houses, make more stuff, etc. that you ever can if you did it yourself. So, you pay less for more stuff.

International trade simply takes it to the next level. For instance, the average American will not bend over to pick cocoa beans for chocolate for even $100k/yr. Many of you will argue, but all I'll say to you is that there's a reason agricultural work is referred to as back-breaking work. There's also a reason why farmers have the highest rate of suicides. Even if the American eventually agrees to do it, the cost will be so prohibitive that buying chocolate will be out-of-reach for everyone but the rich. Abundance ended; the end.

If you believe China is stealing American jobs by making things cheaper an at scale, then tractors stole farmers' jobs by making it easier to consolidate; cars drove much of the horse rearing business into bankruptcy; mobile phones have driven countless industries into extinction, but we're not trying to regulate them out of existence. Why does the logic fail when a nation of 1.5b wants to make stuff cheaply and send it to you for affordable prices? How does it hurt you?

I have this belief that one of the reasons why inflation has been under control despite the QE experiments undertaken by the Federal Reserve, ECB, etc. is because of the impact of 600M Chinese workers, leaving their farms to work in manufacturing, making products cheap enough for the average Westerner to afford, despite dumb government fiscal policy.

If you take that away, your political system becomes even less stable and you have to keep reaching for ever more outrageous stunts to stay relevant or get voted into power.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866645
by ayaros | 2025-08-12 20:36:22+00:00
https://archive.org/details/02-windows-xp-tour-1/01+Windows+...

What makes it so surreal is the intro starts out almost as an extension of the intimately familiar Windows XP startup sound (of course, the same person, Bill Brown, composed The Tour music). If you've never heard it before, or are only just young enough to be familiar with the startup sound, it might seem like some lost never-was artifact, an extension of the Windows XP branding you never knew about.

However that would also make you an ignorant fool for failing to be alive or aware of the majesty of The Tour at the time it was released. Thankfully I was blessed by god and his son, William Gates III, with the privilege of being an XP user shortly after it was released. To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand The Windows XP Tour.
by const_cast | 2025-08-12 20:36:30+00:00
Its not the GUI developers fault usually, it's the platform's fault.

Nobody can decide on standards because everyone is greedy. Microsoft has, like, a dozen GUI platforms and they're all Windows-only. Apple doesn't even use an off the shelf rendering API. And android is... Well, android.

Sure, I would like to use the OS provided controls. And then maybe after that we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
by rpdillon | 2025-08-12 20:37:21+00:00
> Failing to do so means that it has not learned a model of what chess is, at some basic level.

I'm not sure about this. Among a standard amateur set of chess players, how often when they lack any kind of guidance from a computer do they attempt to make a move that is illegal? I played chess for years throughout elementary, middle and high school, and I would easily say that even after hundreds of hours of playing, I might make two mistakes out of a thousand moves where the move was actually illegal, often because I had missed that moving that piece would continue to leave me in check due to a discovered check that I had missed.

It's hard to conclude from that experience that players that are amateurs lack even a basic model of chess.
by pyrolistical | 2025-08-12 20:37:21+00:00
Clearly memory latency is the bottleneck. I see 2 paths we can take.

1. Memory orientated computers

2. Less memory abstractions

We already did the first, they are called GPUs.

What I imagine for the second is full control over the memory hierarchy. L1, L2, L3, etc are fully controlled by the compiler. The compiler (which might be just in time) can choose the latency vs throughput. It knows exactly how all the caches are connected to all numa nodes and their latencies.

The compiler can choose to skip a cache level for latency critical operations. The compiler knows exactly the block size and cache capacity. This way it can shuffle data around with pipelining to hide latency, instead of accidentally working right now.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-08-12 20:37:24+00:00
I agree with you in a temporal & non-proprietary sense.

Temporally, because (knock on wood) RISC-V is going to take over the RadHard space market between Microchip/NASA’s High Performance Space Computer [1] and the Gaisler chips [2]

In a non-proprietary sense because much NVDA is alleged to be RISC-V

[1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...

[2] https://www.gaisler.com/secondary-product-category/rad-hard-... see GR765 & GR801
by pessimizer | 2025-08-12 20:38:17+00:00
Logical consistency is not a test for thought, it was a concept that only really has been contemplated in a modern way since the renaissance.

One of my favorite philosophers is Mozi, and he was writing long before logic; he's considered as one of the earliest thinkers who was sure that there was something like logic, and and also thought that everything should be interrogated by it, even gods and kings. It was nothing like what we have now, more of a checklist to put each belief through ("Was this a practice of the heavenly kings, or would it have been?", but he got plenty far with it.

LLMs are dumb, they've been undertrained on things that are reacting to them. How many nerve-epochs have you been trained?
by to11mtm | 2025-08-12 20:38:35+00:00
I like this analogy.

I think of a bike's shifting systems; better shifters, better housings, better derailleur, or better chainrings/cogs can each 'improve' things.

I suppose where that becomes relevant to here, is that you can have very fancy parts on various ends but if there's a piece in the middle that's wrong you're still gonna get shit results.
by worik | 2025-08-12 20:38:38+00:00
I have a comment above about access to capital, which is much easier if you already have it, so the rich have more access than the poor to the main tool of capitalism.

But another example, equity: If I am raising money for my startup, and I have no traack record (I'm poor in this context) and Sam is doing the same after Sam made a successful exit from their last startup, who would you invest in, all else equal, Sam or me? Sam if you are rational

Thus the rich have more access to equity than the poor

This is a pattern that repeats over and over in free markets
by mikestew | 2025-08-12 20:39:53+00:00
at least LOTR's lightweight fans watched the movies!

Oh, there’s movies for lazy Rand fans, too.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

More of a Fountainhead fan, are you? Do ya like Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
by foresto | 2025-08-12 20:39:56+00:00
> Why can't reasonable people disagree here?

They can, but framing this as a mere disagreement is disingenuous: One approach might slightly inconvenience someone, while the other (as was taken here) inflicts irreparable damage.

> Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm,

No. Although common on certain platforms, they are not a fundamental norm in software, nor should they be.

In particular, we're talking about Debian here.
by varispeed | 2025-08-12 20:40:00+00:00
I wouldn't be able to work in such a space for long. It kind of "squeezes the brain" if I can paint such picture what it feels. Like walls are pushing your head in and you can't think and focus.

Unfortunately such situation, in countries where space is at massive premium, leads to wasted human potential. People would love to have hobbies, experiment but simple lack of space very much prevent that.

So if your parents are not rich or you yourself don't have a job that could let you rent a workshop or studio, then it is extremely frustrating and leads to depression. I know someone who got to the point of suicide, because he couldn't find any way to get space to pursue his interests. He felt like an absolute failure and that the world didn't want him to exist.
by somanyphotons | 2025-08-12 20:40:38+00:00
The difficulty is that while we can move the job to where the cheaper (or specialized) labor is, we can't (currently) easily move the people around to where the job is.

So lower skilled people living in areas surrounded by high skill/cost people can't easily find a better Cost-of-Living balance. They get trapped with no job to match their skill.

To put it more bluntly - the people of Detroit simply aren't allowed to move to the surrounding areas of the BYD factories in China.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-12 20:40:57+00:00
> Many of them also expect that, without heroic effort, AGI development will lead to human extinction.

> These beliefs can make it difficult to care about much of anything else: what good is it to be a nurse or a notary or a novelist, if humanity is about to go extinct?

Replace AGI causing extinction with the Rapture and you get a lot of US Christian fundamentalists. They often reject addressing problems in the environment, economy, society, etc. because the Rapture will happen any moment now. Some people just end up stuck in a belief about something catastrophic (in the case of the Rapture, catastrophic for those left behind but not those raptured) and they can't get it out of their head. For individuals who've dealt with anxiety disorder, catastrophizing is something you learn to deal with (and hopefully stop doing), but these folks find a community that reinforces the belief about the pending catastrophe(s) and so they never get out of the doom loop.
by mappu | 2025-08-12 20:41:07+00:00
He said (2023) it needs an extension protocol or per-compositor work - so screensaver support is available in KDE using the Screen Locker integration, just no port was done AFAICS.

A general "wayland" protocol for it didn't exist back then, but in this thread we see ext-session-lock exists now, and jwz was recently trying to use it where available: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-wayland-and-lo... so you might see an xscreensaver port soon.