MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hk1337 | 2025-08-06 23:39:49+00:00
I don’t have a problem with it. I pointed it out because it seems to show Blackstone hasn’t bought up all the houses like people think.

People should rent what they can afford and need. Some people need the house with all its space, some only need an apartment.

The big thing is people shouldn’t be spending 50% of their monthly income on rent. It doesn’t help them, their family, or you. Likely, eventually, they’ll have trouble paying, you’ll have to evict them, their lives will be disrupted, their families lives will be disrupted, and you’ll have to spend time evicting them and finding a new tenant else you’re not making money.
by hackthemack | 2025-08-06 23:40:26+00:00
If you want to watch a documentary about the forming of Compaq and its rise, Silicon Cowboys is not bad.

Trailer is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wjJYqUkHd8

You can watch the documentary on Tubi https://tubitv.com/movies/559438/silicon-cowboys
by tzs | 2025-08-06 23:41:07+00:00
10-bit has sort of been used. The General Instrument CP1600 family of microprocessors used 16-bit words but all of the instruction opcodes only used 10 bits, with the remaining 6 bits reserved for future use.

GI made 10-bit ROMs so that you wouldn't waste 37.5% of your ROM space storing those 6 reserved bits for every opcode. Storing your instructions in 10-bit ROM instead of 16-bit ROM meant that if you needed to store 16-bit data in your ROM you would have to store it in two parts. They had a special instruction that would handle that.

The Mattel Intellivision used a CP1610 and used the 10-bit ROM.

The term Intellivision programmers used for a 10-bit quantity was "decle". Half a decle was a "nickel".
by hugs | 2025-08-06 23:41:24+00:00
hi hn! i'm making a test site for testing browser automation tools called "test track".

i started the selenium and appium projects, and now i'm working on vibium -- an ai-native successor to selenium, based on the new webdriver bidi w3c standard. (webdriver bidi uses the faster websocket approach popularized by chrome/cdp and provides a standardized version for all browsers to implement).

but to make vibium, i need a test site to benchmark all the tools against, so i also created testtrack.org and am having fun vibe-coding up various web app challenges. (lovable and claude code ftw)

the most recent test module: "3d chess" — a three.js-based 3d chess simulator using raumschach rules

source is on github: https://github.com/tapsterbot/test-track
by turnsout | 2025-08-06 23:42:52+00:00
I think it's valuable for the leaders of a community to make it clear what kind of a community they're trying to build. If you think being anti-Nazi is like, "woke nonsense," then you know that the Gleam community is not going to be for you.

Does that prevent a Nazi from using Gleam? No. But the actual objective is to set the tone.
by quatonion | 2025-08-06 23:42:56+00:00
Why you can't download an entire chat as markdown

Copy/Pasting sections of the chat on mobile is laborious

That it still gets manic and starts glazing

That it can remember some things and keeps bringing them up, but forgets other, more pertinent things

If you switch away from it while it is in the middle of generating an image it often cancels the image generation

Image editing accuracy seems to have gone down significantly in quality based on intent.

You can't turn a temporary chat into a permanent one.. sometimes you start a temporary and realize half way it should be permanent - but too late.

The em dashes need to go

And so do the "it's not this, it's that!"

Is it really necessary to make so many lists all the time

Canvas needs a bunch of work
by adrianmonk | 2025-08-06 23:43:45+00:00
> IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. That would still be enough right now, and even with continuing growth in India and Africa it would probably be enough for about a decade more. [ ... ] When exhaustion does set in, it would plausibly at a time where there's not a lot of growth left in penetration, population, or devices, and mild market mechanisms instead of NATs would be the solution.

I think it's actually better to run out of IPv4 addresses before the world is covered!

The later-adopting countries that can't get IPv4 addresses will just start with IPv6 from the beginning. This gives IPv6 more momentum. In big, expensive transitions, momentum is incredibly helpful because it eliminates that "is this transition even really happening?" collective self-doubt feeling. Individual members of the herd feel like the herd as a whole is moving, so they ought to move too.

It also means that funds available for initial deployment get spent on IPv6 infrastructure, not IPv4. If you try to transition after deployment, you've got a system that mostly works already and you need to cough up more money to change it. That's a hard sell in a lot of cases.
by aryonoco | 2025-08-06 23:43:54+00:00
Stay safe!

Meanwhile, I want to be able to mount my home directory on an external drive, and have it shared between systems without UID/GID hell.

And,

Have an encrypted home directory and boot the system and be able to enter my password with my keyboard which is connected to a thunderbolt dock during boot. Something which has been possible on Mac and windows for a decade or two.

Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux.

Criticisms of systemd just because “it doesn’t smell like Unix” is all nice and fine, but ignores real quality of life and security features it provides. If you don’t have these usecases, you’re welcome to continue to ignore systemd, but some of us actually want these feature.
by sevensor | 2025-08-06 23:44:00+00:00
I maintain a program written in Python that is faster than the program written in C that it replaces. The C version can do a lot more operations, but it amounts to enumerating 2^N alternatives when you could enumerate N alternatives instead.

Certainly my version would be even faster if I implemented it in C, but the gains of going from exponential to linear completely dominate the language difference.
by pxc | 2025-08-06 23:44:07+00:00
I am truly, to borrow a phrase from another commenter on this post, a "longtime Emacs dabbler". But I use Evil mode everywhere and sometimes use other Emacs bindings in Insert mode where they don't directly conflict with some other Evil binding. It feels more or less harmonious to me, but I started with Evil and I'm not particularly attached to any default Emacs bindings.
by triceratops | 2025-08-06 23:44:17+00:00
Is it? Walk us through your "write a fake name" technique. How does it work?

Does <non citizen> walk into a polling location and say they're <registered voter>? What happens if <actual registered voter> has already voted? Or <actual registered voter> shows up later? The poll workers will say "But you already voted". That should immediately result in a criminal investigation. If it doesn't, why the hell not? If it does, there should be numbers so what are they? This is a serious crime.

Or is the claim that a non-citizen fraudulently gets on the voter roll as a citizen? If so, how? Forged birth certificate? Passport? All of them had perfect forgeries? No one got caught? It's a bit far-fetched. Again, where are the numbers?

And finally, what's the point? What's the incentive for a non-citizen to commit such a serious crime? Our elected representatives rarely do anything we think is useful. Spreading the idea that voter fraud is easy or widespread, without evidence, is corrosive to democracy.

By all means require id to vote. It's a great idea. But also ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can easily get id.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-06 23:44:39+00:00
> does the same .bash_profile/.bashrc work on different linux versions?

If we weight versions by likelihood of interacting with them, yes, they do.

> what about macos?

I handle macOS as a special case; it is not too difficult. Mostly, macOS boils down to "Get brew, download the GNU tools with brew, alias the commands to the GNU set", mostly because macOS's builtin tools are crap. The real problem is macOS, not the dotfiles, but many employers (including my own) force one to use macOS. It just not as big a special case as you're thinking.

> and now macos no longer uses bash.

… Apple hasn't updated bash in eons. Yeah, the default is now zsh, but I really hope one isn't just bumming along with bash 3.

And it's also reasonably easier to just use zsh everywhere. zsh is basically objectively superior.

> And what about saving .bash_history? and on and on.

Eh, I learn to love the bomb there.

> there is a whole industry of shell scripts that try to help with this.

There's definitely not.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-06 23:44:39+00:00
It didn't, quite. The UK has been trying various laws like this for a very long time, and nearly passed something massively more censorious nine years ago (IMO the OSA is not censorship) and then backed out.

The OSA has actually already been law for about two years!

It was just awaiting secondary legislation (statutory instruments) that Ofcom has been developing, in conjunction with industry.

The web industry either knew or really if it was responsible and serious should have known this legislation was coming in 2025. Ofcom have not kept secrets.

So if there is a co-ordinating entity, it's likely the porn industry itself and in particular Aylo/Mindgeek, who would very much like a situation where governments let them show porn to people they can sell things to, and who therefore stop using Visa and Mastercard as proxies.

And, again, for clarity: the OSA does not require you give "ID" to any porn sites. Just that you verify your age via mechanisms that might include making a small credit card payment or visiting a link on your phone (since your phone will need to have been unblocked to view adult material, which is an industry standard parental control since on-device controls are often either non-existent, easily-circumvented or utterly confounding)
by hackthemack | 2025-08-06 23:44:55+00:00
As an aside, I worked on fixing computers way back when. Somewhere along the line (maybe late 80s, early 90s) Compaq started using these cheap aluminum screws to hold together the computer case and hard drive mounts and motherboard to the chassis. Those cheap screws would get stripped very easily. Many a day, I would curse Compaq. But then, later, it seemed like all the manufacturers turned to cheaper and cheaper quality parts.
by pambeardsell | 2025-08-06 23:45:34+00:00
Yuzu Health | https://yuzu.health | Founding Pricing Engineer | New York, NY | ONSITE

At Yuzu, we’re building the next-generation health insurance company. We are NOT building a digital brokerage or an AI wrapper, we're fixing health insurance from the ground up -- starting with administration. We have a small, highly capable team currently serving 10,000+ members, and we're looking for a data oriented engineer to define how we price and pay for healthcare.

https://yuzu.health/careers/pricing-systems-engineer

We're also hiring generalist engineers! All roles at https://yuzu.health/careers
by hyperbovine | 2025-08-06 23:45:48+00:00
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.

If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
by turnsout | 2025-08-06 23:45:50+00:00
Cross-compiling is a totally different subject… I'm trying to make an apples-to-apples comparison. If you compile a lot of OSS C projects for the host architecture, you typically do not need multiple LLVMs or GCCs. Usually, the makefile detects various things about the platform and compiler and then fails with an inscrutable error. But that is a separate issue! haha
by czhu12 | 2025-08-06 23:47:00+00:00
I would also be annoyed if the local subway forced me to place all orders over the internet, or over a computer or phone, rather than just buying it in person with cash.

Presumably this also means that we should take those tools away from federal workers also?

I would be shocked if there use aren't cases that makes federal workers more efficient with AI, and for most normal industries, if there is a way to make people more efficient, its adopted.

I think the gutting of the federal workforce is also haphazard and awful, but how does that relate to this discussion?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-06 23:47:03+00:00
> In our ancestors and every other animal around us? Yes.

Right so my point is, with no smooth optimization path towards X in a given species the question "why doesn't species just X" has a readily available answer - because biased random walks are fickle and the pathway likely convoluted. Whereas when a smooth optimization path is available it becomes reasonable to ask "then why isn't species doing X already"? Assuming a long enough timescale then there must be some selection pressure preventing it.

I agree that the ice age is a reasonable hypothesis. If we were exposed to repeated boom-bust cycles of extended duration (ie multi-generational) then it's at least plausible that we gained some mechanism dedicated to preventing us from adapting in that direction.

Still it's an entirely reasonable question that needs to be asked when considering the potential for serious side effects. If the hypothesis is that this is actively prevented for historical reasons then we should want to see the precise molecular mechanism hunted down in order to validate that. Keep in mind that an alternative hypothesis would take the general form that ramping it up causes serious deleterious side effects in the long term.

It's quite like Chesterton's fence. There must be a reason so we would do well to understand approximately what that might be before tinkering.
by tamimio | 2025-08-06 23:47:52+00:00
They might recreate them but it will be real banks up to their names, which is a concept that has been around for thousands of years where banks stored gold and grains, for example. Modern banking, however, was only created in the 1600s by giving receipts for the gold they held, but the money creation from lending (aka credit and making money from loans beyond deposits) only happened in the 1800s. Yet, it was still controllable until 1933 when the gold standard ended in the US and 1971 internationally, where money now is literally paper backed by no real value but rather credit and trust, so the whole concept of credit creation out of nothing is very modern, and that should be abolished for the sake of sustaining the society.
by everforward | 2025-08-06 23:48:27+00:00
I assumed the opposite because I haven't heard about GTA's story in ages, but could be a sampling bias. It's hand-wavy, but last I recall most of the microtransactions didn't show up in single player (like if you bought a car, you couldn't use it in single player) so the people spending money on it are doing it for online, not the story.

I didn't think the story was earth-shattering; it was fine, but no Baldur's Gate.

Edit: In retrospect, the characters were fairly iconic. I still distinctly remember Trevor.
by whartung | 2025-08-06 23:48:50+00:00
Yea I’ve been curious about this.

As mentioned, back in the day, you’d connect to a terminal server which would connect you to a random host. You’d login to that host (using a shared credential managed by yellow pages, maybe — this was pre-LDAP). Once logged in, something like mountd would mount your home directory from the NFS server and off you go.

Not a lot of these kinds of systems out there today. Curious how a modern one would be managed and secured.
by rtpg | 2025-08-06 23:49:28+00:00
maintainers just having to assume every behavior is needed for backwards compatibility... and you still have the absolute mess which was pydantic 1 -> 2 (or django-ninja 0.x -> 1.0)

Everyone talks about moving fast and being dynamic but everyone I know deep in this has lost like actual years to churning from this kind of behavior.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-08-06 23:51:10+00:00
Good point. Similar to how the share price of a company is meaningless, total capitalization is the only useful metric. Similarly, investors have gone to great expenses to commit their money into 19% of California's housing, greater expenses than any other state, even when considered on per-capita basis.

To understand the meaning of this, consider that supply/demand curves are naturally non-linear and even 5% increase in demand can double the prices.
by cyanmagenta | 2025-08-06 23:52:01+00:00
It always feels weird when Linux distro articles brag about new releases that are mostly just updated versions of third-party software. The stuff in the article (GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3, python 3.13, etc.) have cool new features for sure, but it’s not like they were created by Debian.

That’s not a knock on the distro. Debian is great. It’s just a strange state of affairs.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-06 23:52:55+00:00
It's not the default, but JS is capable of this. (JavaScript has a big integer type nowadays, and the JSON.parse function's "reviver" parameter I think should be capable of parsing to bigints, but you'd need to specify such a reviver.)

Something like this, I think:

JSON.parse( /* just a test input JSON */ `{"a": 1.1, "b": 22222222222222222222222222222222, "c": {"d": 999999999999999999999999}}`, /* a reviver that returns BigInts, if it's an integer. */ (key, value, context) => { if(typeof value === "number" && /^[0-9]+$/.test(context.source)) { return BigInt(context.source); } else { return value; } } );
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-06 23:54:03+00:00
Note that malice and stupidity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I say that dulled for me since the time the executive branch refused to appropriate congressional funds, lost several federal rulings on this and then continued to do so (the beef against Harvard and other high profile Universities is one of many recent examples).

The "Big Beautiful bill" was the moment the razor completely broke in my mind.
by mikepavone | 2025-08-06 23:54:12+00:00
As another commenter pointed out, you can do pre-emptive multitasking just fine without an MMU. And as it turns out AmigaOS had just that. All you need for pre-emptive multitasking is a suitable interrupt source to use for task switching.

What it did not have was memory protection or virtual memory. You do need an MMU for those.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-06 23:54:17+00:00
From the release notes, seems like it might be something of a jail break or privilege escalation based on using an environment variable value instead of system calls from the supported library. Maybe something with the X11 windows host.

Curious to see what it actually turns out to be. I'm often impressed by some of the security vulnerabilities people manage to find and exploit. I'm not nearly as creative to even think of trying some of the things people export in a practical way.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-08-06 23:54:53+00:00
> I bet most people don't know their barber personally, and just go to the shop to get a cut.

My wife and her friends make personal recommendations about stylists frequently. My male friends either go to chain barber shops or they have a personally-known barber (and, in one case when an older barber retired he gave personal recommendations for a new barber). At least in semi-rural Western Ohio I see a lot of word-of-mouth for barbers. I'm an oldster (48), though, so I don't know how the youth handle this. (I also haven't participated personally because I haven't had a haircut in 30+ years...)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-08-06 23:55:41+00:00
systemd has done leaps and bounds

No it hasn't. For example going from Raspberry Pi OS to stock Debian I have to be mindful of where network manager is used in place of systemd. I have to be mindful of what version systemd is being used. Same hassle as before but now with less POSIX and more binary blobs.
by ribelo | 2025-08-06 23:56:03+00:00
Yeah, like not spending your every penny on poor is accepting a misery.

In The Good Place, a brilliant show, there’s a great scene where we find out why people stopped getting into the "Good Place" after they died. Life used to be simple before: if you bought your wife a flower, it was a straightforward good deed. Now every action is tainted, because the CEO of the flower company employs child labor, cheats on his wife, and murders bees with pesticides. Ah, and he is an nazi.

No, that’s not how it is at all. Nobody is obligated to give a damn. Not fighting isn’t the same as supporting, and that’s the biggest lie that has thoroughly fucked this world. It’s the exact opposite: only not giving a shit can still save it.
by ForOldHack | 2025-08-06 23:56:08+00:00
Brillant, that 36 bits would be three bytes.

"DEC's 36-bit computers were primarily the PDP-6 and PDP-10 families, including the DECSYSTEM-10 and DECSYSTEM-20. These machines were known for their use in university settings and for pioneering work in time-sharing operating systems. The PDP-10, in particular, was a popular choice for research and development, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. "

"Computers with 36-bit words included the MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2, the IBM 701/704/709/7090/7094, the UNIVAC 1103/1103A/1105 and 1100/2200 series, the General Electric GE-600/Honeywell 6000, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6/PDP-10 (as used in the DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20), and the Symbolics 3600 series.

Smaller machines like the PDP-1/PDP-9/PDP-15 used 18-bit words, so a double word was 36 bits.

Oh wait. Its already been done.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-06 23:56:11+00:00
Personally I never saw degrees as an excuse to post nonsensical answers or troll people with personal barbs. P!=NP can be shown true for certain constrained sets, but P=NP was shown it can't currently be proven.

People can twist it anyway they like, but stating they can "sort of" disprove or prove P=NP is 100% obfuscated BS. That is why the million dollar prize remains unclaimed.

Have a great day, =3
by CalChris | 2025-08-06 23:56:22+00:00
The Librarian of Congress is appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The President can fire the Librarian basically at will. There's no similar advice+consent language. So Trump fired Carla Hayden in May. He has not nominated a replacement but instead name one of his lawyers as acting Librarian.

So your notion that this is dunking on the Library of Congress, not the administration is wrong.
by mhandley | 2025-08-06 23:56:42+00:00
If we had 9-bit bytes and 36-bit words, then for the same hardware budget, we'd have 12.5% fewer bytes/words of memory. It seems likely that despite the examples in the article, in most cases we'd very likely not make use of the extra range as 8/32 is enough for most common cases. And so in all those cases where 8/32 is enough, the tradeoff isn't actually an advantage but instead is a disadvantage - 9/36 gives less addressable memory, with the upper bits generally unused.