MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stevetron | 2025-08-13 16:05:47+00:00
I used to have an Epson Hi-80 plotter someone gifted me. Somebody else gifted it to themselves, so I never had a chance to play with it. But it had a centronics interface and could be set to emulate an Epson RX-80 dor matric printer. Never considered it for printing text, but why couldn't it with Epson emulation?
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-08-13 16:06:08+00:00
> Later VCRs have that feature...

…huh, turns out some US-market VCRs would automatically tune to PBS specifically for a special time-signal embedded within the TV signal, and apparently not all PBS stations participated so it would never work for some people.

I’m guessing it was something encoded into the VBI like Closed Captions and Teletext, etc? I couldn’t find the name for such a time system let alone a spec. Can you tell me where to look?
by chubot | 2025-08-13 16:07:12+00:00
Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end

If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.

In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.

But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.

Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean
by h3lp | 2025-08-13 16:07:25+00:00
Well the railroads aren't the seat of power that they used to be---the progress ebbs and flows in mysterious ways. Even their arguable replacement, air travel, is not the paradigm of economic dominance.

Everybody is now excited about the top end: more parameters, larger context window. Justly so, but I think that it's more important in the long term what will happen at the low end, both in the software and hardware direction. Software obviously has started (c.f. DeepSeek). As for hardware, Google TPU ASIC is six years old, and has presumably 4096 ALUs and uses few watts of power to perform 4 TOPs. Several years later, I would hope that it's reachable goal for those 4 watts to do as many TOPs as say H20 (400 or so).

Once the models stabilize, I could see a low power inference peripheral design with huge TPU matrix with an embedded model parameter Flash EPROM feeding it. This could go into anything from white goods to computers. Imagine a thermometer that you speak symptoms to and ask for diagnosis; is it a good idea? I don't know... but is it possible? I could see that it is.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-13 16:07:32+00:00
I wouldn't say it needs refactoring. Maybe more documentation, or some work on naming. But I believe that code you write has to be at least a bit unusual.

Every project worth making is unique. Otherwise, why not use something off the shelf?

For example, let's say you want to shuffle songs for a music player, you write your shuffling algorithm and it is "wrong", but there is a reason it is "wrong": it better matches the expectations of the user than a truly random shuffle. A LLM trained on thousands of truly random shuffles may try to "fix" your code, but it is actually the worst thing you can do. That "wrong" shuffle is the reason why you wrote that code in the first place, the "wrongness" is what adds value. But now, imagine that you realize that a true random shuffle is actually the way to go, then "fixing" your code is not what you should do either, instead, you should delete it and use the shuffle function your standard library offers.

The unusual/unique/surprising parts of your code is where the true value is, and if there is none of that in your codebase, maybe you are just reinventing the wheel. Now, if a LLM trips off these parts, maybe you need some documentation, as a way to tell both the LLM and a human reading that part that it is something you should pay attention to. I am not a fan of comments in general, but that's where they are useful: explaining why you wrote that weird code, something along the lines of "I know it is not the correct algorithm, but users prefer it that way".
by fmajid | 2025-08-13 16:07:46+00:00
You're right, I had asked my HP specialist to confirm that it was ECC, and he had said yes, but when I prompted him again on the distinction between link ECC (protects data in motion) vs true on-die ECC (protects data at rest in RAM, much more important), he admitted it was the former and canceled my order.

I now ordered a Beelink GTR9 Pro, which unlike the Framework has dual 10G Ethernet, not the weird 5G flavor. We'll see how that goes.
by timerol | 2025-08-13 16:07:51+00:00
For recipes specifically, yes. I am not much of a chef, and, when initially learning, I often used to search for a recipe based on a few ingredients I wanted to use. I was never looking for an expert's take on a crafted meal, I was exactly looking for something "that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without any of the credibility or soul". Frankly I'm amazed that recipes were used as the example in the article, but to each their own
by david38 | 2025-08-13 16:08:03+00:00
Food control is easy but we don’t actually want it.

1. Prohibit large companies from using their size to negotiate prices, like how it used to be

2. Stop farm subsidies for all but the most critical areas. If you want to make food available to the poor, give them food stamp cards, but further restrict junk food. Supply side subsidies just create excess crops which lead to everyone trying to use cheap corn in some way. This cheap corn is then used to destroy local farmers in Latin America, further increasing illegal immigration and the power of cartels over a newly destitute population.
by NewJazz | 2025-08-13 16:08:24+00:00
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think you may be misreading the "Emissions from production of computational resources" section of that link.

It says for servers that 13-21 years is the break even for emissions from production vs consumption.

The 25 year number is for consumer devices like phones and laptops.

I would also argue that average load on the servers comes into play.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-08-13 16:08:27+00:00
The US federal budget goes to:

(based on FY 2025 budget proposal )

category, billions, % of federal spending

Social Security 1,543 21.2%

Medicare 936 12.9%

Medicaid 589 8.1%

Food Stamps (SNAP) 94 1.3%

WIC 8 0.1%

Section 8 33 0.5%

Defense 900 12.4%

Other Entitlement Programs 1,168 16.1%

Other Agencies (Non-Defense Discretionary) 1,029 14.2%
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 16:09:20+00:00
Yeah, I tend to stick to game models with a baking step. Realistic humanoids is the pinnacle of 3D art and I’m no where near. I buy mine like everyone else.

Hard surface modeling and environments, vehicles and ships, props and guns is what I like. Rigging simple IK. I’m always trying to improve but I lack the time between work/life/sleep. When I retire I’ll devote my time to perfecting the humanoid sculpt.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-13 16:09:21+00:00
Or just driving. For example you are entering a curve in the road, look well ahead at the center of your lane, ideally at the exit of the curve if you can see it, and you'll naturally negotiate it smoothly. If you are watching the edge of the road, or the center line, close to the car, you'll tend to drift that way and have to make corrective steering movements while in the curve, which should be avoided.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 16:09:39+00:00
We’ve been working on this problem off and on for over a year now. Many models bake knowledge of particular tools/libraries/patterns into their weights very well and others quite poorly. In my experience Claude is quite good at integrating the dog.ceo API and noticeably ignorant when it comes to Postgres features, and it knows gcloud commands enough to very confidently and consistently hallucinate arguments.

We’ve baked a solution to this into our product, so if anybody is working on an API/SDK/etc feel free to contact me if your users are running into problems using LLMs to integrate them.

One thing we’ve noticed is that subtle changes to library/api integration prompts’ context can be surprisingly impactful. LLMs do very well with example commands and explicit instructions to consider X, Y, and Z. If you just dump an API reference and information that implicitly suggests that X, Y, and Z might be beneficial, they won’t reliably make the logical leaps you want them to unless you let them iterate or “think” (spend more tokens) more. But you can’t as easily provide an example for everything, and the ones you do will bias the models towards them, so you may need a bit of both.
by ikskuh | 2025-08-13 16:09:39+00:00
Creator here!

You're absolutely right! I wasn't there either, and i wouldnt want a terminal-only machine.

My goal is providing means and knowledge to those that want it. The Ashet is more meant for technical schools, apprenticeship and "the interested", and definitly requires an initial spark that will make that project interesting to you.

It's here to fill a (percieved) gap and wants to sit more in the professional education part than the "get the kids to computing".

I'd love to have had such a hands-on device in school instead of the bare theory of circuit operation and basics of programming.
by al_borland | 2025-08-13 16:09:59+00:00
That’s what I added the caveat about it being open sourced. I’m sure what I’m doing has been solved many times by many companies, but it’s not information they share publicly, just like my code isn’t shared publicly. There is also the issue of integrating with existing legacy systems, which may include bespoke internal tools.

Maybe the thing has been done in general, but not in a way that’s useful for me. That’s why it looks good in tech demos. If I ask AI to write what I need, it will give me an answer, but it won’t actually work and integrate in the ways I need for production. The last time I tried it gave me 70 lines of code, the real end result was thousands. The AI version would look cool in a demo though.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-08-13 16:10:21+00:00
We also tax those already.

EDIT: There is a fixed VAT charge of 5% on electricity, as well as a currently 16% levy on electricity to cover various environmental and social benefit schemes. Which is hilarious, as the UK is moving away from fossil fuels for its electrical generation mix, while taxing electricity consumption much more than it taxes gas (5% VAT and 5.5% levies). This punishes those using electricity for heating and incentivizes people to continue using gas at home. This is on top of the fact that currently, gas is much cheaper (in unit rate, per kWh) than electricity. It's like they can't make up their mind on what they want to accomplish. For fuel, the tax is currently just under £0.53/L with 20% VAT added on top of the total as well.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-13 16:10:38+00:00
I wasn't referring the "luck" factor of evolution, which is of course always there. I was asking whether "luck" is the reason that the cognitive capabilities which presumably were selected for also came with cognitive capabilities that almost certainly were not selected for.

My guess is that it's not dumb luck, and that what we evolved is in fact general intelligence, and that this was an "easier" way to adapt to environmental pressure than to evolve a grab bag of specific (non-general) cognitive abilities. An implication of this claim would be that we are universe-understanders (or at least that we are biologically capable of that, given the right resources and culture).

In other words, it's roughly the same answer for the question "why do washing machines have Turing complete microcontrollers in them when they only need to do a very small number of computing tasks?" At scale, once you know how to implement general (i.e. Turing-complete and programmable) computers it tends to be simpler to use them than to create purpose-built computer hardware.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 16:10:52+00:00
1. How do you think taxes are paid, exactly, that removes choice? Certainly if you don't pay taxes you will be cut off from everything that taxes offer in return, so it is unlikely to be a choice you want to make, but we already went down that road of what happens if you give up on your end of the bargain.

2. Taxes aren't paid to a magical deity in the sky. It is merely a pool of resources shared by a community. How the resources are used are up to the community. The community equally expects a return on subsidies.
by chneu | 2025-08-13 16:11:00+00:00
This is a cop out that capitalism LOVES. It relinquishes the individual of any blame and encourages more consumption.

We need to consume less and vote for climate policy. This begins with the individual.

Those companies only get away with it because of our complacency. Your logic encourages that complacency and corporations LOVE that. They're happy to take the blame because they know people will still buy their product.

It starts with the individual. Nothing changes until the individual cares enough.

There are always excuses and others to blame while we destroy the livable environment.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-13 16:11:56+00:00
Ok, let me try to take your post point by point.

I am happy for you that you are living in a community that sounds like it is more or less to your liking. I am not saying your lifestyle should be illegal or prohibitively expensive, which I think you are saying certain pro-SFH people with zoning/lobbying power are trying to do. I am definitely against those types of people.

I do agree as well that cars are a nuissance and a danger. My ideal view of the world involves SFH with acreage, and the banning of noisy gas cars and leafblowers. I don't even like electric cars all that much, I would prefer most people bike, and that heavy delivery trucks deliver to centralized locations instead of everywhere. I will not excuse the actions of fellow car drivers at all.

What I will vehemently defend, however, is the rational pricing and legality of single family housing with acreage. There is no possible way that I will live with people surrounding me on 6 sides, banging their feet on the ground, blasting music, cooking all their different cuisines going into a shared AC system, screaming. There is no possible way I will put myself in proximity to those, thanks to the way our world is architected, choose violent crime on random bystanders.

You cannot take that right away from me, and if you do, I will go somewhere where I still have that right. And if there is nowhere left to go, then you know what happens next, and only history can give you examples from then on, such as what happened to the Ukrainian Kulaks in the 1930s.
Show HN: XferLang, a data-transfer and configuration alternative to JSON
by paulmooreparks | 2025-08-13 16:12:03+00:00
About nine months ago I posted about a language I had begun experimenting with, called XferLang. I got several helpful comments, and since then I've completely revamped the design and built a complete language spec and library around it. I've even integrated it into some apps I use daily. The language, intended to be an alternative to JSON and YAML, is a strongly typed, human‑readable/writable, structured text language. Where it differs from JSON is support for comments, strict typing of data, support for processing instructions (which are extensible), nascent scripting features, and embedding of text without the need for character escaping.

Right now it is implemented in a .NET 8.0 library, but I want to port it to other languages as well.

I'm looking for critiques on the language's ergonomics, opinions on its real-world applicability, and any reasons you would or wouldn't adopt something like this over JSON/YAML/TOML. Thanks for your feedback!
by jcranmer | 2025-08-13 16:12:11+00:00
Wow, you're crossing a few wires in your zeal to provide information to the point that you're repeating myths.

> The intel processors have a separate math coprocessor that supports 80bit floats

x86 processors have two FPU units, the x87 unit (that you're describing) and the SSE unit. Anyone compiling for x86-64 uses the SSE unit for default, and most x86-32 compilers still default to SSE anyways.

> Moving a float from a register in this coprocessor to memory truncates the float.

No it doesn't. The x87 unit has load and store instructions for 32-bit, 64-bit, and 80-bit floats. If you want to spill 80-bit values as 80-bit values, you can do so.

> Repeated math can be done inside this coprocessor to achieve higher precision so hot loops generally don't move floats outside of these registers.

Hot loops these days use the SSE stuff because they're so much faster than x87. Friends don't let friends use long double without good reason!

> Non-determinism occurs in programs running on intel with floats when threads are interrupted and the math coprocessor flushed.

Lol, nope. You'll spill the x87 register stack on thread context switch with FSAVE or FXSAVE or XSAVE, all of which will store the registers as 80-bit values without loss of precision.

That said, there was a problem with programs that use the x87 unit, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what you're describing. The x87 unit doesn't have arithmetic for 32-bit and 64-bit values, only 80-bit values. Many compilers, though, just pretended that the x87 unit supported arithmetic on 32-bit and 64-bit values, so that FADD would simultaneously be a 32-bit addition, a 64-bit addition, and a 80-bit addition. If the compiler needed to spill a floating-point register, they would spill the value as a 32-bit value (if float) or 64-bit value (if double), and register spills are pretty unpredictable for user code. That's the nondeterminism you're referring to, and it's considered a bug in every compiler I'm aware of. (See https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p37... for a more thorough description of the problem).
by stevetron | 2025-08-13 16:12:28+00:00
If the website is for humans, why isn't it readable? I mean white text on an off-yellow background is mostly only readable by bots and screenreaders. I had to higlight the entire site to read anything, a trick which doesn't always work. And no link to leave a comment to the web site maintainer about the lack of contrast in their color selection.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-13 16:13:12+00:00
I am my parents only child - they are both in their 80s.

I’m the beneficiary of all of their accounts. I reviewed where they have their accounts at. As long as I know where there accounts are, if it takes months to get to it - which isn’t the case since I’m the beneficiary, why does it matter? I don’t need their money.

However, they did make me a joint account holder on one of their accounts that had enough money in it to take care of final expenses.

Even if I did have passwords to their other accounts, I wouldn’t access them and start transferring money until it went through all of the level processes when they pass - aside from their joint accounts.

Of course joint accounts does require a fair amount of trust in your children.
by potatolicious | 2025-08-13 16:13:43+00:00
> "Whether it's a naturally emergent phenomenon in LLMs or specifically a result of its corporate environment, I'd like to know the answer."

I heavily suspect this is down to the RLHF step. The conversations the model is trained on provide the "voice" of the model, and I suspect the sycophancy is (mostly, the base model is always there) comes in through that vector.

As for why the RLHF data is sycophantic, I suspect that a lot of it is because the data is human-rated, and humans like sycophancy (or at least, the humans that did the rating did). On the aggregate human raters ranked sycophantic responses higher than non-sycophantic responses. Given a large enough set of this data you'll cover pretty much every kind of sycophancy.

The systems are (rarely) instructed to be sycophantic, intentionally or otherwise, but like all things ML human biases are baked in by the data.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-13 16:13:45+00:00
> They’re not designed to have the rich control feel, balanced and satisfying handling near the limits, responsiveness, material quality, suspension sophistication, etc.

Sounds to me like you're looking for a Lotus or a 911 at budget prices. I agree with you that's pretty far from the "simple, simple, light" vehicle, and it's fully in the hobby realm.

If you're that deep into cars, I'd say more power to you, and spending ungodly amount of money time and effort on vintage cars is probably a pleasure as well.
by ElijahLynn | 2025-08-13 16:14:27+00:00
The same could be said for food. And farmers who farm the food. The farmers could say I only want to sell food to people that I know are going to be directly eating it. And not be used in a bunch of other stuff. They might want to talk to the person buying it or the person buying. It might want to talk to the farmer and know how it's grown.

This abstraction has already happened. And many people eat food that is not directly bought from the farmer.

I don't see how this is much different.
by jmull | 2025-08-13 16:14:48+00:00
> If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why would you ever visit the actual website?

AI has this problem in reverse: If search gets me what I need, why would I use an AI middleman?

When it works, it successfully regurgitates the information contained in the source pages, with enough completeness, correctness, and context to be useful for my purposes… and when it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

At best it works about as well as regular search, and you don’t always get the best.

(just note: everything in AI is in the “attract users” phase. The “degrade” phase, where they switch to profits is inevitable — the valuations of AI companies make this a certainty. That is, AI search will get worse — a lot worse — as it is changed to focus on influencing how users spend their money and vote, to benefit the people controlling the AI, rather than help the users.)

AI summaries are pretty useful (at least for now), and that’s part of AI search. But you want to choose the content it summarizes.
by ikskuh | 2025-08-13 16:15:04+00:00
Module spec should be around 85x28x100 mm size, so we'd have a deep module with around 15mm of "front extrusion" to fit the modules.

It's definitly possible to re-layout the backplane into a different mechanical design, and reduce the number of slots

Final specs will be shared soon, i have to do another revision of the hardware design as i figured mechanical properties like that the "stickyness" of PCIe slots is good enough so you dont actually need mechanical screws to fasten the modules
by reactordev | 2025-08-13 16:15:11+00:00
Our problem is with tracking. Their problem is that other companies are tracking. So let’s stop the other companies from tracking since we can track directly from our browser. GDPR requires cookie banner to scare people into blocking cookies

There, now only our browser can track you and only our ads know your history…

We’ll get the other two to also play along, throw money at them if they refuse, I know our partner Fruit also has a solution in place that we could back-office deal to share data.
by Vegenoid | 2025-08-13 16:15:16+00:00
While this can be true, I think a lot of people are far too eager to say that because someone is doing something in an unusual way, it's probably wrong. Not everything fits the cookie cutter model, there is tons of software written for all kinds of purposes. Suggesting that they're writing code wrong when someone says "an LLM struggles with my unusual code", when we aren't actually looking at the code and the context, is not helpful.