MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by churchill | 2025-09-07 09:06:54+00:00
No amount of noise America's nativist crowd makes will stop this. Are authorities going to open every single package making its way into the US? There are ways to cut down on drug trafficking, but this kneejerk repetition of anything Fox News says won't fix anything.

It'll make you and your cohort feel good about finally sticking it to China, but after a few years/months, it'll be abandoned. It's not a viable long-term strategy prohibiting trade with the rest of the world or inspecting every package. After all, didn't America have a severe drug problem even before normalizing trade with China?

But what do I know?
by segfault99 | 2025-09-07 09:06:55+00:00
December/January 1987 I was doing a vacation EE internship in a power station in Australia. Some of the Hitachi mini computers still used core RAM. This was in an all Hitachi Heavy Industries turnkey coal-fired power station commissioned ca. 1985. Pretty sure they had a reference design from boilers and turbines right down to the hardware and software level and kind of cookie cutter stamped out power stations from it. The Hitachi engineering attitude was obviously "If it works, keep doing it the same way for as long as possible". I was told that for some software (firmware?) updates, they'd simply ship out a new core RAM module -- It's non-volatile after all.
Show HN: This trick short-circuited my anxiety
by chetansorted | 2025-09-07 09:07:17+00:00
Crowds always triggered me — busy cafés, parties, subway stations, someone talking on the phone next to me loudly. I'd feel the anxiety rising but had no graceful way to leave without drawing attention.

I usually try wearing my AirPods and listening to music to evade talks happening around me. But not every time I can wear earphones and listen to music.

One day, my phone rang right when I felt trapped. Answering it gave me the perfect out. Suddenly I wasn't "that person freaking out," I was just "someone who got a call." That shift was a lifesaver. Now I trigger a call whenever I feel panic building. It sounds so simple, but it breaks the spiral and gives me a believable exit every time.

Now I'm building an app that phone calls me whenever I need it.
by dijit | 2025-09-07 09:08:21+00:00
> only a minority of them enables ECC support in their firmware, so always check for that before buying!

This is the annoying part.

That AMD permits ECC is a truly fantastic situation, but if it's supported by the motherboard is often unlikely and worse: it's not advertised even when it's available.

I have an ASUS PRIME TRX40 PRO and the tech specs say that it can run ECC and non-ECC but not if ECC will be available to the operating system, merely that the DIMMS will work.

It's much more hit and miss in reality than it should be, though this motherboard was a pricey one: one can't use price as a proxy for features.
by vidarh | 2025-09-07 09:08:58+00:00
Searle is an idiot. In Searle's argument, the translating entity will be the full system executing the translation "program", not the person running the program.

And you failed to understand my argument. You are a Turing machine. I am a Turing machine. The LLM in a loop is a Turing machine.

Unless you can show evidence that unlike the LLMs* we can execute more than the Turing computable, the theoretical limits on our reasoning are exactly the same as that of the LLM.

Absent any evidence at all that we can solve anything outside of the Turing computable, or that any computable function exists outside the Turing computable, the burden of proof is firmly in those making such an outrageous assumption to produce at least a single example of such a computation.

This argumebt doesn't mean any given LLM is capable of reasoning at the level of a human on its own any more than it means a given person is able to translate Chinese on its own, but it does mean there's no basis in any evidence for claiming no LLM can be made to reason just like a human any more than there's a basis for claiming no person can learn Chinese.

> When we claim someone reasons logically we usually don't imagine they randomly throw ideas at the wall and then consult outputs to determine if they reasoned logically

This isn't how LLMs work either, so this is entirely irrelevant.
by tkel | 2025-09-07 09:08:58+00:00
Yeah, it's always been like that, South Korea today is absolutely full of US military personnel. The sight of US tanks on streets is considered normal. War is like the main industry of the US, it's very profitable to have military bases in 55 countries, with a $1 trillion annual pot to draw from. It pays well to force regime change and install friendly client states that allow labor and resource extraction by US companies. Oil in Syria, Oil in Venezuela, minerals in Ukraine are a couple recent examples. The nice thing about Trump is that he just comes out and says these things, he doesn't disguise imperialism like other politicians have. "We'll install Guaido if they agree to give us half of their oil", "We are in Syria for the Oil", "We want something in return in Ukraine, we want the minerals", "We want the lithium in Bolivia", "We want Panama", "We want Greenland", "Make Canada a US state", "turn beachfront Gaza into a Real-Estate investment", etc. But it goes all the way back to the Korean War, with the North having most of the mineral resources that the US is interested in conquering. This is a playbook that the US has used all over the world.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-07 09:09:24+00:00
> dangle carrots

When my coworker was leaving, I learned that he was earning 2x my salary. I went to my manager and asked for a raise. He told me he'd promote me if I do some project. I went above and beyond, but my manager simply set me up for failure. I don't think it was intentional, but rather that he's incompetent, because it's a pattern that I tell him to do X, he says that X doesn't make sense, one year later we go back to X.

Now my strategy is to slack off as much as I can. The company is comically dysfunctional, so the end result is that I have a livable wage for effectively two hours of work a day. The rest of the time I'm at home.

I have a go-getter in my team but they also got disillusioned when they fulfilled the promotion requirements but then the requirements changed. This means we're slowly building a team of lazy fucks, contributing to the overall rot in the company. Which honestly isn't a bad deal from my perspective when you think about it.
by Krasnol | 2025-09-07 09:10:19+00:00
It is quite interesting to see this development on forums like this one.

I guess the Thiel influence is strong here too but it seems like "The Last Scream of the Old World", which is a right wing, populist and anti-intellectual tone, will seep deep even into areas we wouldn't have expected or didn't even think it would happen because it wouldn't be necessary.

We're living in interesting times indeed...unfortunately.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-07 09:10:58+00:00
Thermal throttling originated as a safety feature. The early implementations were basically a "thermal fuse" in function, and cut all power to the system to prevent catastrophic hardware damage. Only later did the more sophisticated versions that do things like "cut down clocks to prevent temps from rising further" appear.

On desktop PCs, thermal throttling is often set up as "just a safety feature" to this very day. Which means: the system does NOT expect to stay at the edge of its thermal limit. I would not trust thermal throttling with keeping a system running safely at a continuous 100C on die.

100C is already a "danger zone", with elevated error rates and faster circuit degradation - and there are only this many thermal sensors a die has. Some under-sensored hotspots may be running a few degrees higher than that. Which may not be enough to kill the die outright - but more than enough to put those hotspots into a "fuck around" zone of increased instability and massively accelerated degradation.

If you're relying on thermal throttling to balance your system's performance, as laptops and smartphones often do, then you seriously need to dial in better temperature thresholds. 100C is way too spicy.
by uniqueuid | 2025-09-07 09:11:10+00:00
For what it's worth, I have an i9-13900K paired with the largest air cooler available at the time (a be quiet! Dark Rock 5 IIRC), and it's incapable of sufficiently cooling that CPU.

The 13900k draws more than 200W initially and thermal throttles after a minute at most, even in an air conditioned room.

I don't think that thermal problems should be pushed to end user to this degree.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-07 09:11:14+00:00
Oh, yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria

From the Japanese PoV, imagining that they could hold off the US/UK suddenly ceased to matter. Obviously Japanese armies could not stand against Soviet armies. So - "OMG, who could have imagined the Americans inventing a super-super-duper bomb! I guess we'll have to surrender to them" was a face-saving way to avoid a quick & brutal Soviet conquest & occupation.
by consp | 2025-09-07 09:11:25+00:00
Isn't it mostly an ease of mind thing? I've never seen a ECC error on my home server which has plenty of memory in use and runs longer than my desktop. Maybe it's more common with higher clocked, near the limit, desktop PC's.

Also: DDR5 has some false ecc marketing due to the memory standard having an error correction scheme build in. Don't fall for it.
by rapind | 2025-09-07 09:11:59+00:00
> The planning phase will produce plans that claude can iterate on for 3+ hours in some cases, if you tell it to complete the entire task in one shot, and the robust test validation / change set analysis will catch agents solving an easier problem because they got frustrated or not following directions.

Don't you run into context nightmares though? I was coming up with very detailed plans (using zen to vet with other models), but I found claude just doing the wrong thing a lot of the time, ignoring and / or forgetting very specific instructions and rules, especially across context compactions.

There's this one time that really sticks out in my mind because I had to constantly correct it; when to use ->> versus -> and handle null / type checks with PostgreSQL JSONB. Vibe coders would miss this sort of thing with testing unless they knew that JSONB null is not the same as SQL NULL (and other types too). When working with nested data, you probably won't have test coverage for it. This is just one of many examples too.
by diegobit | 2025-09-07 09:12:59+00:00
I think these books and resources should not be viewed as hard rules, but as sets of examples explaining guiding principles, and the internet is full of discussions that turn into religious wars over it.

It is always worth it for a programmer to dwell over what complexity is according to Osterhaur; it is worth it to reason over what Uncle Bob thinks is "clean" code, etc. I'm not benefiting from either by applying what they say dogmatically, but I improve my taste in what is good software to me, by discovering and trying many approaches. Without reading them I might never even have thought at a particular solution, or a particular frame of mind.
by thraxil | 2025-09-07 09:13:14+00:00
The description of the "meta framework":

* Thesis/Starting Argument * Counter-Argument (paper requirement from Naval War College) * Rebuttal (different perspective, not your starting argument)

Sounds like someone discovering a variation on the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectical method from philosophy for the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Paine is likely well versed in the philosophy and knows exactly what she's doing. Pointing this out in case anyone wants to go deeper on this kind of approach. Much ink has been spilled over the years on different approaches, criticisms, etc.
by a2128 | 2025-09-07 09:14:03+00:00
> Most people shouldn't install a Linux desktop on any normal Windows laptop.

My personal experience was completely the opposite. I had two ordinary Windows laptops that I decided to install Linux on, all hardware worked perfectly. Even on the most niche distros like Void Linux, the touchscreen, pen pressure sensitivity, everything worked. The beauty of having hardware that is supported in mainline Linux kernel.

So it entirely depends on the hardware you choose to buy. Most people don't think about Linux when purchasing hardware, neither did I, and I only got lucky. But now it's at the front of my mind, and I think other people should also keep it in their minds if they don't want to forever be stuck with whatever Microsoft decides to stick on their computers
by microtonal | 2025-09-07 09:14:25+00:00
Also relevant in this context:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2024/08/02/puget-systems-p...

to;dr: they heavily customize BIOS settings, since many BIOSes run CPUs out-of-spec by default. With these customizations there was not much of a difference in failure rate between AMD and Intel at that point in time (even when including Intel 13th and 14th gen).
by nunobrito | 2025-09-07 09:14:36+00:00
Oh man.. that comment really hit deep. I'll never understand why people argue that it is "easier" to adopt invisible characters and exact tab positioning instead of just using braces or similar to mark the code blocks.

Drives me nuts because you really can only write code for those programs with an IDE that is prepared for the case. Try to edit the code directly from the github web interface and it won't compile.
by tomhow | 2025-09-07 09:14:43+00:00
Comments like this have never been OK on HN, and the people who have been making consistently good contributions since the earliest days do not attack other users like this. If you’re concerned about a decline of HN, we need you to observe the guidelines that have been in place since well before your account was registered.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by fexelein | 2025-09-07 09:15:41+00:00
So I am running Ollama on Windows using an 10700k and 3080ti. I'm using models like Qwen3-coder (4/8b) and 2.5-coder 15b, Llama 3 instruct, etc. These models are very fast on my machine (~25-100 tokens per second depending on model)

My use case is custom software that I build and host that leverages LLMs for example for domotica where I use my Apple watch shortcuts to issue commands. I also created a VS2022 extension called Bropilot to replace Copilot with my locally hosted LLMs. Currently looking at fine tuning these type of models for work where I work in finance as a senior dev
by j45 | 2025-09-07 09:16:24+00:00
- Surprised UTM wasn't mentioned here.

Depending on the version of iPad, you may be able to get UTM SE on it, which will let you run a virtualized operating system on it.

https://getutm.app/

- There appear to be some jailbreaks too

- iSH would let you install and run local linux packages
by c0l0 | 2025-09-07 09:16:26+00:00
Usually, if a vendor's spec sheet for a (SOHO/consumer-grade) motherboard mentions ECC-UDIMM explicitly in its memory compatibility section, and (but this is a more recent development afaict) DOES NOT specify something like "operating in non-ECC mode only" at the same time, then you will have proper ECC (and therefore EDAC and RAS) support in Linux, if the kernel version you have can already deal with ECC on your platform in general.

I would assume your particular motherboard to operate with proper SECDED+-level ECC if you have capable, compatible DIMM, enable ECC mode in the firmware, and boot an OS kernel that can make sense of it all.
by vidarh | 2025-09-07 09:16:32+00:00
You can do it yourself by setting temperature to zero and asking an LLM to execute the rules of a (2,3) Turing machine.

Since temperature zero makes it deterministic, you only need to test one step for each state and symbol combination.

Are you suggesting you don't believe you can't make a prompt that successfully encodes 6 trivial state transitions?

Either you're being intentionally obtuse, or you don't understand just how simple a minimal Turing machine is.
by jpc0 | 2025-09-07 09:17:43+00:00
How is getting an error array not making invalid input unrepresentable.

You either get the correctly parsed data or you get an error array. The incorrect input was never represented in code, vs a 0 value being returned or even worse random gibberish.

A trivial example: 1/0 should return DivisionByZero not 0 or infinity or NaN or whatever else. You can then decide in your UI whether that is a case you want to handle as an error or as an edge case but the parser knows that is not possible to represent.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-07 09:18:03+00:00
Nearly every authoritarian country starts with people promising good things. A lot also start with rebels fighting against a group that led a massacre. They're underdog groups with popular support.

Then those underdogs take over. They become paranoid about the possibility of being killed themselves, so they repeat the massacres they fought against. A lot of people who supported the new regime think it's just a few remaining enemies being taken out. It won't happen to them. Then the government starts laying out methods to solidify their control. The list of things seen as traitorous and against national interests grows. It becomes a frog in a boiling pot situation. By the time people realize they might be a target, the system is too complicated and widespread to take down alone, and a new generation of youths have been raised knowing only the current system. And to those youths, things are stable. The most terrifying thing to people raised in stability is the idea of losing that stability. So keeping your head down and following the law is much better than absolutely anything else.

And with the absolute control of information that NK has, a significant portion of people really don't even know a better world exists out there. And they're terrified of anyone that even talks about shaking things up.
by ntlk | 2025-09-07 09:18:05+00:00
Renshuu provides fantastic SRS based tools for memorizing the hell out of vocabulary, has a huge bank of grammar lessons and a variety of grammar quiz styles to bed in the knowledge through practical applications. There are multiple quiz styles that are more or less challenging, including typing out answers instead of multiple choice questions.

Using just Renshuu and Wanikani I learned enough Japanese to be able to engage with Japanese content and for it to be actually comprehensible.

In the past I tried learning through immersion only, made no progress, found it demotivating and gave up. You need a baseline of vocab and grammar, and I don’t think it matters much where exactly it’s coming from (apps, lessons, textbooks).
by stevekemp | 2025-09-07 09:18:46+00:00
I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards.

Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.

I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:

https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos
by pjmlp | 2025-09-07 09:19:20+00:00
Objective-C, the main difference to NeXTSTEP is that DriverKit changed from Objective-C into C++ with IO Kit, that uses Embedded C++ in a COM like approach.

In an homage to NeXTSTEP, the userspace version of IO Kit is named DriverKit.

There are some frameworks that might use C++ in their implementations, like Core Audio, however they are exposed to userspace as C APIs and Objective-C frameworks.

Hence why Apple nowadays mostly cares about LLVM, clang is good enough for their limited uses of C++.

https://developer.apple.com/xcode/cpp/

https://cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html
by ahartmetz | 2025-09-07 09:19:46+00:00
I think of design patterns as possible solutions to certain problems. They should be used when the corresponding problem arises and their mental overhead is less than whatever the alternatives may be. I use them quite sparingly.

I don't find them very useful (today) to understand existing systems that don't intentionally use the patterns. They don't occur very often in well-designed systems in the first place, even less so unintentionally.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-07 09:19:58+00:00
Yes, please don't get me wrong. There are always a few good things, but like you mention with streams: the person writing it can have an idea of what he was doing but the others afterwards will struggle to make changes and will likely revert the code base to simpler code.

Switch statements got better. I'm also getting used to Paths albeit don't yet understand why File wasn't already good enough. It is difficult to find compelling reasons for upgrading the JDK since I know it will be hassle for everyone that later down the line has to install/run the product.
by qwezxcrty | 2025-09-07 09:20:39+00:00
I just searched and it appears that contrary to what I thought, it is possible to individually acquire Windows 11 Enterprise (IoT or non-IoT) LTSC licenses from some redistributors.

The price varies a lot from suprisingly cheap ($7.7, is buykeysoft.com legit?) to a bit expensive but acceptable (~200 CHF). I'll definitely use these when I'm setting up my new desktop in the future.
by em-bee | 2025-09-07 09:20:57+00:00
no they don't. in some countries in europe (maybe in all of them?), installing airconditioning is frowned upon because it is considered a waste of energy. if you want government subsidies for replacing your heating system with a more energy efficient one you are not allowed to have airconditioning. and in the rest of the world only people/countries well of, that don't consider their energy usage, do it. airconditioning is luxury.

using to much airconditioning is also not comfortable. i used to live in singapore. we used to joke that singapore has two seasons: indoors and outdoors. because the airconditioning is powered so high that you had to bring jacket to wear inside. i'd frequently freeze after entering a building. i don't know why they do it, because it doesn't make sense. when i did turn on airconditioning at home i'd go barely below 30. just a few degrees cooler than the outside so it feels more comfortable without making the transition to hard.
by vidarh | 2025-09-07 09:22:03+00:00
With temperature set to zero, they are deterministic if inference is implemented with deterministic calculations.

Only when you turn the temperature up they become probabilistic for a given input in that case. If you take shortcuts in implementing the inference, then sure, rounding errors may accumulate and prevent that, but that is not an issue with the models but with your choice of how to implement the inference.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-07 09:22:26+00:00
And those mobile devices have much more conservative limits, and much more aggressive throttling behavior.

Smartphones have no active cooling and are fully dependent on thermal throttling for survival, but they can start throttling at as low as 50C easily. Laptops with underspecced cooling systems generally try their best to avoid crossing into triple digits - a lot of them max out at 85C to 95C, even under extreme loads.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-09-07 09:22:40+00:00
>If local time is qualified with where "local" is then it is identical to using a time with a locale, like Europe/London or whatever

We may not know the location when we write down a datetime. It could be "wherever I may be at the time".

Even if we do know the location, we cannot know for sure what point in time a future local time refers to because locations can change timezones.

>Even your example of alarms is not obvious. If you set a timer, or a daily alarm to wake up by, then yes. But if you set an alarm for some event, like sunrise for example, then you would need a zone.

That's absolutely right. We need to be able to store points in time and we need to be able to store local times relative to locations that are yet to be determined and relative to as yet unknown timezones. The two concepts cannot be merged.