MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-28 01:47:14+00:00
Eh, "figuring out how to deal with it" is the easy part. The hard part is first making it work, and then proving its effectiveness, scaling it and improving it.

Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well.

You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to bankrupt many.
by MattGaiser | 2025-09-28 01:50:33+00:00
America spends a greater percentage of government money on healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare. Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and you would be ahead of almost everyone.

And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.

Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
by ashdksnndck | 2025-09-28 01:51:13+00:00
Defense is only 13% of federal spending: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:

https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...

Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.

Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
by commandersaki | 2025-09-28 01:52:31+00:00
I'll chuck in another rationalisation from just one angle (of many). It's a low in demand feature that if they implement they would have to support. One thing that Apple does incredibly well (I really can't think of any tech company that comes close) is provide front line support for virtually every capability and feature in the Apple ecosystem. This means they have to resource support people to know how the feature works, and troubleshoot it when things have issue, dedicate engineer resources if an issue cannot be fixed and requires escalation, etc.

Just having such a feature involves a cost, and the juice is just not worth the squeeze.

Curious, if your phone supports the feature and it doesn't work, what is your recourse?
by Terr_ | 2025-09-28 01:53:13+00:00
The things I'm trying to keep in mind, because hard to suppress the instinct to be reactive:

1. "Time in market beats timing the market."

2. When diversifying, your profession is is already part of your portfolio.

There's also the political mismanagement of the United States, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
by k3vinw | 2025-09-28 01:53:17+00:00
I really think that Rust has one of the best designed/inspired type systems.

If I had to rewrite a Python project, I would consider Rust or another statically typed language before choosing to continue in a dynamic language with types bolted on. I hope the situation improves for dynamic languages with optional types, but it still feels weird and bolted onto the language because it is.
by sipjca | 2025-09-28 01:53:52+00:00
Author here!

The default recommendation is Parakeet (mainly because it runs fast on a lot more hardware), but definitely think people should experiment with different models and see what is best for them. Personally I found Whisper Medium to be far better than Turbo and Large for my speech, and Parakeet is about on par with Medium, but each have their own quirks.

I'll update the site soon!
by ompogUe | 2025-09-28 01:55:50+00:00
Been having fun with this one

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/read-aloud/

Read Aloud allows you to select from a variety of text-to-speech voices, including those provided natively by the browser, as well as by text-to-speech cloud service providers such as Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, and Microsoft. Some of the cloud-based voices may require additional in-app purchase to enable.

...

the shortcut keys ALT-P, ALT-O, ALT-Comma, and ALT-Period can be used to Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Forward, respectively.
by SteveJS | 2025-09-28 01:57:24+00:00
It is not llm specific. A large swathe of it isn’t that much Microsoft specific either.

And it is a developer feature hidden from end users. e.g. - In your ollama example, does the developer ask end users to install ollama? Does the dev redistribute ollama and keep it updated?

The ONNX format is pretty much a boring de-facto standard for ML model exchange. It is under the linux foundation.

The ONNX Runtime is a microsoft thing, but it is an MIT licensed runtime for cross language use and cross OS/HW platform deployment of ML models in the ONNX format.

That bit needs to support everything because Microsoft itself ships software on everything.(Mac/linux/iOS/Android/Windows.

ORT — https://onnxruntime.ai

Here is the Windows ML part of this —https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/new-windows-ml/...

The primary value claims for Windows ML (for a developer using it)— This eliminates the need to: Bundle execution providers for specific hardware vendors

Create separate app builds for different execution providers

Handle execution provider updates manually.

Since ‘EP’ is ultra-super-techno-jargon:

Here is what GPT-5 provides:

Intensional (what an EP is)

In ONNX Runtime, an Execution Provider (EP) is a pluggable backend that advertises which ops/kernels it can run and supplies the optimized implementations, memory allocators, and (optionally) graph rewrites for a specific target (CPU, CUDA/TensorRT, Core ML, OpenVINO, etc.). ONNX Runtime then partitions your model graph and assigns each partition to the highest-priority EP that claims it; anything unsupported falls back (by default) to the CPU EP.

Extensional (how you use them) • You pick/priority-order EPs per session; ORT maps graph pieces accordingly and falls back as needed. • Each EP has its own options (e.g., TensorRT workspace size, OpenVINO device string, QNN context cache). • Common EPs: CPU, CUDA, TensorRT (NVIDIA), DirectML (Windows), Core ML (Apple), NNAPI (Android), OpenVINO (Intel), ROCm (AMD), QNN (Qualcomm).
by fn-mote | 2025-09-28 01:58:24+00:00
Cynical, but maybe not wrong. We are plenty familiar with ignoring technical debt and letting it pile up. Dodgy LLM code seems like more of that.

Just like tech debt, there's a time for rushing. And if you're really getting good results from LLMs, that's fabulous.

I don't have a final position on LLM's but it has only been two days since I worked with a colleague who definitely had no idea how to proceed when they were off the "happy path" of LLM use, so I'm sure there are plenty of people getting left behind.
by danaris | 2025-09-28 02:00:38+00:00
No, that's probably true. That's where the last part of my post applies: this is rarely a conscious application of the Protestant work ethic, and more just the way it has shaped our culture to say that rest for rest's sake, and especially taking time off from work just for that, is Wrong. Specifically, it's Lazy.

Vacation is a normal thing: culturally, we have a strong understanding of it, and an agreement that going to visit another country, or to Disneyworld, or for a camping trip, is what you're supposed to do with paid time off.

But just resting? Well, that's just selfish!
by rendall | 2025-09-28 02:02:48+00:00
> I assume you mean USAian.

In English, the word American refers to someone from the United States, and almost all of the languages of the world use some equivalent term: amerikkalainen, Amerikaner, Américain, americano, американец, アメリカ人, أمريكي

When speaking South American-inflected Spanish, you might use the word estadounidense and not americano

USAian is not a word that anyone uses. I don't make the rules.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-09-28 02:06:18+00:00
I know this is a tangent, but I just want to share this oddity. I am 38 years old, and I have been trying to buy Neuromancer since 1999. I have been in Santiago, Rome, London, Miami, Madrid, Bogota, live, in situ looking for the book on mainstream bookshops and I have never found a copy to buy. I know Neuromancer by heart but I have never been able to buy a copy of it. 38 Years.
by astrange | 2025-09-28 02:06:48+00:00
> In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."

They had cancel culture in the 90s too.
by mrandish | 2025-09-28 02:07:43+00:00
> outcry from the shareholders

If you're a shareholder, you can vote "no" to selling with your shares. Generally, selling a public company requires the majority of the shares to vote "yes" in order to force the minority shareholders to go along with the sale. Usually the share price being offered represents a substantial uplift over the current trading price of the shares (and thus the value of the company). If the transaction unfairly hurts the financial value for minority shareholders they can sue to block the transaction (which does happen).
by defrost | 2025-09-28 02:08:41+00:00
Lumping together is poor taxonomy, the challenge is how to represent all the branching, eg: the early Krautrock influenced and later "Krautrock produced" Hunters & Collecters work.

* Album 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunters_%26_Collectors_(album)

* Album 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fireman%27s_Curse

* Album 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaws_of_Life_(Hunters_%26_...

Albums 2 & 3 were co-produced by Konrad Plank in Neunkirchen and Weilerswist, Germany following his liking of the first album and tracks such as Talking to a Stranger, Run Run Run, leading to his work on tracks such as Judas Sheep, Tow Truck, and Betty's Worry or The Slab.

Not the Krautrock known to many via Kraftwerk but certainly tangentially adjacent in some odd way.
by wilt6269 | 2025-09-28 02:10:39+00:00
I did read the thread — and I’m specifically referring to the third (and final) diagram where it still literally labels X as “Twitter.” No amount of timeline layout gymnastics explains that. It feels less like faithful documentation and more like a pretext to take a swipe at the acquisition by “some guy,” which then segues into the whole “getting cooked by the algorithm” bit.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-09-28 02:11:14+00:00
That would have been pretty good back in the day. I don't recall when the BoStream people started to first appear but they started to push 1mbit/s or more and the 56k modems felt very slow in comparison.

I don't miss tweaking all the counter strike settings to try and optimise for the latency to the servers I played on and the limitations of bandwidth nor loosing the only phone. Everything was so much slower.
by parpfish | 2025-09-28 02:13:26+00:00
I was just thinking about heart transplants and how they’re treated as commonplace now, but they are nuts when you think about them.

You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why isn’t there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn’t that other heart sliding out of place while you move around?
by o11c | 2025-09-28 02:15:02+00:00
Not all, only most Americans. For Brits it's usually after Sir Garfield (spear field) St Aubrun Sobers.

And even before Gary Cooper there were people using it for Gerald (spear power), Gerard (spear hard/brave), and (old) Gerbert (spear bright). It is a cousin to, but believed not historically derived from, Garrett/Garrod. It is unclear whether German/Germain derive from this root or not. It is usually unrelated to Jared (which is usually a Hebrew name, but does have spelling variants that overlap Garrod).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-28 02:15:09+00:00
Tata’s IT outsourcing decisions (to improve profits) are what led to the UK government having to step in to prevent job losses at scale in the supply chain. They didn’t procure cyber insurance due to internal failures. This is a partial cost of nationalization without any of the benefit, while Tata continues to own and control the enterprise.

China has many faults, but they do not make these mistakes more capitalistic and profit driven countries like the UK and the US do (“financialization until failure”).
by _heimdall | 2025-09-28 02:15:16+00:00
I have always wondered what decision I would make facing such a health concern.

> Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a “fantastic long-term outcome”, he adds.

I am surprised by this being considered a long-term outcome though. Going through the high risk of a kidney transplant, immunosuppression required, risk of using a pig kidney in general, etc seems like a lot if the hope is for 12 months as a long-term unlikelihood.
by bwann | 2025-09-28 02:15:50+00:00
The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an ITSP/VoIP provider and my modems connected to Grandstream/Linksys/Cisco analog telephone adapters.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-28 02:15:59+00:00
A lot of programmers that say that LLMs are awesome tend to be inexperienced, not good programmers, or just gloss over the significant amount of extra work that using LLMs requires.

Programmers tend to overestimate their knowledge of non-programming domains, so the OP is probably just not understanding that there are serious issues with the LLM's output for complicated subject matters like insurance.
by davely | 2025-09-28 02:16:48+00:00
I don’t care all that much for the book, but I often think of a passage Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations:

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
by dralley | 2025-09-28 02:18:45+00:00
The second one didn't sell well as a result of being scheduled for release on top of a Call of Duty and a Battlefield.

Reportedly it was an effort to suppress Call of Duty sales but en effect basically sacrificed Titanfall. Respawn management were very, very unhappy about this.

It's a shame, it was a great game with a fantastic campaign. I have a few hundred hours in the multiplayer too.
by sleepyguy | 2025-09-28 02:18:59+00:00
This type of weapon reflects the West's approach to drone warfare—multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment that will need to be right on the front line to defend troops and positions. I'll tell you right now, it would last about 10 minutes on the front lines in Ukraine. What many people don't realize is the sheer volume of drones being used in some of the battles along the front—it's not hundreds, but thousands. Trenches are being abandoned, and everyone is going underground. Ground drones can’t even be sent in to support front line troops anymore, as vehicles are taken out within minutes. This is a weapon of last resort, to take out what gets through to the rear. We need front line solutions which don't exist yet.

Here is a quote from a piece a front line defender in the Ukrainian Arm Forces wrote. His name is Maksym Zhorin

>Equally dangerous is the technological obsolescence of NATO countries and their inability to counter modern threats. Adequacy of response, means of combat, even simply understanding what real war looks like today — all of this is missing. Therefore, even a few drones have become a problem for them.

I don't know what the solution to drones are because everything is evolving in real time.
by nadis | 2025-09-28 02:19:26+00:00
OP here (Nadia). Yes, in my case I was specifically asking for it to act as a code reviewer and make comments and a recommendation on whether to merge the PR with my changed into our main branch. This just happened to be the response.

I feel like Claude specifically uses language in what seems like a more playful way. I notice this also when instead of just a loader there are things like “Baking… Percolating…” etc.

I do get the ick if it feels like the agent is trying to be too “human” but in this case I just thought it was funny language for a response to my ask specifically to play a PR reviewer role.

Claude in reviewer mode also had a funny (at least to me) comment about it being interesting that Claude put itself as a PR contributor. I think in the screenshot in my blog post (if it got cutoff for others let me know and I can fix), but not called out in the text.
by imglorp | 2025-09-28 02:20:10+00:00
This seems like an ideal application of the electrolaser. This was an ultraviolet laser that would ionize a channel through air and then a high voltage pulse could be sent over that channel to a target. Originally they were talking about this being like a long range taser as a non-lethal stun weapon, but maybe more suited for anti-drone technology.

I don't know why this didn't get realized in its original form. Maybe there was a practical impediment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
by forrestthewoods | 2025-09-28 02:21:07+00:00
Strong agree on the “target distro” or even “target specific env” versus Linux.

I think I disagree on Windows being tightly coupled. Windows simply has a barren global library path. Programs merely included their extra DLLs adjacent to the exe. Very simple and reliable.

Linux has added complexity in that glibc sucks and is horribly architected. GCC/Clang are bad and depend on the local environment waaaay too much. Linux ecosystem is very much not built to support sharing cross compiled binaries. It’s so painful. :(
by prewett | 2025-09-28 02:21:10+00:00
"Solve quantum physics" meaning generating closed-form solutions to the Schrodinger equation for atoms of any composition? Of arbitrary molecules? Good luck with that... Even for the hydrogen atom, the textbook said "so it happens that <some polynomial function I'd never heard of before> just so happens to solve this equation", instead of the derivations one would normally expect. I doubt we have even invented the math to solve the equations much above the hydrogen atom, assuming that a closed-form solution is even theoretically possible.

I think Altman has been getting mentored by Musk. I think we'll get full self-driving Teslas before quantum mechanics is "solved", though, and I am not expecting that in the foreseeable future.
by monocasa | 2025-09-28 02:21:35+00:00
> Thanks for the link. As Ken points out at the end, "Probably the biggest objection to calling the ARM1 microcoded is that the designers of the ARM chip didn't consider it that way.[4] Furber mentions that some commercial RISC processors use microcode, but doesn't apply that term to the ARM1". My opinion is the same as Steve Furber's, though I can certainly see Ken Sherriff's viewpoint.

So reading, the citation fully, it seems that Furber doesn't really dive deep into the ARM1, instead saving a deep dive for the ARM2 as well as an additional chapter about the changes then made for the ARM3. I think kens might be steel manning the position.

> In theory PLAs and ROMs are fully equivalent. In practice, while the ROM can accept any possible "microcode", a PLA might have to be enlarged if you want to change some of the "micro instruction". This need to change the hardware to change the functionality of an instruction is what makes me consider this design hardwired instead of microcoded.

Traditionally, the difference would be defined as whether or not it's structured as an address being decoded to create a one hot enable signal for a single row of the array at a time. When you take the FSM signals as a sub address, and the init, interrupt, and decoded instr bits as a segment address, this is what you see here. And that matches the structure seen in traditional CISC microcode ROMs.

Additionally, there is extra space on the die for an additional few rows.

> [EDIT] Another issue is that the ARM1 has three pipeline stages. The "microcode" here is not used for the fetch and decode stages, only the execute one. So though register to register operations take 3 clock cycles to execute, only one "micro instruction" is needed (the second line in the table).

The pipelining doesn't really matter here. The 486 for instance more or less completed one (simple) instruction a clock, but had a rather deep for the time piepline where those instructions would have several cycles of latency. Those simple instructions were also a single micro op despite being being processed in several pipeline stages. And the micro decode was not the first stage of the pipeline either. The 486 had a deeper pipeline with fetch, decode 1, decode 2, execute, and writeback pipeline stages, but didn't start emitting micro instructions except as the output of the third pipeline stage.
by firefax | 2025-09-28 02:21:39+00:00
I miss when if someone got too heated, I could pull the "I'm literally a child, maybe I should call the company the whois info is showing for your IP and tell them their sysadmin is acting like one" card.

(Imagine getting owned that hard by a teenager. Modern internet just can't compare since you can just say the most vile shit under your real name with zero consequence apparently.)
by zdragnar | 2025-09-28 02:23:00+00:00
Fiber is a decades long investment into hardware- one that I would argue we hardly needed. Google fiber started with the question, what would people do with super high speed? The answer was stream higher quality videos and that's about it. In fact, by the time fiber became widespread, many had moved off of PCs to do the majority of their Internet use via cell phones.

With that said, the fiber will be good for many years. None of the LLM models or hardware will be useful in more than a few years, with everything being replaced to newer and better on a continual basis. They're stepping stones, not infrastructure.
by danpalmer | 2025-09-28 02:23:33+00:00
I'm persisting, have been using LLMs quite a bit for the last year, they're now where I start with any new project. Throughout that time I've been doing constant experimentation and have made significant workflow improvements throughout.

I've found that they're a moderate productivity increase, i.e. on a par with, say, using a different language, using a faster CI system, or breaking down some bureaucracy. Noticeable, worth it, but not entirely transformational.

I only really get useful output from them when I'm holding _most_ of the context that I'd be holding if writing the code, and that's a limiting factor on how useful they can be. I can delegate things that are easy, but I'm hand-holding enough that I can't realistically parallelise my work that much more than I already do (I'm fairly good at context switching already).