MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gerdesj | 2025-09-08 23:25:25+00:00
"When it comes to multiway extension leads - people in the UK are sometimes told it's bad to "overload" sockets but have only a vague understanding of what that means, so some people are reluctant to use them."

To be fair, most people work on the assumption that if the consumer unit doesn't complain, then it is fair game. They are relying on modern standards, which nowadays is quite reasonable. I suppose it is good that we can nowadays rely on standards.

However, I have lived in a couple of houses with fuse wire boards, one of which the previous occupants put in a nail for a circuit that kept burning out.

Good practice is to put a low rated fuse - eg 5A (red) into extension leads for most devices. A tuppence part is easy and cheap to replace but if a few devices not involved with room heating/cooling blow a 5A fuse, you need to investigate. A hair dryer, for example, should not blow a 5A fuse.
by ajb | 2025-09-08 23:25:28+00:00
I've never seen a plug that has an exposed wire for that reason - all the plugs have a heavy clamp internally that attaches to the outer sheath, preventing the movement that would cause this. I would suspect that any plugs where wear has caused exposure are either properly ancient, or were wired incorrectly (eg by trimming the outer sheath short of the clamp).
by codethief | 2025-09-08 23:26:38+00:00
Ah yes, the Signal PIN is backed by Intel SGX to ensure it can't be hacked even if the user has not provided enough entropy. However, why not simply rule out the low-entropy case altogether and use that randomly generated 64-character key throughout? That way, we also wouldn't have to trust Intel SGX… (which I think we shouldn't)
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-08 23:26:55+00:00
I think both can be true.

A client CPU spends most of its life idling. Thus, the key to good battery life in client computing is, generally, idle power consumption. That means low core power draw at idle, but it also means shutting off peripherals that aren't in use, turning off clock sources for said peripherals, etc.

ARM was built for low-power embedded applications from the start, and thus low-power idle states are integrated into the architecture quite elegantly. x86, on the other hand, has the SMM, which was an afterthought.

AFAICT case for x86 ~ ARM perf equivalence is based on the argument that instruction decode, while empirically less efficient on x86, is such a small portion of a modern, high-performance pipeline that it doesn't matter. This reasoning checks out IMO. But, this effect would only be visible while the CPU is under load.
by petertodd | 2025-09-08 23:26:58+00:00
Installing open source software on phones is becoming more and more difficult. It used to be the case that bootloaders were generally unlocked or unlockable. That is no longer true, including on Android. Google is also planning on banning APKs from unregistered sources soon.

We need end-to-end encryption on phones to have reasonably convenient privacy. We can definitely lose that, and open source software won't help.

Worse, once phones are locked down desktops and laptops can be locked down as well.
by haukem | 2025-09-08 23:27:39+00:00
OpenWrt accepts binary only firmware running outside of the Linux kernel address space on the wifi chip itself. This matches what upstream Linux also accepts. This works well with most recent Wifi drivers. OpenWrt does not accapt binary only kernel modules or binary only userspace applications, they are very hard to maintain if you do not have the source code.

This works well with Mediatek and also Qualcomm and most other vendors.
by socalgal2 | 2025-09-08 23:28:50+00:00
> All that really matters is consistency

And this is my problem. My last example, the 2 styles are inconsistent. So when the guideline is "all that matters in consistency" then I take that at face value. You though apparently pull back and believe something more messy. Effectively "All that really matters is a consistently applied style even if that style itself is full of inconsistency"

The same applies to the trailing commas. With them, every line is consistent. Without, the last line is inconsistent with the other lines. So are we applying this rule "All that really matters is consistency" or only applying it sometimes? I would argue whatever heuristic made you say "All that really matters is consistency" should apply to both cases. Consistently apply a style guide and, the style guide itself should be consistent.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-08 23:28:55+00:00
My feeling about it is that there is not a tension between refactoring and feature work but rather that a specific bit of feature work is best done with a refactoring. For instance about 10 components on a certain page I was working on all had the same accessibility problem which involved changed the HTML and then changing the CSS so this is a good chance to make a single component which can be used to replace the problematic code in all 10 components and to rationalize the CSS.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-08 23:28:56+00:00
Fwiw the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000 RISC CPU and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K5 are a good example of this. As in AMD took their existing RISC CPU to make the K5 x86 CPU.

Almost the same in die shots except the K5 had more transistors for the x86 decoding. The AM29000's instruction set is actually very close to RISC-V too!

Very hard to find benchmarks comparing the two directly though.
by jjk166 | 2025-09-08 23:28:57+00:00
I'm pretty sure a lot of work has gone into making institutions resistant to a potential future super-Hitler. Whether those efforts will be effective or not, it is a very real concern, and it would be absurd to ignore it on the grounds of "there is probably some limit to tyranny we're not yet aware of which is not too far beyond what we've previously experienced." I would argue a lot more effort should have gone into preventing the original Hitler, whose rise to power was repeatedly met with the chorus refrain "How much worse can it get?"
by utyop22 | 2025-09-08 23:29:19+00:00
Okay... but an airplane in essence is modelling the shape of a bird. Where do you think the inspiration for the shape of a plane came from? lmao. come on.

Humans are not all that original, we take what exists in nature and mangle it in some way to produce a thing.

The same thing will eventually happen with AI - not in our lifetime though.
by addaon | 2025-09-08 23:29:41+00:00
> The area has nothing to do with peak performance... based on the node, it has to do with the amount of components you can cram into a given space.

Of course it does. For single-threaded performance, the knobs I can turn are clockspeed (minimal area impact for higher speed standard cells, large power impact), core width (significant area impact for decoder, execution resources, etc, smaller power impact), and cache (huge area impact, smaller power impact). So if I want higher single-threaded performance on a power budget, area helps. And of course for multi-threaded performance the knobs I have are number of cores, number of memory controllers, and last-level cache size, all of which drive area. There's a reason Moore's law was so often interpreted as talking about performance and not transistor count -- transistor count gives you performance. If you're willing to build a 432 mm^2 chip instead of a 308 mm^2 chip iso-process, you're basically gaining a half-node of performance right there.
by wooptoo | 2025-09-08 23:29:59+00:00
I'm assuming the backup format uses a container (like Veracrypt volumes), which grows in size forever, and cannot be backed up incrementally. I ran into the same issue when backing up loopback LUKS volumes. An elegant solution in this case was switching to Gocryptfs which encrypts each file individually, but then can mount the entire folder as a whole with fuse. This means only modified files need to be synchronised to the remote.
by jujube3 | 2025-09-08 23:30:06+00:00
It's important to understand that only a small percentage of academics will ever get tenure. The rest will keep toiling away on increasingly poorly paid and desperate postdocs until they finally age out and decide to take a job in industry. That job will pay less than the equivalent job for someone who never took the PhD track.

Of course, the percentage of tenured winners varies a lot by fields. It's very low in the humanities, somewhat better in CS and math, etc.

Once you get tenure, if you ever do, you will indeed have a lot of freedom, but you will also have a lot of work to do. Sure you can pass grading and other jobs off to grad students and postdocs (which you were for the last decade...) but in many fields, the need to fundraise never ends. It's sort of like funding a new startup every year with a different set of grad students.

Most people don't want to sit alone in a closet and think deep thoughts (well, ok, mathematicians do...). But if you want to do something in the real world, you'll need funding, and that means writing a LOT of grant proposals.
by westurner | 2025-09-08 23:30:07+00:00
IDK, "fine, due to no gapps sharing due to certain issues, then everyone must write a professional ScholarlyArticle manuscript with two columns, a title, authors, and abstract at the top" (with e.g. Notepad, LyX, Overleaf, CoCalc's time slider, LaTeX in $ \text{Jupyter notebooks} $ , $$ as /sigma \textit{Markdown} $$, and code with test coverage and docs)

:Article, : ScholarlyArticle, :Thesis, "Dissertation" (for a doctoral degree)

Philosoraptor: Do people get fired for messing around on Slack and not paying attention in meetings or for underperforming?

Socially awkward penguin: Is team coordination over chat one of your strengths?

Learn to code and manage projects resources that work on school Chromebooks: Hour of Code, Hour of AI (2025), JupyterLite, jupyterlite-xeus with (PyData,) packages from emscripten-forge, Google Colab, Replit, JS Fiddle, container2wasm, vscode.dev, Dockerfile + devcontainers/devcontainers.json

These days it's pretty simple to generate a meme generator tool; but still the cost of moderation (is part of the Accounting Equation for a team/org/business with limited funding amd operating costs and margin).

Why wouldn't you want to host a service for pick a type (an rdfs:Class) of schema.org/CreativeWork?

How can employers minimize waste and maximize utility of tools for collaboration and also networking?
by s1artibartfast | 2025-09-08 23:30:20+00:00
interesting thesis, but I dont see why you focus on victimhood over every other form of leverage.

I dont think victimhood motivates those in power to take action. They care about votes. victimhood is but one of many factors driving votes.

Your conclusion supports the relevance of violence (it is always the final currency of power). your conclusion says nothing about victimhood.

How can you look around the country or world and think the victims have all the power?
by elvisloops | 2025-09-08 23:30:37+00:00
Giving people a 64-character key also feels uncharacteristically crude for Signal. It's not realistic to hand people 64 characters and tell them to “store this securely.” Most people will screenshot it, and those screenshots will end up in unencrypted cloud backups.

That's less of a problem when the backups are local, because access to the local backups implies access to the device, but if the backups are in the cloud with no forward secrecy, this seems like a huge security backslide for Signal.
by dhon_ | 2025-09-08 23:31:01+00:00
I switched to a candy-bar style dumb phone for a month and did something similar. My list was pretty much the same as the one in the article with a few small changes.

The most jarring was probably maps - other things like email, messaging etc could be delayed until I could reach a computer but not knowing how to get somewhere right now was problematic and required planning in advance.

I usually kept my smart phone in my car and did a sim swap on the occasion that I really needed it.
by DrillShopper | 2025-09-08 23:31:46+00:00
So what if he was selling kits?

It's legal to sell kits along with instructions for modifying a firearm from semi-automatic to automatic fire, and the results of that have been several mass shootings.

So modding your console or selling tools to do it ought to be legal as well. The damage from that is far, FAR smaller than even a single mass shooting.
by brudgers | 2025-09-08 23:31:53+00:00
In school, you can take notes and learn enough to pass pretend problems on next week’s test.

In the adult world it ain’t that way. There’s no test next week and knowledge is not applied to pretend problems. Often it is not relevant to any problem and when it is, the relevant knowledge is based on years of experience.

Maybe look at it this way, what kind of problem is solved by knowing what the zenith is and how do you wind up in a position where that problem is relevant, meaningful, and important to society except through years of training and work experience?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with edification. But adult standards for knowing things are often higher. Even one-eyed kings in lands of the blind are kings because they have useful knowledge. Trivia is just trivia.

Time is the price of adult knowledge. Synthesis is the value. Aging comes with “how the hell did I do that?” because that’s the nature of up-to-the-ass-in-alligators work. If you leave the swamp you can’t do swamp work.

So some advice: if you want to use what works in school, go back to school. If you want a lifetime of learning, pursue intellectual challenges that don’t have one right answer. Fortunately, that’s most things. Unfortunately, doing so won’t feel safe and comfortable. Good luck.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-08 23:32:20+00:00
If you're measuring the draw at the wall, AFAIK desktop Ryzen keeps the chipset running at full power all the time and so even if the CPU is idle, it's hard to drop below, say, ~70W at the wall (including peripherals, fans, PSU efficiency etc).

Apparently desktop Intel is able to drop all the way down to under 10W on idle.
by kfrzcode | 2025-09-08 23:32:38+00:00
It's not a substantive talking point, and this forum should encourage reasonable conversations not politically-hued science fiction; a Microsoft refining and enriching fissile material to weapons-grade would be one thing in and of itself.

Let's imagine, for your sake, if Elon, Bezos, Gates and Zuck, hell, maybe Branson - they all had a handful of bespoke nukes. Starship becomes Startshit, or whatever clever branding the tech bros come up for their "private enterprise physical defense AI-driven atomic-oriented energy constraint circumvention systems" that can guarantee corporate continuation in the event of micro-scale nuclear warfare.

(this is literally the plot to Fallout, IIRC).

so okay, now they're "superpowers," somehow, in this fictional world where the instant any of these organizations begin the path to centrifugal enrichment toward weapons-grade material, the IAEA and the DOE and nine thousand other detection agencies are just going to allow it?

HN used to be a bastion, the place you'd lurk because you'd only keep learning. Network effect + time just middles the Bell.

So no, there's no need for some "censorship" when the masses can recognize and downvote stupidity. The system is working.

Not bug, feature.
by diggan | 2025-09-08 23:33:09+00:00
Or you know, get a password manager like the rest of us. If your password manager doesn't show the usual autofill, since the domain is different than it should, take a step back and validate everything before moving on.

Have the TOTP in the same/another password manager (after considering the tradeoffs) and that can also not be entered unless the domain is right :)
by utyop22 | 2025-09-08 23:33:49+00:00
As someone that has driven thousands of miles, and encountered some interesting roundabouts and junctions - I cannot relate to your experience whatsoever.

"I just didn't want it acting like an asshole on the road and didn't trust it enough to let the situation play out by itself."

So basically you had to intervene and it doesnt meet the standard of a fully autonomous vehicle. Do all the mental gymnastics all you want mate lmao.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-08 23:33:53+00:00
Is it really that bad? The beginning definitely ramps things up, but I don't think anyone who beat Hollow knight would call Silksong "punitive", at least not for the 10 hours I've played so far. The area I struggled in the most was clearly one I wasn't "supposed" to go into yet, but otherwise the difficulty curve is only slightly steeper than HK's early game.

Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-08 23:34:30+00:00
> While I'm not a hardware designer, my gut says that you can probably do x86 instruction length-decoding in one cycle

That's some very faint praise there. Especially when you're trying to chop up several instructions every cycle. Meanwhile RISC-V is "count leading 1s. 0-1:16bit 2-4:32bit 5:48bit 6:64bit"
by just_human | 2025-09-08 23:34:33+00:00
This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-08 23:35:41+00:00
As I already clarified, I was not referring to his formal selection by the DNC at the convention. That was your interpretation and I could see how someone might get confused and think that was a reasonable interpretation in the context of this thread about checking out of the news for as long as possible. Frankly I find it somewhat odd that your response to the discrepancy is to lecture me about what I meant rather than to do consider that your interpretation was wrong... particularly after receiving clarification.

To spell it out more explicitly: "getting the nod" is a reference to having the backdoor/bigwig/advisory/party boss support to risk formally throwing his hat in the ring and make a run for it. vs say... deciding it would be best to sit this one out to allow Harris to run... or some scandal or interaction with Trump having taken him completely off the table.
by Bukhmanizer | 2025-09-08 23:36:12+00:00
> We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.

This seems silly to me. In most cases, the least amount of work you can possibly do is logically describe the process you want and the boundaries, and run that logic over the input data. In other words, coding.

The idea that we should, to avoid coding or reading code, come up with a whole new process to keep generated code on track - would almost certainly take more effort than just getting the logical incantations correct the first time.
by saulpw | 2025-09-08 23:37:55+00:00
I think the main thing that makes this workable is "The library is usually a small, flat collection of atomic functions."

I find that it's the hell of transitive dependencies--you as a developer can reasonably vet a single layer of 10-30 standalone libraries. But if those libraries depend on other libraries, etc, then it balloons into hundreds or thousands of dependencies, and then you're sunk.

For what it's worth, I don't think much of this is essential complexity. Often a library is complicated because it supports 10 different ways of using it, but when you use the library, you're only using 1 of those ways. If everyone is only using 10% of thousands of transitive dependencies, the overall effect is incredibly complicated, but could have been achieved with 10-100% more short-term effort. Sure, "it took twice as long to develop but at least we don't have 10x the dependencies" is a hard sell to management (and often to ourselves), but that's because we usually choose to ignore the costs of depending on software we don't understand and don't control. We think that we're cleverly avoiding having to maintain and secure those libraries we outsourced, but most open-source developers aren't doing a great job of that anyway.

Often it really is easier to develop something from scratch, rather than learn and integrate a library. Not always though, of course.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-09-08 23:38:16+00:00
Oh that’s interesting - I’d never thought of Possession as being dark academia. But you’re right, it is. It’s certainly one of my favorite novels, on another level than The Secret History which I also enjoyed. Every time I re-read it I am impressed all over again by how it’s woven together and, not least, how Byatt managed to write all the poems herself.
by creakingstairs | 2025-09-08 23:38:53+00:00
I agree with you. These games are difficult on purpose and its a lot of fun is in rewarding the player with getting good. But if it is too difficult from the get-go, newer players will bounce off the game.

What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
by deater | 2025-09-08 23:38:54+00:00
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...
by chpatrick | 2025-09-08 23:39:01+00:00
LLMs are absolutely not "fully understood". We understand how the math of the architectures work because we designed that. How the hundreds of gigabytes of automatically trained weights work, we have no idea. By that logic we understand how human brains work because we've studied individual neurons.

And here's some more goalpost-shifting. Most humans aren't capable of novel mathematical thought either, but that doesn't mean they can't think.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 23:39:17+00:00
Try ingesting the a complete WHOIS dump into DDB sometime. This was before autoscaling worked at all when I tried... but it absolutely wasn't anything one can consider fun.

In the end, after multiple implementations, finally had to use a Java Spring app on a server with a LOT of ram just to buffer the CSV reads without blowing up on the pushback from DDB. I think the company spent over $20k in the couple months on different efforts in a couple different languages (C#/.Net, Node.js, Java) across a couple different routes (multiple queues, lambda, etc) just to get the initial data ingestion working a first time.

The Node.js implementation was fastest, but would always blow up a few days in without the ability to catch with a debugger attached. The queues and lambda experiments had throttling issues similar to the DynamoDB ingestion itself, even with the knobs turned all the way up. I don't recall what the issue with the .Net implementation was at the time, but it blew up differently.

I don't recall all the details, and tbh I shouldn't care, but it would have been nice if there was some extra guidance of trying to take in a few gb of csv into DynamoDB at the time. To this day, I still hate ETL work.