MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-01 12:26:03+00:00
We don't need agreement for this. In the past, hardware was limited, and you could only really implement one (maybe two) network stacks before things got silly. Nowadays, a software-defined radio can speak ten thousand protocols, for a lower cost than saving a cat video to your hard drive.

We only need that the standards are open, and described clearly enough for a schoolchild to implement, and that we are not prevented from adding additional protocol support to systems we acquire.

Hardware protocols are a bit different, but I actually dislike the USB-C standardisation. We already had better de-facto standards (e.g. small, "fixed-function" devices like feature phones and e-readers all use Micro USB-B for charging). Our problems were mainly "this laptop barrel charger is incompatible with this other laptop barrel charger", and proprietary Apple connectors.

The most important hardware protocol is power supply, which we can fix by requiring well-documented, user-accessible contacts that, when sufficiently-clean power is applied to them, will power the device. These could be contacts on the motherboard (for something designed to be opened up), or something like Apple's Smart Connector (without the pointless "I'll refuse to charge until you handshake!" restriction).

Requiring open, well-documented protocols which aren't unnecessarily-complicated is imo more important than requiring standard protocols.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-01 12:26:18+00:00
I wouldn't say "a lot of people". See https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27746/interactive...: only a few conditions, such as Myocarditis, are linked to the mRNA vaccines. I'd be way better off taking even the dodgiest vaccine (Oxford–AstraZeneca, which is no longer in production) than no vaccine, if exposed to actual COVID-19: the reduction in COVID-19 severity would be well worth it in terms of health outcomes (let alone the herd immunity consequences).
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-01 12:27:05+00:00
I don’t really see how the drawings were useless.

As long as parts were mechanically produced in series, they are standard. It doesn’t really matter then if the drawings were made ex post from existing parts. If you produce from a description with a precision equivalent to the original machinery tolerance, you should end up with virtually identical parts.

> I'm pretty sure that P-51s are maintained these days by making replacement parts by hand

This is fairly common for old cars too when spare parts are not mass produced anymore if they were at all. It used to be really common for all repairs not that long ago to be honest.

My grandfather was a mechanics in the 50s and he liked to explain that machining parts was a common occurrence then because getting parts shipped would take considerably longer than just making them and everyone involved knew how to machine parts anyway.
by nickdothutton | 2025-09-01 12:28:57+00:00
In early childhood someone gave me a storybook of African tales. Anansi, Legba, others I have long since forgotten. Every time I hear that the continent is not properly represented in film, and how some European tale needs to be Africanised I'm reminded of how lazy and risk averse Hollywood is. There are a hundred tales that could be told from the continent, genuinely novel and unlike anything you've read before.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-01 12:28:57+00:00
> Why not build your own hardware

Haven't looked at this in depth, but designing and manufacturing a phone with a similar miniaturization level and performance to commercial models is a huge electronics/firmware/design engineering challenge. Additionally, often the datasheets for processors, etc. are difficult to obtain and/or under NDA.

Nothing a group of determined engineers with the funding and connections couldn't achieve, but it's no easy task. Fairphone required a few million $ to develop the first model.

Either way, developing software is hard enough - having to build hardware too moves the project toward "pipe dream" territory IMO.
Show HN: Goal – a poetic goal tracker from OS Yamato
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-09-01 12:29:05+00:00
A new journaling app just landed in OS Yamato. “Goal” lets you create missions with quiet intention — each one blooms, lives, and fades if left untouched.

Designed not as a task manager, but as a seasonal ritual — a gentle space for reflection, not productivity.

•Set a goal with emoji, importance, and due date

•Mark favorites to keep them longer

•No pressure, no gamification — just mindful presence

Try it: https://hanaco875.com
by p_l | 2025-09-01 12:29:21+00:00
UEFI and ACPI is actually blowback from living in exactly that kind of world.

ACPI even included "compatible interface discovery" to handle the possibility that newer features might confuse older OSes without requiring end user to install newer OS (which they might not want to for various reasons) which used to be the norm. I owned a ~1994 UNIX workstation whose manual came with explicit instructions "you need to use at least this specific emergency upgrade version or the OS won't boot". PPC macs despite OpenFirmware had the same issue, because OpenFirmware had no such "interface discovery" mechanism allowing varying interface according to OS being run - it could only specify compatible device identifiers, which was not enough.

Also, you often need (a bit less today, but still important in server systems) considerable amount of vendor-specific drivers in firmware just to get to the OS.

Of course you can also go the completely other way, and implement always-virtualized environment like some IBM POWER systems, where the CPU wakes up with all of hardware already initialized and instruction pointer pointing to hypervisor scheduler loop.
by avianlyric | 2025-09-01 12:30:13+00:00
I would assume LTT does this to build and retain a clear competitive advantage over their competitors in the same space.

I don’t think LTT goal is just be another commodity YouTube review site whose entire appeal is dependent on a single personality. That not really a scalable or long term sustainable approach.

Large journalist organisations of any kind aren’t built by aiming to be mediocre.
by cb321 | 2025-09-01 12:30:41+00:00
Yeppers - https://github.com/treeform/nim_emscripten_tutorial

FWIW, people have been doing that for about as long as there's even been an emscripten, but the article is pointing out the lack of more tight integration with stdlib/std compilation toolchains. I would say evolving/growing the stdib in general is a pain point. Both the language and compiler are more flexible than most, though. So, this matters less in Nim that it might otherwise.
by Manfred | 2025-09-01 12:31:11+00:00
You have to understand where we came from. Development for iOS and macOS (then MacOS) meant you had to pluck source files from random places on the internet and weave them into your Xcode build. Xcode and xcodebuild didn't really shine in the department of extensibility.

Eloy designed CocoaPods to be the absolute minimum we needed to deal with dependencies for the projects we were working on. So that meant:

* Rely on GitHub for hosting so nobody would get bankrupted running the repo, with the option to switch over to self-hosted in case that ever became necessary. * Use Git and existing project tools on GitHub to deal with external contributions for pods. * Use Ruby for scripting because that was what people used most at that time. * Use Ruby for pod definitions for flexibility and reduced development time (ie. so CocoaPods didn't need a parser).

For a long time this was a one-person effort.

All of those decision obviously have downsides, even more obvious now you have to power of hindsight given years of incremental improvements on speed and security of dependency managers.

I think Eloy did a great job in general and the popularity gained speaks for itself.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-01 12:31:13+00:00
It's simple self interest. If you perceive trade as benefiting your interests (which, by definition, would imply not giving your opponent a meaningful edge in the conflict) then you trade.

It's the same thing that decides when wars end. Either side is free to surrender or withdraw at any point in a war. They continue fighting when they think that the result they can obtain (win or lose) in the future will be better than the result they can obtain in the present. They stop fighting when that no longer becomes the case, at least assuming non-insane leadership.

War isn't the end of relations. It's not infrequent that enemies today are allies tomorrow, or vice versa. Nobody ever knows what tomorrow holds, and history seems to love a nice plot twist.
by vincirufus | 2025-09-01 12:31:52+00:00
I've been in tech and have been coding for 25 years now. My workflow in the past 2 months uses coding agents for 95% of my work. Just yesterday I had my agent fix and rewrite nearly 2 weeks of a 2 member in about 30 minutes. The agent's code was a lot lot better. There there is a huge bubble, but once that bursts new patterns will emerge, Just like how ecommerce and online banking emerged, after the doc com bust
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-01 12:32:30+00:00
Should be safe to do, as long as none of that is load bearing. If it's the usual naive "massage the image into a hundred tokens and throw that into the context" vision implementation, nothing bad would happen from removing or just freezing them.

I've seen "cut off unused vision inputs" done for older multimodals, just not the newer Gemma 3.
by benjiro | 2025-09-01 12:32:36+00:00
> I don't believe they do the same for VPS / Cloud servers.

Because its backed into the price. If you run a VPS for a month, you get the listed monthly price. But if you run a VPS for a shorter time, the hourly billing price is a lot more expensive.

The ironic part being, that your better off keeping a VPS active until the end of your month periode (if you already crossed 2/3), then its is to cancel early.

Noticed that few people realize that the hourly price != the monthly price.
by iamtedd | 2025-09-01 12:33:06+00:00
"Good" content without data is unsubstantiated content.

Data to provide evidence of performance objectively evaluates products, benefiting everyone. For example, show me who has been verifying the quality and performance claims of computer power supplies without equipment such as LTT labs.

If you want to be reductive about it - technology and their gadgets are valuable for the audience, but not strictly necessary.
by t_mahmood | 2025-09-01 12:33:06+00:00
> If all you need is "good enough" reliability and basic compute power (which I think is good enough for many businesses, considering AWS isn't exactly outage free either), you're probably better off getting a server or renting one from a cheap cloud host.

This is exactly my point. Sorry if I was not clear on my OP.

We are using Seller API to get different product information, while their API provides base work for communicating with their endpoint, you'll have to implement your own system to use that, and handle the absurd unreliability of their API's rate limiter, and the spider web of API callbacks to get information that you require.
by kcplate | 2025-09-01 12:33:41+00:00
There are a number of mobile phones out there that are fully open. If you need root, go buy one. You seem to have a specific need that I am quite sure that 99.999% of the mobile phone using world do not have and never will have. If I am apple, I recognize that making a phone that makes the .001% happy probably will frustrate the 99.999%. They are quite happy to give that market of maybe 150k users to someone else to keep their 1.5B users content.
by palata | 2025-09-01 12:33:48+00:00
> While I used Graphene myself for a solid 6 months, the features you have to give up on using or find some obtuse workaround for aren't appealing to the "normies" who just want their phone to do what they want

Did you use GrapheneOS with the Play Services? Sounds like you didn't. Of course if you don't use the Play Services, you lose... the Play Services. But GrapheneOS allows you to run them in the sandbox.

> Throw in how Google starting with Android 16 is not releasing updated drivers with AOSP and Graphene probably doesn't have much life left in it, either.

This sounds incorrect. Google decided to stop sending the device tree of the Pixel devices in AOSP. And GrapheneOS is still fine, though it will take more effort because they won't get the device tree from Google.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-09-01 12:34:01+00:00
Something worth adding and reading about is how the very existence of the European-Russian gas relationship has it's roots in German 70's and 80's realpolitik initiative that led to the pipes-for-gas contracts between Germany and the USSR. Neither the USSR not Russia had the internal industrial capacity to build this kind of infrastructure to begin with. The belief was that "they" would become reliant on "us". Who could predict that "they" would want to abuse "us"?
by FinnLobsien | 2025-09-01 12:34:39+00:00
I always thought that there's some stuff that looks hard in chess, but is actually not so difficult. Things like sacrifice lines. Those feel complicated, but the calculation eventually becomes pretty deterministic.

The things that don't look hard to beginners (because there's no immediate danger) are usually questions around activity and positional advantages. Should you get rid of your opponent's central knight, but give them your long-range bishop? Should you take with the pawn in the center and explode the position or bring the rook behind it first?

Those are the truly hard things in chess. Maybe this changes if you're a high-level player, but I'm not.
by cb321 | 2025-09-01 12:35:21+00:00
The "dual" of this type-dispatch of template/macros is that the scoping rules also allow you to use a template or a macro to define a bunch of things which are only "in effect" in a sub-scope, like, e.g. that old C hazard of pointer arithmetic - "defined but contained": https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/1188#7366

In a lot of little ways, Nim is a lot like a statically typed Lisp with a vaguely Python-ish surface syntax, although this really doesn't give enough credit to all the choice one has writing Nim code.
by Nursie | 2025-09-01 12:35:23+00:00
> always inform them of the consequences

This would be about as useful as telling the cat why he can’t go out right now. The words would not be understood, as they won’t be by probably 90% of humanity.

> If they want to…

They don’t. Categorically. The only reason they would try is because they are being scammed with offers of getting something or cajolement entreating them to allow it.

> Why should you have control what they can or cannot do?

Me? I’m not asking for control. I’m saying that most people aren’t equipped to understand the threats they face, even in the face of explanation or warning, and their use-cases are comprehensively covered without it. My parents are old. My brother ends up with any PC he owns full of malware and viruses. The current status quo serves them and many millions of other people very well, and we need to be very cautious when arguing to rip this away in the name of our freedom - to them it only represents freedom to be exploited.

> Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family member…

Experts in other fields determine the extent of what all laypeople may do legally all the time. Or do you live somewhere that there are zero restrictions on (for example) gas plumbing or work on electrical systems?
by avianlyric | 2025-09-01 12:35:36+00:00
DP has a HDMI compatibility mode that allows a DP output to output a HDMI signal, but at the wrong voltage. The external adapters are just level shifters to bring the signal voltages into compliance with HDMI, but their entirety passive devices.

> Even the PS4 had a DP > HDMI adapter internally for some reason.

DP is far more than just an external display protocol. Its biggest use case is internal display signals, so it’s used to power pretty much every laptop screen.

As a result standard PC hardware (which is what the PS4 is) has defacto support for DP, because is the standard display transport between embedded video components. As a result it’s a lot easier and cheaper to build a device that outputs DP, and then slap a HDMI converter on it, than it is to build a device that uses HDMI natively.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-09-01 12:38:11+00:00
...and you compensate writers how exactly? Be specific please. Cultural exploitation no matter the nationality or ethnicity or race, in my opinion, is a worthwhile debate. If you're compensating African Writers at a higher rate than the industry that's a selling point. If on the other hand you're hiding a model where you take advantage of African Writers under the guise of promoting their work and career while you profit from them, then that's a valid reason to cheer for your enterprise to fail. Which is it?
by baby | 2025-09-01 12:38:20+00:00
I think there are two issues, that maybe we should point out to help the debate:

- As a user sometimes I want to sideload legitimate applications (the question now is why can't these apps get approved on the appstore?)

- As a user sometimes I want to be able to use different devices from different vendors, I don't want to be forced to stay on Apple because airdrop or the keychain or login with Apple or my airpods pro don't work on Android anymore.
by safety1st | 2025-09-01 12:38:55+00:00
I don't believe there was any utopian period in the past, but in US history, the Gilded Age had a lot in common with our current day (corruption, centralization of wealth and power, stemming from new technologies). And it was followed by the Progressive era and then the New Deal which were distinctly more populist in nature. Those were the eras of American history where the US got serious about anti-trust and unionization respectively.
by positron26 | 2025-09-01 12:39:31+00:00
And the solution to cavities is to increase self-dentistry literacy? The solution to a bridge collapsing is to increase civil engineering literacy? The solution to a plane crash caused by a cracked turbine blade is to increase casual aerospace engineering literacy? How much of how many literacies will we be willing to acquire so as to balance the responsibility we ask of every other profession and even those who are low and unskilled?

This incredibly selfish point of view put forth by a particular sect of _OSS polls sufficiently well at the engineer's only meeting in Palo Alto and nowhere else.

When people were coming up with the idea of computer literacy being ubiquitous like math, they meant math like addition and subtraction. To make the kind of impact that "free/libre" advocates want the everyday Joe to be responsible for, Joes need to know the CS equivalents of perturbation theory and how to solve partial differential equations. It's not happening, but believing that it can happen allows those ostensibly in favor of it to keep acting like they have a plan, like they want a solution.

As long as the hardware hacker is stuck in the mindset of what 0.01% of users want to do with devices, while they may find sympathy from the 0.1% who are software engineers, many of whom gather on this site, this is not even blowing at the gauge from halfway across the room in terms of moving the needle. Either figure out what is important to the consumer and how it aligns with your interests or just go home.
by api | 2025-09-01 12:40:00+00:00
We aren’t much more complex than a crab, if we are at all. “Complexity” is not what makes us what we are. It’s that we went down an evolutionary path that heavily leveraged intelligence and social cooperation so we got a big hypertrophied brain. Our brain is like a cheetah’s musculoskeletal system or a rabbit’s reproductive system.

The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.

We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.
by palata | 2025-09-01 12:40:23+00:00
> Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS

I don't think that the problem is the OS. The problem is access to the hardware. Hardware manufacturers can decide to prevent you from installing an alternative OS on your hardware.

If the law made it mandatory to allow this, it would be a lot easier to go with alternative OSes like GrapheneOS.

> Huawei has HarmonyOS but it's not open

I was thinking at some point that they would go with AOSP and their own Huawei Services on top. Could have been fun. Also I wonder why they don't just support GrapheneOS as an alternative OS.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-09-01 12:40:46+00:00
I don’t know, I’ve never had those problems and my codebases reach 600k+ LOC. I’ve certainly had plenty of errors to deal with Cocoapods and obsolete frameworks though, though those projects also tend to use pretty much every third-party lib that gets attention on Medium.

Modularizing an Xcode project with local Swift packages has been the best productivity gain in my experience. Doing something similar with Cocoapods is a headache.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-01 12:41:05+00:00
People (usually on the internet) act like you "need" drawings.

You don't. Tolerances are almost never bespoke except in the rarest occasions of cutting edge green field development.

You can literally buy an old book (the info is all on the internet too but not in one place) and skim through thousands and thousands of pages that tell you what different classes of tolerance for different applications are. You don't need to know what they spec'd. You just need to know what the part was and how it was used.

The thought process goes like "This worn the f out coupling is .9443 inches major diameter, so it was a 1" (nominal) coupling, and it must slip under load, so I will use a class-whatever fit, and the tolerances for that are +/-.0gfy"

An imprecise drawing is also a sufficient starting point for the process.

And like 30% of the time then you get half way through figuring out how to set it up and realize that you can literally just buy whatever you're looking for at tractor supply or Alibaba or whatever and modify it slightly.
by benjiro | 2025-09-01 12:41:43+00:00
> I will definitely buy my own hardware and collocate.

Even colocation is often fraud with issues. I shall not mentioned the plectra of dead hardware from datacenter electricity failures. Ironically, my home has more stable electricity then some datacenters lol.

Unless you running a business where a few minutes downtime will cost you millions, most companies can literally run their own servers from their basements. I often see how much people overestimate their need for 99.999% uptime, or bandwidth requirements.

Its not like colocation is that much cheaper. The electricity prices your paying are often more expensive then even business/home electricity. That leave only internet/fiber, and the pletra of commercial fiber these days.

Used to get minimum quoted price of 2k, for a 1Gbit business fiber years ago (not inc install costs). Now you get in some countries, 5 or 10Gbit for 100 Euro business fiber.
by Rochus | 2025-09-01 12:42:46+00:00
> it saves me time in looking up the documentation

I have a Perplexity subscription which I heavily use for such purpose, just asking how something works or should be used, with a response just on the point and with examples. Very useful indeed. Perplexity gives me access to Claude Sonnet 4 w/o Thinking which I consider great models, and it can also generate decent code. My intention was to find out how good the recent Claude Opus is in comparison and how much of my work I'm able to delegate. Personally I much prefer the user interface features, performance and availability of Perplexity to Claude.ai.