MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-21 17:37:23+00:00
Nothing is wrong with it. I’m an enthusiast for the tech - I care about the cameras in particular and they are still moving forward between generations on the top platforms.

At work, the optimal cash flow is rapid replacement. We buy high volume so as long as I don’t use a lot of labor, we make money on the subsidy. I buy a phone for $1, and net $250 in trade in 18-20 months.

5-10 years means you want a wall phone. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a contrarian position and the options on the market don’t support it well as a result.
by owlbite | 2025-09-21 17:38:15+00:00
So my experience with moving from a Cambridge undergrad to an Edinburgh postgrad, albeit a couple of decades ago now, was the expectations between the two were nowhere comparable.

Cambridge if you'd not done the homework before the tutorial, you got sent packing for wasting everyone's time, but in Edinburgh it was common for all but the best students to only start the homework at the tutorial (thus wasting their opportunity to ask questions on trivial stuff they could get by reading the course notes.

Equally on exams, the minimum standard at Cambridge was "regurgitate proof from course notes" with the other 2/3rds of the marks for iterating on it with unseen material, whereas the Edinburgh exams the regurgitation would get you 100%.

Unless things have changed significantly (or Edinburgh is that much worth than other redbricks), I'm not sure I trust these rankings in terms of student quality.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-21 17:38:26+00:00
Yeah, sorry my comment was a bit misleading. I spent a lot of time around my grans when I was a kid, and later as a young adult and a ... less young adult? We lived in the same houses (two, because my parents were divorced). They didn't sharpen knives. They both took great pride in their cooking, but they would just stare at you if you asked them about things like knife skills or mise en place. They were Greek housewives not French chefs.

I'm pretty sure we didn't have "professional sharpening services" either, when I was growing up in Greece. I think I've seen men with whetstones on their backs in old movies, or paintings, but I've never seen anyone like that live. Nor do I remember any shop that did that sort of work.

Why is it so hard to believe that housewives rarely sharpen knives? It even rhymes.
by scuff3d | 2025-09-21 17:38:55+00:00
I disagree. Maybe in syntax it's a bit different but in spirit I think it's absolutely a modern C. Purely procedural code and manually memory managed. On top of that Ginger Bills stated goal for the project is to basically grind down all the rough edges off C.

Plus if you look at something like Zig, it syntactically starts to drift a lot as well. They left behind C's "use matches declaration" approach (thank God), capture groups look like nothing in C, function definitions are entirely different, the list goes on.
by walleeee | 2025-09-21 17:39:18+00:00
It can be read charitably as claiming that society is traumatic in different ways, maybe, and in a wider variety of ways. Which is much more defensible. A rapid change in everyday psychological or physiological reality is traumatic, by definition, as one must adapt to it or bear the consequences. There may be less instances of stoning and flogging but many more of subtle conditioning, for instance.

Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
by giardini | 2025-09-21 17:39:47+00:00
Amy's Trick:

============

You can sharpen (really, burnish) steel knives on a stainless steel sink edge! Stainless steel kitchen sinks are very common in USA.

Gently press the knife blade almost flat against the sink edge and pull the knife handle toward you while moving it to the right (or to the left if you're left-handed). Hold the knife at the angle desired for the blade edge (endless discussions of angle are possible). Of course don't cut yourself.

The motion is similar to that when using a sharpening steel.

Do several times on both sides. Wash and wipe the blade clean. Voila!

A co-worker taught me this trick after I asked how she kept her knife so sharp. I haven't bought or used a knife sharpener since.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-21 17:39:51+00:00
Not at all, I ordered at the LiSaDuPu Store (https://www.aliexpress.com/store/912251155). I had a 60 mm outline of a water lily leaf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeblatt) made, and the die seems alright. I've done around twenty of those now in 7-8 oz leather, so no idea about its longevity, but it's cheap enough to warrant experimenting. The die itself accurately reproduces the PNG I sent in the chat to the store.

To use the die I'm using a one ton arbor press. That's not enough force to push a die of that size through in one go, but after the first press I can move the die and the leather around the outline and finish the cutting with a few light presses all around.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-21 17:40:16+00:00
Which is exactly the direction I see going forward, finally getting mainstream mindshare closer to how Xerox PARC languages were bootstraped, languages like Zig come about 30 years too late.

Rust is already shipping in production for Windows, Android, Amazon and Azure infrastructure, and the Azure official language for new low level systems code, hardly questionable its adoption in the industry at scale.

Naturally someone might prove me wrong by releasing that one framework or product that makes writing Zig code unavoidable.
by immibis | 2025-09-21 17:40:24+00:00
I don't. I see lots of arguments. You're engaging in one right now. COVID arguing was Reddit's most popular subreddit, back before Reddit was an AI slopfest.

Is it possible that the majority opinion is the correct one and the majority arguments are the reasons why it's correct? I mean, that's how it works with the blue sky, round earth, and fiber optic internet narratives.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-09-21 17:40:25+00:00
> If you allocate and touch everything, and then try to allocate more, it's better to get an allocation error than an unsatifyable page fault later.

It depends, but generally speaking I'd disagree with that.

The only time you actually want to see the allocation failures is if you're writing high reliability software where you've gone to the trouble to guarantee some sort of meaningful forward progress when memory is exhausted. That is VERY VERY hard, and quickly becomes impossible when you have non-trivial library dependencies.

If all you do is raise std::bad_alloc or call abort(), handling NULL return from malloc() is arguably a waste of icache: just let it crash. Dereferencing NULL is guaranteed to crash on Linux, only root can mmap() the lowest page.

Admittedly I'm anal, and I write the explicit code to check for it and call abort(), but I know very experienced programmers I respect who don't.
by notatoad | 2025-09-21 17:41:07+00:00
it's hard to compare a new phone to a three-year-old phone because the old phone's battery has degraded, but in the two days i've had it my air is significantly better than my 14 plus, which i've never really had any complaints about.

i went to bed last night with 70% charge remaining. that included about 1.5hrs of voice calls, some texting, some doomscrolling, and a bit of youtube - a pretty normal day of phone usage for me.
by sixothree | 2025-09-21 17:41:13+00:00
I've always assumed the issues you described were meant to disarm users but also maybe to set expectations. When you see 3 similar items, you don't know if you're getting the "real thing". So you spend that money and expect the worst. Terrible listings make it hard to find what you need exactly but also make it seem like they have more selection when they might not.

Regardless I've considered it to be intentional.
by wk_end | 2025-09-21 17:41:26+00:00
Just because fires are inevitable in the business of firefighting, doesn’t mean that firefighters are in the business of starting fires.

In engineering, thinking is inevitable but also costly and error-prone, and the more thinking an engineer needs to do the higher the costs, the higher the risks of errors. We should be striving to minimize the thinking required every step of the way, even if we’ll never get it down to zero; that’s the only way to keep it from spiraling towards infinity.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-21 17:41:35+00:00
The key insight from the study is that even the users that did see an increase in productivity overestimated that increase.

Taken along with the dozens of other studies that show that humans are terrible at estimating how long it will take them to complete task, you should be very skeptical when someone says an LLM makes them x% more productive.

There’s no reason to think that the most skillful LLM users are not overestimating productivity benefits as well.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-21 17:42:10+00:00
Trivial to integrate into an existing code base, minimal size overhead, no heap allocations, no stdlib usage (only stdbool.h and stddef.h included for type definitions), no C++ template shenanigans and very simple and straightforward API. C libraries which tick all those boxes are actually quite rare, and C++ libraries are much rarer.
by grayhatter | 2025-09-21 17:42:59+00:00
Because your other toxic comments are getting flagged, I felt this one deserved a response.

> Show me the law that says my nosy neighbor should be allowed to walk over to my house and demand to know the names of the cops are who are talking to me, and force them to reveal what crime I am being accused of, what evidence they have, etc.

The US has constantly upheld the rights of the citizens to record the actions of police.

But it's also explicitly required by law in CA

The right to record: CA Penal Code 1. 15. 1.5 - Section 632.

> [right to privacy from being recorded] but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive, or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.

Uniform police are required to wear identification: CA Penal Code 2.3 4.5 - Peace Officers Section 830.10.

> 830.10. Any uniformed peace officer shall wear a badge, nameplate, or other device which bears clearly on its face the identification number or name of the officer.

In addition to that most police departments (maybe all of them) in CA have policies that officers need to identify clear themselves when asked. It's also interesting to watch some of the "audit the police" videos on youtube. The asshole cops never want to identify, but the good ones behaving like cops you'd want to interact with, are all eager to share their identity. There's one video I remember where a cop, who was being a shitbag, said "we don't have cards" when asked for one, and two other cops also there, the ones worthy of being cops, instantly corrected him and both gave their card to him. So quickly I'm sure it's department policy to do so. One of them giving the shitbag cop the stink eye for lying to him.

Good cops don't feel the need to hide who they are.

https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/titl...

https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-2/titl...
by yohbho | 2025-09-21 17:43:11+00:00
"thinnest iphone", well no, i am sure the Iphone (2007) or iphone 3g was slimmer. Only a big part of the device is slim with iphone air.

And to not put your phone on the camera lens, I would put it in a case that is as thick as the thickest glass part, which looks not that slim.
by Animats | 2025-09-21 17:44:00+00:00
> 160A

For how long? Can't be continuous. What's average power. Yes, flash LIDAR has a power problem. How does their long-range LIDAR work?

> Another influence certainly is that the automated driving craze has been superseded by the AI craze and scaling won't come in the time frame that was predicted some years ago.

Huh. Good point. Want to think about that one.

We might max out at most taxis being self-driving, because that works and sells, but not make it to personal vehicles.

> P.S.: a QNX desktop is possible and actually alive again, but company politics... :/

I'm out of that now. The closed source/open souce/closed source/open source/closed source transitions angered too many people. There was once Netscape/Firefox for QNX.
by gpm | 2025-09-21 17:44:15+00:00
Gas phase change systems in practice are up to about 60% efficiency (relative to an idealized carnot cycle), magnetocaloric systems in labs have been something like 70%, and elastocaloric 80%.

Edit: And just for reference peltier devices are usually 10-15% efficiency on this scale. So I suppose this new one is somewhere in the 20-30% range.
by wswope | 2025-09-21 17:44:39+00:00
The article is tailing off a well-established historiographic narrative that it cites at the beginning (Will Self) but doesn’t dwell on much.

Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.

Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
by fidotron | 2025-09-21 17:44:46+00:00
> You cannot compare the achievements of a student at an independent school to those of a student at a state school based on grades. State school and independent school are a fundamentally different educational experience.

While I agree with this as a conclusion, I believe you cannot really go there without acknowledging that this has been a deteriorating situation ever since most of the UK abolished the grammar schools.

"Comprehensive" education has done nothing except result in the oppression of the very people it claims to be liberating.
by rglullis | 2025-09-21 17:44:48+00:00
> When things start becoming "privileges", you get a privileged class who cares less and less about the quality of life of those in lesser classes, shaping society to benefit their lifestyles at the expense of others.

I'll never forget one of my last lectures from my high-school History class teacher. She said "People talk about societies in terms of two classes: the kings and the plebs, the haves and have-nots, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. I hope you managed to learn that throughout all of history, what we have is actually three different forces - priests or monks in Ancient times, or the merchants during the Renaissance, land owners in the US - and that it's this third class that is crucial in determining the course of History. Every time they aligned with the elites there was no change in the status quo, and every time a revolution happened was because they in the middle shifted their support to the other side."

I'm saying this for one simple reason: the way to fix this problem is not by pretending that car ownership isn't a luxury, but by de-stigmatizing public transport. I can bet you that if political forces shifted and started putting pressure against car-ownership, you would quickly see a swing from the middle class in support for better public transit, mixed-use zoning, YIMBY-ism, etc.

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation"
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-21 17:44:59+00:00
I don't live in a place that has public transit or "walkability". It will never be able to afford that, the tax base isn't sufficient.

When the fuck-cars people start ranting, what they mean is that they want me and the millions like me to move to some distant gigantic city and make that even more gigantic. I do not look forward to becoming the termite people that they wish to become.

The luxury is living in a place where this is a possible lifestyle, and then thinking every one of 300 million people can live in such a place or make the place they live into such.
by Hizonner | 2025-09-21 17:45:18+00:00
I was under the impression that, for any FHE scheme with "good" security, (a) there was a finite and not very large limit to the number of operations you could do on encrypted data before the result became undecryptable, and (b) each operation on the encrypted side was a lot more expensive than the corresponding operation on plaintext numbers or whatever.

Am I wrong? I freely admit I don't know how it's supposed to work inside, because I've never taken the time to learn, because I believed those limitations made it unusable for most purposes.

Yet the abstract suggests that FHE is useful for running machine learning models, and I assume that means models of significant size.
by scubbo | 2025-09-21 17:45:19+00:00
> > When writing code you have the motto "don't make me think" in mind

> I disagree with this phrasing. We’re engineering after all. The entire job is thinking.

Well, sure. The implied full phrase - more technically-correct, but less pithily-quotable - would be something like "don't make me think unnecessarily; let me spend my thoughts productively. If you've already spent brainpower on figuring something out, explain it to me directly and clearly rather than forcing me to go through the same discovery process"

So - yes, if someone doesn't want to think _at all_, they shouldn't be a programmer; but if someone has an aversion to being forced to solve a problem that someone else has already solved, they likely have the right "shoulders-of-giants" mindset.

(For any potential pedants - yes, there are some practices you simply have to work through before understanding dawns, which cannot be explained directly. Still, though - the explanation should aim to minimize unnecessary thought-requirements so the student can get straight to learning)
by Retric | 2025-09-21 17:45:32+00:00
Glass eating is a real thing with a surprising number of documented cases. In some cases it’s classified as Hyalophagia a form of Pica where people focus on glass, but it doesn’t necessarily have significant negative side effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)

There’s also a magic trick where people eat sugar that’s very clear and looks like glass, but that’s a different thing.
Show HN: Model-literals, model-aliases, and preference-aligned routing for LLMs
by honorable_coder | 2025-09-21 17:45:54+00:00
Today we’re shipping a major update to ArchGW (an edge and service proxy for agents [1]): a unified router that supports three strategies for directing traffic to LLMs — from explicit model names, to semantic aliases, to dynamic preference-aligned routing. Here’s how each works on its own, and how they come together.

Preference-aligned routing decouples task detection (e.g., code generation, image editing, Q&A) from LLM assignment. This approach captures the preferences developers establish when testing and evaluating LLMs on their domain-specific workflows and tasks. So, rather than relying on an automatic router trained to beat abstract benchmarks like MMLU or MT-Bench, developers can dynamically route requests to the most suitable model based on internal evaluations — and easily swap out the underlying moodel for specific actions and workflows. This is powered by our 1.5B Arch-Router LLM [2]. We also published our research on this recently[3]

Modal-aliases provide semantic, version-controlled names for models. Instead of using provider-specific model names like gpt-4o-mini or claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022 in your client you can create meaningful aliases like "fast-model" or "arch.summarize.v1". This allows you to test new models, swap out the config safely without having to do code-wide search/replace every time you want to use a new model for a very specific workflow or task.

Model-literals (nothing new) lets you specify exact provider/model combinations (e.g., openai/gpt-4o, anthropic/claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022), giving you full control and transparency over which model handles each request.

P.S. we routinely get asked why we didn't build semantic/embedding models for routing use cases or use some form of clustering technique. Clustering/embedding routers miss context, negation, and short elliptical queries, etc. An autoregressive approach conditions on the full context, letting the model reason about the task and generate an explicit label that can be used to match to an agent, task or LLM. In practice, this generalizes better to unseen or low-frequency intents and stays robust as conversations drift, without brittle thresholds or post-hoc cluster tuning.

[1] https://github.com/katanemo/archgw [2] https://huggingface.co/katanemo/Arch-Router-1.5B [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16655
by jstummbillig | 2025-09-21 17:46:22+00:00
> It's taken 8 years to go from introduction of the Transformer (attention paper) to today's LLMs

I feel this position severely discounts the acceleration that is going on right now and our inherently limited abilities. Humans are not going to ever be significantly better at coding than they are today, and we can literally watch LLMs improve on it, by the month.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-21 17:46:25+00:00
> activation lock

Tangentially, it is utterly trivial to completely bypass Apple MDM, in a manner that breaks nothing, and survives OS upgrades, minor and major. Just requires the right combination of three DNS names at one point of install, and no internet at another, and you will get a completely de-fanged Mac. The only time you need to repeat the process is if you completely erase the SSD.
by dawnerd | 2025-09-21 17:46:28+00:00
And potentially trick you into going down a rabbit hole as you try to steer it when it would have been faster to edit the code yourself. The best use is editing code with it instead of purely relying on prompting. Also new contexts for different changes make a huge difference. Seems a lot of devs get stuck in the single context chat stream and it starts to break down as context gets fuzzy.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-09-21 17:46:43+00:00
Personally, I hope IA's projects help plant a vital but poorly distributed notion - that laws aren't ethics.

Sometimes laws aren't even laws but thru bad judgment and manipulation, they can be enforced as if they were. Copyright's endless complexities land it here a lot. Perhaps we should expect that when we let an industry buy it's way into - tinking with and creating law.
by ccppurcell | 2025-09-21 17:47:18+00:00
Rankings are just meaningless. And this isn't the evidence for it! Actually in the past they've more or less admitted that they play around with the weighting and discard if the outcome is unexpected, meaning that even by its own standards it's circular. But the fact is that rankings are one dimensional and universities are very obviously multidimensional. You can't get anything meaningful out of such compression. The researchers and students at oxbridge are higher quality, that's more or less undisputed. Other than that though, it's so subjective and personal.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-09-21 17:47:23+00:00
I never understand these drive-by comments. It's not like developing on/for the competition is any easier or less convoluted. The author is debugging a cross-language (both managed and native), cross-architecture video game with a variety of third-party libraries.

Turns out that the Windows graphics stack is complicated (mainly because it needs to support a variety of closed-source programs that never saw maintenance after initial release), so compatibility layers meant to optimise for certain programs (an easy optimisation, frankly) accidentally caught the author's program in the master list, too.