MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndiddy | 2025-09-25 19:14:34+00:00
Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would have beaten AMD64 to market by several years, but management forced him to disable it because they were worried that it would cannibalize IA64 sales.

> Intel’s Pentium 4 had our own internal version of x86–64. But you could not use it: we were forced to “fuse it off”, meaning that even though the functionality was in there, it could not be exercised by a user. This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium’s chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I “didn’t stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I’d be fired on the spot” and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff.

https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...
by cmurf | 2025-09-25 19:14:39+00:00
A 1:1 to 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio is reported by John Spencer, urban war researcher and chair at the Modern War Institute.

Spencer has said it will take years of research to confirm this ratio and how it was achieved. He considers it important to understand because the typical ratio in urban wars, including wars the U.S. has prosecuted, exceeds 6 innocent civilians killed per enemy combatant killed. Some urban wars see 12 innocent civilians killed per combatant killed.

I think all of these ratios are horrifying. A low ratio can't be considered either good or exculpatory, as to whether violations of international humanitarian law have occurred. Civilians always bear a disproportionate impact in all urban wars. The case studies that have been completed are worth reading.

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project/urban-warfar...
by dvkramer | 2025-09-25 19:15:15+00:00
Yeah that's how I feel too. Flash is less verbose and every LLM nowadays seems to be designed by some low-taste people who reward the model for falsely hedging (i.e. "The 2024 Corolla Cross usually has an X gallon gas tank") on stuff that isn't at all variable or questionable. This false hedging is way more of an issue than hallucinations in my experience and the "smarter" 2.5 Pro is not any better at avoiding this issue than Flash

Also 2.5 Pro is often incapable of searching and will hallucinate instead. I don't know why. It will claim it searched and then return some made up results instead. 2.5 Flash is much more consistently capable of searching
by stackedinserter | 2025-09-25 19:15:16+00:00
Inconvenient truth is that anyone who remained in Gaza, in active IDF ops area, is not a civilian. Civilians left these areas, or at least asked to leave many, many times. Unless it's a little child that's not capable of lifting a firearm, this person is Hamas at this point.

If you have better way to differentiate, I will happily pass it to IDF. Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-25 19:15:19+00:00
> despite one piece of code making a method private, another piece of code still overrides it/modifies it/calls it, an affront to the idea of encapsulation

That's inherent on the way current computers manage the memory. And I don't know if the gains are enough to pay for the loses of guaranteeing encapsulation.

One could reach for static analysis, but that would imply some restrictions on the machine's assembly. Those are probably worth it.

> a piece of code has different behavior depending on the identity of a function

I have written my quota of "find the latest caller on the stack with property X, verify if it has access", on different languages. Some times a function can't in any way be just a function.
by Aloisius | 2025-09-25 19:15:30+00:00
> They feel incredibly safe and don't have to worry about being victims of crimes, having their packages stolen, walking around late at night alone, etc.

Em. I think feeling incredibly safe has more to do with the media telling people that no crime exists and all criminals are caught, rather than a reality of zero crime.

There is evidence that crime started being systematically under-recorded in China since they started assessing police on proportion of recorded crimes they solve.

https://archive.is/20250624235740/https://www.economist.com/...
by pizlonator | 2025-09-25 19:15:31+00:00
In the JS world, tracing was abandoned because it didn't scale to real world code.

JS JITs (the production ones, like JSC's) have no such thing as trace blockers that prevent the surrounding code from being optimized. You might have an operation (like a call to some wacky native function) that is itself not optimized, but that won't have any impact on the JIT's ability to optimize the code surrounding that operation.

Tracing is just too much of a benchmark hack overall IMO. Tracing would only be a good idea in a world where it's too expensive to run a real optimizing JIT. But the JS, Java, and .NET experiences show that a real optimizing JIT - with all of its compile time costs - is exactly what you want because it results in predictable speed-ups
by thisislife2 | 2025-09-25 19:15:33+00:00
Well, Biden was claiming that "there is no genocide" while approving the building of (future) concentration camps for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while Trump is worried only about the "optics" but is fine as long as a "beautiful resort is finally built in Gaza", after herding the Palestinians into these new "refugee centres" (i.e. the concentration camps) and from there to Egypt (who has been promised to be made the future gas hub for Europe) to complete Israeli occupation of Gaza. I'll leave it to you to decide whether I am being naive or dishonest or who planned the genocide and who is complicit in it - Here's the "propaganda" sources based on which I am making these assertions:

1. Trump criticizes Israel for releasing photos and videos of its devastating war in Gaza - https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-criticizes-israels-pho...

2. Trump ruthless take on Israel's war on Gaza: 'Finish the problem' - https://www.newarab.com/news/trump-israels-war-gaza-finish-p...

3. Satellite photos show Egypt building Gaza wall as Israel’s Rafah push looms - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/16/satellite-photos-sh...

4. Israel’s plan to build Gaza ‘concentration camps’ was rolled out months ago - https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/israels-plan-to-build-gaza-co...

5. Trump’s Gaza takeover all about natural gas - https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/trumps-gaza-takeover-all-about...
by invalidator | 2025-09-25 19:15:53+00:00
> The voltages of batteries, in the first place, is function of state of charge.

It's also a function of the rate of discharge. Have a look at this:

https://marsen.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Panasonic-N...

All that space between the black and green curves is energy being lost to internal resistance.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-25 19:15:58+00:00
Itanium was pointless when Alpha existed already and was already getting market penetration in the high end market. Intel played disgusting corporate politics to kill it and then push the ugly failed Itanium to market, only to have to panic back to x86_64 later.

I have no idea how/why Intel got a second life after that, but they did. Which is a shame. A sane market would have punished them and we all would have moved on.
by ewoodrich | 2025-09-25 19:16:03+00:00
Yep Kilo (and Cline/Roo more recently) push these free trial of the week models really hard, partially as incentive to register an account with their cloud offering. I began using Cline and Roo before "cloud" features were even a thing and still haven't bothered to register, but I do play with the free Kilo models when I see them since I'm already signed in (they got me with some kind of register and spend $5 to get $X model credits deal) and hey, it's free (I really don't care about my random personal projects being used for training).

If xAI in particular is in the mood to light cash on fire promoting their new model, you'll see it everywhere during the promo period, so not surprised that heavily boosts xAI stats. The mystery codename models of the week are a bit easier to miss.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-25 19:16:06+00:00
Yeah, I mean it's analogous to car insurance for self driving cars. People, including lawyers, insurers and courts are just averse to it intuitively. I'm not saying they are wrong or right, but it's how it is.

I believe medical AI will probably take hold first in a poorer countries where the existing care is too bad/unaffordable, then as it proves itself there, it may slowly find its way to richer countries.

But probably lobbying will be strong against it, just as you can't get cheap generic medications made in India if you live in the US.
by sipofwater | 2025-09-25 19:16:48+00:00
"Resolving Windows 11 24H2 KB5063878 SSD Issues with Game Launching": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5553708/... (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5553708/resolving-windows-11-24h2-kb5063878-ssd-issues-wit)
by mothballed | 2025-09-25 19:17:45+00:00
The commenter insinuated his wife was a hoodrat because she was black, which was some blatantly racist nonsense. He's the one that insinuated she meets the criteria of a hoodrat, I don't at all agree with his categorization based on facts presented. Amazingly he even shits on the people that even found her cancer, so you can see even if you do the full work up (the very thing he implies those who believe there's a "hood rat" wouldn't do despite paradoxically accusing of the people doing it as thinking of her as a hoodrat) and catch cancer you're damned.

The cancer discovered post a referral by a doctor to go to the ER doesn't even remotely fit under the criteria I listed.

The only reason why what he said carries any weight as a rebuttal is because he's carrying an intensely sad story that has clouded both of your minds with emotion to the point it's being used as a trump card.
by ccleve | 2025-09-25 19:17:58+00:00
178 billion? That's nothing. I did trillions just this morning. I went to the grocery store and picked an item off the shelf, effectively filtering out the trillions of other products that I could have picked but didn't.

They did not process 178 billion rows per second. They did a search that found something in a large data set by eliminating the parts of the data set that could not have contained the item. Same way I did by picking one grocery store and going straight to the shelf.
by wpollock | 2025-09-25 19:17:59+00:00
This is interesting. I believe one way to deal with such breaking changes is to have multiple PRs, where the breaking change in each is hidden (protected) by a feature flag and tested by unit tests. Once all the PRs are committed, end to end testing can be done by enabling the flag. Any problems in production can be quickly reverted by disabling the flag. Eventually, a final PR removes the now-useless flag.

Of course, your mileage may vary; this technique is certainly not suitable for all breaking changes or all workfkows.
by golddust-gecko | 2025-09-25 19:18:01+00:00
100% -- the conventional wisdom was that the x86 architecture was too riddled with legacy and complexity to improve its performance, and was a dead end.

Itanium never met an exotic computer architecture journal article that it didn't try and incorporate. Initially this was viewed as "wow such amazing VLIW magic will obviously dominate" and subsequently as "this complexity makes it hard to write a good compiler for, and the performance benefit just doesn't justify it."

Intel had to respond to AMD with their "x86-64" copy, though it really didn't want to.

Eventually it became obvious that the amd64/x64/x86-64 chips were going to exceed Itanium in performance, and with the massive momentum of legacy on its side and Itanium was toast.
by ziml77 | 2025-09-25 19:18:09+00:00
This might be why I'm finding a lot of these comments so confusing. Because what you're saying here is how I've always operated.

If the first time your reviewer sees what decisions you've made is when the review happens, then of course it will be overwhelming if the merge request is large.

If you keep your reviewer in the loop, and have bounced implementation ideas off of them, then the review basically just becomes a sanity check.
by fragmede | 2025-09-25 19:18:28+00:00
The problem is how do you quantify it and metricize it and get some numbers to compare? Because it's absolutely invaluable after you get to a level of mastery with a machine that you're sitting in that the seat moves in. You just feel it, you can't explain it in words, you're just one with the machine. Your butt really needs to feel that in order for that to really happen. Can you do it without it? Absolutely. Does it make it worse to not have that? Also true. It's extra effort, it's extra cost, and it makes things better for the actual users of the product, but it'll never show up as something you can measure.

Do you want to sell Microsoft Teams to the executives or do you want to give joy to the people who actually use the product?
by leontrolski | 2025-09-25 19:18:32+00:00
Lovely writeup!

> Pascal did not have sum types because Wirth thought they were less flexible than untagged unions

I'm not sure whether my dream language would have tagged or untagged unions (Scala 3 has both it seems). I'd be interested if anyone has any further points of comparison beyond:

Tagged unions, eg. in Rust: enum Tagged {A(i64), B(String), C(f64)} Untagged unions, eg. in typed Python: Tagged = int | str | float

Tagged unions are better as you can represent duplicated types and types with no data, eg: enum Tagged {A, B(f64), C(f64)}

Untagged unions are better as you can willy nilly create new subsets and intersections of types. I find often in AST-ish work I want to express eg: def f(x: A | B | C) -> A | B
by wk_end | 2025-09-25 19:18:33+00:00
What? Windows made tons of progress while maintaining this principle and became the most popular operating system in the world. Are you trying to tell me that you believe the evolution of Windows from 1.0 all the way to 7 - the entire time trying to operate according to this principle - doesn't constitute meaningful progress?

The recent stagnation of the OS has nothing to do with attempting to maintain backwards compatibility.
by reify | 2025-09-25 19:19:02+00:00
said the ai shills at MIT.

A new tool called SCIGEN allows researchers to implement design rules that AI models must follow when generating new materials.

With SCIGEN, researchers can steer AI models to create materials with exotic properties for applications like quantum computing.

QUANTUM COMPUTING! Fuck me. whens that going to happen. Like never.

Im still waiting for a quantum laptop that can do the first 1000 primes. I will even take it down the pub to show it off.

Design rules sound like???

Having a degree in prompting, and making sure you keep prompting, until you get what you are looking for, as near you can and weave in some Quantum.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious............
by somenameforme | 2025-09-25 19:19:12+00:00
You chose to take us down the path of cancer, not entirely unreasonable as I mentioned it. But it is clearly in the fringe extremes of my argument since it is one disease where, ostensibly, specialized care could really pay off. But it turns out that even in the case of cancer, the benefit of specialized care (for the most cancers at least) is small to zero.

If your local hospital can treat e.g. colorectal or breast cancer to the same degree as a specialized institution, then they can certainly competently treat the overwhelming majority of other issues that people show up to the hospital with, which are generally going to be substantially more mundane with rather more 'commoditized' treatment available.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-25 19:20:01+00:00
I remember at the time thinking it was really silly for Intel to release a 64-bit processor that broke compatibility, and was very glad AMD kept it. Years later I learned about kernel writing, and I now get why Intel tried to break with the old - the compatibility hacks piled up on x86 are truly awful. But ultimately, customers don't care about that, they just want their stuff to run.
by Fwirt | 2025-09-25 19:20:35+00:00
I was going to wait for a few bugfixes until I upgraded, but I was forced to update to iOS 26 because the AirPods Pro 3 that I bought required it for some inexplicable reason (which I didn't know until I tried to pair them). The AirPods are just fantastic in every way and a huge leap forward, I don't regret buying them for a second. But sheesh, none of the OS updates were ready for release. I found 3 obvious bugs (non-functional UI elements, invisible labels due to incorrect handling of dark mode, soft locks caused by guided access) not to mention a distinct pause when unlocking the device, GPU issues with Safari. It seems like the pendulum has swung from Apple making mediocre overpriced hardware and reliable software, to making best-in-class hardware and garbage software. I'm hoping that with the end of Intel support we get a "Snow Leopard" style polish and bugfix of the entire stack, but with their recent track record it seems unlikely. It's just inexcusable for a company with Apple's focus on consumer products and market cap. At least Microsoft has the excuse that they have a sprawling empire to oversee.
by sgnelson | 2025-09-25 19:21:24+00:00
The interesting part isn't the statue, it's that it apparently was put up conforming to all regulations, but (again, apparently) the Park Services broke their own rules, removed it early, without proper notification to the persons who placed it, and damaged it (maybe somewhat intentionally from description given?).

The story is about the fact that the US government seems to have yet again removed politically protected speech because it was insulting to the current administration.

I'm sure the Free Speech Absolutists will speak up about this violation of the First Amendment any minute now....

crickets
by gmueckl | 2025-09-25 19:21:29+00:00
The article doesn't go into details whether these academics are full professors or e.g. postdocs. Twenty-five tenured professors would be a big deal because they tend to either bring their workgroups along or rebuild them at the new university. That's where the true impact of such news lies if these are indeed teachers: these groups produce a steady stream of future experts in the form of graduates and PhDs in their respective domains. Given the timelines for careers of students and young academics, the full impact of these moves should start to show in about 5 to 10 years.
by jerf | 2025-09-25 19:21:53+00:00
If I am remembering correctly, this was also a good time to be in Linux. Since the Linux world operated on source code rather than binary blobs, it was easier to convert software to run 64-bit native. Non-trivial in an age of C, but still much easier than the commercial world. I had a much more native 64-bit system running a couple of years before it was practical in the Windows world.
by palata | 2025-09-25 19:21:59+00:00
> I believe they are referring to using GPG to encrypt data before putting it into Slack

In good approximation, nobody does that.

And anyone who is capable of communicating over PGP won't be covered by ChatControl anyway. They can keep using PGP over whatever they want, or just compile Signal from sources.

> If that ever became illegal because encryption then groups of people could simply use scripts or addons to pipe through different types of encoding to make AI fuzzy searches harder.

I don't think that this makes any sense at all. This is some kind of poor encryption. Either you honour the law and you send your messages in plaintext, or you don't and you use proper encryption. There is nothing worth anything in-between.

If encryption is illegal, those who really need it can still use steganography.
by Xelbair | 2025-09-25 19:22:01+00:00
>Probably, but I think you are giving most bad actors too much credence. Tyler Robinson took several precautions to cover his trail in his assassination of Charlie Kirk—but he also told many individuals about his plan on discord, as well as other non-encrypted channels, etc. Not all bad actors are sophisticated in the same way.

you're comparing organized crime, which this is supposed to combat - with a lone gunman. Stupid criminals will always exist.

>Still, again, if the threat is big enough, I am curious to ponder what role individuals would want government to take in using surveillance to reduce actual human deaths in terror attacks (or any type of attack, for that matter).

the purpose of this isn't to stop deaths. It is to entrench state power, increase agencies budget... and as they have to demonstrate that they are useful it will turn either into totalitarian hellhole with plenty 'making example of' public cases... or some attacks will go through on purpose to justify their budget after cuts...
by dang | 2025-09-25 19:22:01+00:00
> Jews have a hatred of Muslims

Wtf? You can't post like this here, and we've banned this account.

I suppose I'd better add that yes, we have banned accounts for posting the reverse as well. Religious flamewar is not allowed here, regardless of which religion people have a problem with. Neither is using HN primarily for political/ideological and/or nationalistic battle, which this account has been doing egregiously—enough so that I'm surprised we didn't ban it earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by hawflakes | 2025-09-25 19:22:18+00:00
Itanium was compatible with x86. In fact, it booted into x86 mode. Merced, the first implementation had a part of the chip called the IVE, Intel Value Engine, that implemented x86 very slowly.

You would boot in x86 mode and run some code to switch to ia64 mode.

HP saw the end of the road for their solo efforts on PA-RISC and Intel eyed the higher end market against SPARC, MIPS, POWER, and Alpha (hehe. all those caps) so they banded together to tackle the higher end.

But as AMD proved, you could win by scaling up instead of dropping an all-new architecture.

* worked at HP during the HP-Intel Highly Confidential project.
by arjunchint | 2025-09-25 19:22:49+00:00
Since it looks like you are built on FireCrawl, and FireCrawl itself has similar products like FireEnrich, how do you see yourself maintaining a differentiation and compete with FireCrawl directly, if they just decide to copy you?

As an aside, we are about to launch something like similar at rtrvr.ai but having AI Web Agents navigate pages, fill forms and retrieve data. We are able to get our costs down to negligible by doing headless, serverless browsers and our own grounds up DOM construction/actuation (so no FireCrawl costs). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIU3K4E8pyw
by Fwirt | 2025-09-25 19:23:07+00:00
I used it from iOS 15-18 and it always worked great. We try to limit our kids' iPad use to drawing in Freeform and the occasional edutainment app, and I never had issues with them escaping Guided Access or it causing lockups. The fact that I can barely trust it to work properly on iPadOS 26 is a huge disappointment for me.