MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 11:49:45+00:00
> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers.

If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.

> What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint.

The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that.

EDIT:

>> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek

> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.

We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well.

Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part.

The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this.

(Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)
by TZubiri | 2025-09-28 11:50:27+00:00
So the type is anything that implements the index function ([], or __getitem__), I thnink that's a Sequence, similar to Iterable.

>from typing import Sequence

>def third(something: Sequence):

> return indexable[3]

however if all you are doing is just iterate over the thing, what you actually need is an Iterable

>from typing import Iterable

>def average(something:Iterable):

> for thing in something:

> ...

Statistically, the odds of a language being wrong, are much lower than the programmer being wrong. Not to say that there aren't valid critiques of python, but we must think of the creators of programming languages and their creations as the top of the field. If a 1400 chess elo player criticizes Magnus Carlsen's chess theory, it's more likely that the player is missing some theory rather than he found a hole in Carlsen's game, the player is better served by approaching a problem with the mentality that he is the problem, rather than the master.
by Marazan | 2025-09-28 11:51:27+00:00
Ok, so this is just one of many examples but the most immediate one is where I don't care about the immutable sanctity of the variable I have just declared.

I often use Python for data munging and I'll frequently write code that goes

foo = initial_value ... foo = paritally_cleaned_up_value ... if check: foo = fianllylikethis else: foo = orlikethis

Where the type of the value being assigned to foo is different each time. Now, obviously (in this simplistic example that misses subtleties) I could declare a new variable for each transformation step or do some composite type building type thing or refactor this into separate functions for each step that requires a different type but all of those options are unnecessary busy work for what should be a few simple lines of code.
by tripzilch | 2025-09-28 11:51:31+00:00
Yeah and you were rude anyway.

Here's some advice: There will be literally never, ever, be a situation in your life when it is okay or even remotely appropriate to tell somebody else that "they're autistic".

If you figure that someone is autistic just make the accommodation you notice they need, because if you don't you are in fact the one being demanding of them to do the work to make the social thing happen on account of two people.
by noAnswer | 2025-09-28 11:52:45+00:00
"Not really true"?! TRUE AS HELL! "Outlook New" LITERALLY DOES THAT! It's an infostealer. Microsoft gets your login info and downloads your mails, contacts and calenders to its own servers!

How this app is legal and not marked as malware is beyond me! It's the biggest information heists in history!

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Microsoft-lays-hands-on-login-d... https://cybernews.com/privacy/new-outlook-copies-user-emails...

> If they betray trust on such a scale, and we find out, they'll be out of business.

The decision makers don't care. They could eat children and they still would buy from them.

https://www.wiz.io/blog/storm-0558-compromised-microsoft-key...
by teleforce | 2025-09-28 11:53:24+00:00
This is good news, hopefully this come with much better integration with Nvidia and also non-Nvidia AI/ML eco-system including the crucial driver, firmware and toolkit as discussed in this very recent HN posting [1].

[1] Docker Was Too Slow, So We Replaced It: Nix in Production [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45398468
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-28 11:54:40+00:00
It's wild that you got downvoted for this reasonable take.

Right next door, Ireland had a little problem with potatoes and a massive famine resulted from it. Had the island had a more diverse mix of crops, things probably would've been a little less severe.

There are currently pests and infections spreading around the world and destroying crops. Bananas are undergoing a repeat of their last global crop failure and isolated pockets of uninfected bananas are becoming more valuable. Natural rubber had a disease that wiped out most rubber trees. It's not impossible for wheat in Europe to be hit with a plague in the near future and absolutely wipe out crops and food sources for hundreds of millions. There's war in Eastern Europe that risks spreading, and if it does, embargoes are possible. Investing now in alternative local food sources is simply smart.

Profit now isn't everything. The problem that's gutting the west now is how countries shipped off every industry to other cheaper countries because it was "more profitable and nothing bad will happen." Now the youth are left with less than their parents had.

Plus the article addresses this being done as a climate change-proofing measure. With the UK getting hotter, rice grows better and better. Other crops may not.
by alan-crowe | 2025-09-28 11:54:43+00:00
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board.

Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan, if you want to play elsewhere, your move needs to have an even bigger threat behind it.

He is learning, and now I face my clever moves being player against me. This makes it harder for me to win (it is about 50:50 with the handicap), but also more fun for me to play.

You could ask your spouses brother for a "teaching game" or a larger handicap, or a bit of both.
by alfons_foobar | 2025-09-28 11:54:45+00:00
I ran into some code recently where this pattern caused me so much headache - class A has an attribute which is an instance of class B, and class B has a "parent" attribute (which points to the instance of class A that class B is an attribute of):

class Foo: def __init__(self, bar): self.bar = bar class Bar: def __init__(self, foo): self.foo = foo

Obviously both called into each other to do $THINGS... Pure madness.

So my suggestion: Try not to have interdependent classes :D
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-28 11:54:45+00:00
That has to do with the physics of harmonic vibration.

It's not that you can't make even numbers of spokes balanced, it's just marginally easier to do odd numbers.

Back in ye-olden days when things sucked there were more manufacturing benefits to it too but these days (this century) that doesn't really matter because even the sloppiest casting factory in china has their stuff figured out.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-28 11:55:04+00:00
That doesn't sound like it'd have something to do with the dynamic nature of python. Type checking is a static analysis of the source code, so if you'd want something to be inferred dynamically, then you'll have to make use of generics:

from typing import Callable class Pipeline[T]: def __init__(self, value: T) -> None: self._value = value def step[U](self, cb: Callable[[T], U]) -> 'Pipeline[U]': return Pipeline(cb(self._value)) def terminate(self) -> T: return self._value def _float_to_int(value: float) -> int: return int(value) def _int_to_str(value: int) -> str: return str(value) def main() -> None: result = Pipeline(3.14)\ .step(_float_to_int)\ .step(_int_to_str)\ .terminate() print(result) if __name__ == '__main__': main()

You could further constrain the generic type through type variables: https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html#typing.TypeVar
by mark_l_watson | 2025-09-28 11:56:16+00:00
I can’t read the linked FT article but I wanted to mention that Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline is interesting for me because he has a contrarian view of tech that is often different from my own. Some of his recent podcasts on the funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society. I feel my own views slightly shifting when I listen to him.

I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.
by eska | 2025-09-28 12:00:00+00:00
I think thread pools are one of those solved problems that the silent majority of C programmers has solved ages ago and doesn’t release open source projects for. I’ve also written my 300 line for pool and allocator together and always laughed at taskflow, rayon, etc.. Even NUMA is easy with arena allocation. When casey muratori of the handmade network said the same thing I remember agreeing and he got made fun of for it.

BTW the for-case can simply be supported by setting a pool/global boolean and using that to decide how to wait for a new task (during the paralle for the boolean will be true, otherwise do sleeps with mutexes in the worst case for energy saving)
by fiq100 | 2025-09-28 12:00:11+00:00
Apple does not secretly analyze sine waves to infer head motion. Instead, airpods pro/max/gen-3 include actual IMUs (inertial measurement units), and ios exposes their readings through core motion.

It’s a known research technique called acoustic motion tracking (some labs use inaudible chirps to locate phones or headsets) you mentioned, but it’s not how airpods head tracking works
by hyperpape | 2025-09-28 12:00:49+00:00
> To put it in perhaps more concrete terms: playing a "tactic" position may net you +10 points across a sequence of 5 moves or so. (IE: One well placed tactical move, and ~4 followup moves may capture 5 enemy stones + 5 territory simultaneously from your opponent). However, every single early-game move is worth nearly +20 points of territory if played correctly. I'm serious.

I'm baffled by this comment. Both professional commentary and AI evaluation confirm that most joseki mistakes are very small, often on the order of 1-2 points, because the temperature is low. There are specific joseki that turn into fights (e.g. Taisha), and it is possible to lose 10-20 points in those, but first of all, it's typically possible to play conservatively and avoid those joseki, second, most errors in them are smaller, and third, mid-game fights end up being even bigger (an error in a capturing race can be an almost unlimited number of points, having 40 points at stake is common).

I'm curious what level you are? As a 4kyu (European), I can confidently say joseki is less important than reading up to my level. I believe stronger players say the same well into the amateur dan level.
by soneil | 2025-09-28 12:00:59+00:00
> How do you physically solder a chip the wrong way around?

With effort, and bodge-wire. I've seen chips done dead-bug style when the board's been messed up (eg, the footprint is orientated for the bottom of the board, but placed on the top, and vice-versa).

It's definitely not something you'd ship, but a kludge that can get you working until the next board spin.
by usrusr | 2025-09-28 12:01:00+00:00
I guess I must count myself lucky having lived through that optimism of the 1990ies. But perhaps those too young to really remember anything pre 9/11 have it easier to adapt to the state of the world today and I should therefore be envious?

PS: Yes, this appears a terribly unrelated to the article, but that's basically what I read: "There was this trajectory to a better world, I eagerly contributed (and this turned out huge but that's beside the point), but at some point we lost direction and now I'm just trying to find small steps in that old direction, even if the impact certainly won't repeat."
by gryfft | 2025-09-28 12:03:07+00:00
It's funny, negative parallelisms used to be a favorite gimmick of mine, back in the before-times. Nowadays, every time I see "it isn't just..." I feel disappointment and revulsion.

The really funny thing is, I'll probably miss that tell when it's gone, as every AI company eventually scrubs away obvious blemishes like that from their flagship models.
by crote | 2025-09-28 12:05:39+00:00
> how about you go ahead and multiply those two numbers for me

What are you going to fill in for the third number, though? With an open-circuit voltage of 37.10V at 25°C and a coefficient of -0.35%/°C it can theoretically go up to 75V at absolute zero. And that open-circuit voltage is with an irradiance of 1000 W/m2, should we also account for the possibility of someone building a heliostat around it?

There's no one-size-fits-all number they could possibly quote. It'll always depend on the environment, because that's just how the physics work. The best you can do is provide a figure for the standardized testing environment and the relevant coefficients - which is exactly what they are doing.
by geocar | 2025-09-28 12:06:20+00:00
Really?

I have all sorts of electronics that say everything from 208V - 240V that all go in the wall, so I think all those numbers are probably close to each other in whatever a volt is.

I think if I'm worried about a limit of some kind, being within 5% of that limit seems like I might as well be over-limit if the commonly seen distribution I see in my house is greater than 15%
by scyclow | 2025-09-28 12:06:36+00:00
Author here. Gas costs have actually come down a lot over the past few years. It only costs me a few dollars to run the transaction. It's more that scheduling, setting up, conducting, and tearing down each burn session is a huge pain in the ass. So if I can burn 10 bills an hour, then I'd clear maybe $450 an hour after gas, which doesn't feel crazy for providing boutique financial services.
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 12:06:39+00:00
That’s true — though in my benchmarks Tokio came out as one of the slower parallelism-enabling projects. The article still included a comparison:

$ PARALLEL_REDUCTIONS_LENGTH=1536 cargo +nightly bench -- --output-format bencher test fork_union ... bench: 5,150 ns/iter (+/- 402) test rayon ... bench: 47,251 ns/iter (+/- 3,985) test smol ... bench: 54,931 ns/iter (+/- 10) test tokio ... bench: 240,707 ns/iter (+/- 921)

... but I now avoid comparing to Tokio since it doesn’t seem fair — fork-join style parallel processing isn’t really its primary use case.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-28 12:07:14+00:00
On the other hand you have bad faith actors like Sam Altman who pretends he really wants governments to regulate ai to protect people from it's potential risks. Maybe he also wants that but mainly he was trying to preserve openai advantage via regulatory capture.

The idea that people can expect to know the data stored about them unfortunately is a pipe dream. governments certainly have no interest in that. As a rule i assume that anything i do and write online is being recorded under my name and i act accordingly. I'm not paranoid but i am prudent. I bear in mind the possibility that one day there will be a massive leak and anyone will be able to type my name and see everything i've ever done.
by myself248 | 2025-09-28 12:07:19+00:00
This is what happens when something goes mainstream. The background knowledge that "everybody knows" when it's niche, because only turbo-nerds are into it, simply isn't common sense for everybody in the wider population.

Back when Home Power magazine started up, the panels were super expensive, and squeezing out every watt was important. Since high temperatures decrease voltage and output, keeping the panels cool (while baking in the sun!) was top-of-mind for every installation. And right along with learning that critical consideration, everyone also learned the caveat that in the bitter cold, that very same phenomenon means they can produce significantly more. Temperature coefficient was simply something "everyone knew".

Now they're so cheap nobody cares. The magazine shut down because "alternative power" and EVs aren't exactly alternative anymore, you can buy one off the dealer's lot, it's nuts. And the panels are crazy cheap now. If you lose 10% because the panels are hot, it's likely cheaper to just buy 10% more panels, than to redesign your support brackets to allow better airflow. But nobody highlights the phenomenon behind the efficiency loss.

"Everybody knew" that the ratings on the panel are at Standard Test Conditions: 25°C and 1000W/m². That's almost never the conditions in the real world, but it establishes a legal baseline whereby panels can be compared apples-to-apples and advertising kept honest (if anyone cared), but deviate from STC and output will go down, or up. Again, ask today's consumer what the ratings on the label mean, and most of 'em have never heard of STC nor could define how the nameplate wattage is just one point on a curve.

Is this the panel manufacturer's fault? They're labeling things precisely the same as they've labeled them for 40-plus years. (Perhaps there's even more data on the panel label now, as Vmp and Imp are typically specified now, and they weren't always universal.)

Edit to add: The label doesn't typically specify the temperature coefficient, but for every panel I've checked, it is in the datasheet. But who reads datasheets?

Is it the inverter manufacturer's fault? They're labeling things precisely the same as they've labeled them for 40-plus years. The input max is a hard limit where the silicon can take no more, and there's a certain amount of headroom required between that and the panels' max, after compensating for temperature coefficient. Of course you calculate your panel voltage for your local conditions before comparing it to the inverter input, duh!

Everyone knows that! Except now they don't.
by metalman | 2025-09-28 12:08:51+00:00
Where to start, eh! So most everything to do with off grid specifications can be listed as "nominal", ish, depending on, etc.Not knowing this means that persistance will provide the circumstance to be educated. There are a number of ways to get things wrong and melt stuff, or get hurt. Batteries should always be treated as unpredictable dangerous beasts, happy as a clam if they are treated just right, but capable of producing trouble and disaster, or just del8vering a viscious bite to the unsuspecting and surviving to do it again. A 48volt (nominal) battery bank will happily turn the required 10mm wrench into single demonstration of a wide range of metelurgical and other phenomina. For fun on a cold morning take the leads from a 3 kw solar array, off, and then strike the wires to produce a realy big fat arc, h3y hey! The simple fact, that I tell enthused,nice, but clearly unprepared people who express interest in "off grid", is that I do it, but it's not for everybody, as there is a significant technical learning curve, plus the required physical skills to mount panels, run wireing, deal with battery banks,set up the systems, and if costs are to be kept to a minimum then source parts from distributors or import directly.
by luma | 2025-09-28 12:09:08+00:00
> this is being driven entirely by spite not insight

Zitron is a PR dude who runs a PR company and has never had any experience, training, or meaningful contributions to technology. He found twitter success posting shittakes about AI, ran that into a podcast, and now he's in the FT. Zitron is a professional contrarian and PR man, saying "AI sucks" has found him fame and success.
by protocolture | 2025-09-28 12:09:13+00:00
Depends.

This is a very old argument within artistic communities.

In cinema, authorship has resoundingly been awarded to the director. A lot of film directors go deep in many creative silos, but at its core the process is commissioning a lot of artists to do art at the same time. You dont have to be able to do those things. Famously some anime directors have just been hired off the street.

In comics things went the other way. Editors have been trying to extract credit for creative work for a long time. A lot of them have significant input in the creative process, but have no contractual basis for demanding credit for that input. It frustrates them. They can also just commission work, or they can have various levels of input in to the creative process, up to and including defining characters entirely.

Really then, in your example, theres clearly a point where you have had enough of a creative input in the creation to be part of the artistic endeavor. One judge in china ruled in favour of the artist after they proved that they had completed 20 odd revisions of the artwork, before watermarking it.

That is of course, assuming we only follow your strict, reductionist argument. Even for AI art, most generators these days take more than text input. You can mask areas, provide hand drawn precursor art and a lot of other things. And that also assumes no post processing.

Not all AI generated items will be art. But what I find offensive, is the judgement that as a class nothing touched by AI could be considered art. Mostly because I lived through "Digital Art is not Art" and "Computer Games are not Art" proponents of both got overtaken by history and rightly shamed.
by ivorbuk | 2025-09-28 12:11:37+00:00
Agree - the Land Rover brand has such significant demand that there's zero risk they won't bounce back.

The "bailout" says more about Tata's approach to supplier relations than it does about brand risk. Not that Tata is much different than any other abusive conglomerate.

This is akin to being "forced" to do the right thing by the UK government. Do we really believe that Tata Group couldn't afford this?
by wodenokoto | 2025-09-28 12:11:46+00:00
I dipped my toes in mechanical keyboards by going from an Apple keyboard to the low profile keyChron. I really like the idea of custom keycaps and tinkering with different clickers but in the end I just type better on the Apple keyboard.

Got the flat Logitech for work where we use windows.

I’m not saying this is the right choice for everyone but low profile and low travel is nice on the wrists and nice to type on, and it just might also be the right choice for you.

It’s a lot more boring though.

As for ergonomics, just stay away from the home row. I don’t know why that’s a recommended position, but I can see why you’d get wrist pain if you are placing your fingers on the home row most of the time.
by protocolture | 2025-09-28 12:11:49+00:00
>Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping.

Yeah and it worked great until industrial agriculture let lots of people eat who had no skill at agriculture. In fact, our entire history as a species is a long history of replacing Skill with machines to enable more people to access the skill. If it gives you sad feelings that people without skill can suddenly do more cool things, thats entirely a you problem.