MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ckozlowski | 2025-09-03 02:24:31+00:00
As I recall it, Intel brought about Hyperthreading on Northwood and later Pentium 4s as a way to help with issues in it's long pipeline. As I remember it described at the time, P4 had 30+ stages in it's pipeline. Many of them did not need to be used in a given thread. Furthermore, if a branch prediction engine guessed wrong, then the pipeline needed to be cleared and started anew. For a 30+ stage pipeline, that's a lot of wasted clock cycles.

So hyper-threading was a way to recoup some of those losses. I recall reading at the time that it was a "latency hiding technique". How effective it was I leave to others. But it became standard it seems on all x86 processors in time. Core and Core 2 didn't seem to need it (much shorter pipelines) but later Intel and AMD processors got it.

This is how it was explained to me at the time anyways. I was working at an OEM from '02-'05, and I recall when this feature came out. I pulled out my copy of "Inside the Machine" by Jon Stokes which goes deep into the P4 architecture, but strangely I can only find a single mention of hyperthreading in the book. But it goes far into the P4 architecture and why branch misses are so punishing. It's a good read.

Edit: Adding that I suspect instruction pipelines are not so long that adding additional threads would help. I suspect diminishing returns past 2.
There's a new standard for privacy on the horizon
by dog5pk | 2025-09-03 02:24:48+00:00
And though I'd certainly like to it's just not feasible for me to tackle this project alone. Blockchain is nearly built, from scratch, no fork, something new to take in and digest. GitHub repository will be visible by some point tomorrow morning. Hoping to find help here. Step Forward or Step Aside. Dog5pk Presents: Trivacy (True-Privacy)
by spindump8930 | 2025-09-03 02:25:13+00:00
Great article, thanks for sharing. The tension between "SQL is declarative" and "Write the query like this or it will OOM" has always made me uncomfortable.

I've used closed, mature, systems with custom cost based optimization and still find that I sometimes need to override the optimizer on join orders. Interesting to see if any of the benchmarks in this paper have similar shapes.
by bccdee | 2025-09-03 02:25:38+00:00
NOBUS is only NOBUS until a spy gets their hands on the escrow master key (or until Donald Trump shares it at a dinner party on a lark, for that matter). If RSA's signing keys can be compromised¹, anything can be compromised.

[1]: "The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told," https://www.wired.com/story/the-full-story-of-the-stunning-r...
by com2kid | 2025-09-03 02:25:44+00:00
> 1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next.

I asked Claude Code to read a variable from a .env file.

It proceeded to write a .env parser from scratch.

I then asked it to just use Node's built in .env file parsing....

This was the 2nd time in the same session that it wrote a .env file parser from scratch. :/

Claude Code is amazing, but it'll goes off and does stupid even for simple requests.
by fenomas | 2025-09-03 02:27:50+00:00
You're not wrong - "the staff ate it later" is a word-for-word translation, so it's kind of weird to leave out 美味しく. (among other things a meaningful translation would say "crew" instead of staff)

But the nuance of the JP here is that it's using a polite set phrase, not describing whether people enjoyed the food or not. A bit like how "a good time was had by all" is used to wrap up a story, not really to describe what kind of time people had.

tl;dr, 美味しく is there because the JP would sound weirdly flat without it, and you're right that "enjoyed" would probably be a better.
by cinimodev | 2025-09-03 02:27:51+00:00
Hey, blog author here. Thanks!

I agree that a VM or container doesn't add to the power usage for a homelab that's already running. I kinda did it for fun and being able to run it off solar. I had original plans to turn the lab off at night and then the phone could keep running from battery. But, the homelab became critical infra and has to be always on lol.

The requirement for Ethernet was just for bandwidth consistency. My WiFi network isn't the best.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-09-03 02:27:52+00:00
I’m doing a lot of upgrades to neglected projects at the moment and I often need to do the same config over and over to multiple projects. I guess I could write a script, or get AI to write a script, but there’s no standard between projects. So I need the same thing over and over but from slightly different starting points.

I think you need to imagine all the things you could be doing with LLMs.

For me the biggest thing is so many tedious things are now unlocked. Refactors that are just slightly beyond the IDE, checking your config (the number of typos it’s picked up that could take me hours because eyes can be stupid), data processing that’s similar to what you have done before but different enough to be annoying.
by sleazebreeze | 2025-09-03 02:28:01+00:00
I don't want to deal with prompt injection attacks leading to being swatted. That's where all this reporting to the authorities is leading and it's not looking fun.

> Is being dead better, or is having complete privacy better? Or does it depend?

I know you're being provocative, but this feels like a false dichotomy. Mental health professionals are pro-privacy AND have mandatory reporting laws based on their best judgement. Do we trust LLMs to report a suicidal person that has been driven there by the LLM itself?

LLMs can't truly be controlled and can't be designed to not encourage mentally ill people to kill themselves.

> Mentally ill people trying to use an LLM for therapy

Yes indeed this is one of the core problems. I have experimented with this myself and the results were highly discouraging. Others that don't have the same level of discernment for LLM usage may mistake the confidence of the output for a well-trained therapist.
by vel0city | 2025-09-03 02:28:10+00:00
> The others is to send people to CECOT and other prison camps with no due process (even those with legal status) and ignore the courts.

> I am sorry, but I do not plan to engage in emotions and hypothetical

> Learn what the Trump administration is actually doing before you both-sidesing it more.

>I am not interested

So just willfully ignorant. Strange how you seem to be so well versed on the topic but choose to bury your head in the sand on anything current.

> Then, you backtracked

I have not changed my stance on anything I've claimed in this entire thread.

> someone who is on a valid status but engages in unauthorized employment is illegal immigrant

I mean, they are. They're overstaying their work visa and are fraudulently applying and staying under a different visa under false pretenses. What do we call people who overstay visas (continuing employment under a temporary work visa) and apply for other visas under false pretenses?

I guess I did fail to show a documented->undocumented->documented, only a legal->illegal->legal change. Sorry, my bad. They're still involved in illegal, undocumented labor. But even then, that's under the assumption they bothered applying for some other visa in the in-between time, not everyone does.
by tbeseda | 2025-09-03 02:28:24+00:00
I get your point but my Apple devices (Macs, iPhone, even my Vision Pro thing) aren't exactly "calm" either. The app stores are constantly trying to rope me into gacha games or promote some subscription wellness platform. Apple News subscription is floating click-bait Hollywood articles no matter how much I tap the thumbs down. Maps clutters my commute with suggested places and guides. Don't get me started on Podcasts and Music showing me topics and genres it's bizarrely certain I want to listen to.
by hx8 | 2025-09-03 02:28:38+00:00
> the best solution seems to be treating them as military targets.

The United States isn't the world police. We have both a mixed track record of military engagements with similar non-state targets, and a poor track record of long term disruption of the drug trade. The drug cartels are better funded, better trained, and better connected than terrorist organizations. I wouldn't put money on this turning out well over a twenty year period. Our military budget is extensive, but the resources are still finite. Let's spend them defending ourselves and allies from the type of state actors we are effective against and find another solution to drug trafficking.
by mxmilkiib | 2025-09-03 02:28:40+00:00
hah, I literally monetarily subscribed to Hasan several days ago so I could send that exact video to them in chat, because it has some horribly bad logic and guff understanding of political science and needs a critical deconstruction

I have watched Ryan on occasion for their info and opinion, but was sorely disappointed by that video n their reaction to what was presented to them on their visit and then how they presented it to the general public

"duck duck go Murray Bookchin"
by sdovan1 | 2025-09-03 02:29:46+00:00
I have a function in .bashrc to read the pod in browser:

read_pod_html() { local html=$(mktemp --suffix '.html') pod2html --css='https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/parser.css?doc=XML&family=7' "$1" > "$html" /usr/bin/x-www-browser "$html" }
by rootsudo | 2025-09-03 02:30:14+00:00
"The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior."

I've said this before in many ways to other Americans and they just join the very vocal "china bad, usa good, you're weird for liking china" while then wondering why they don't understand their own credit score, etc.

Imagine having a less than 600 credit score and buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, even getting insurance lol you are auto denied.
by nayuki | 2025-09-03 02:30:18+00:00
Managing your own buffer of object slots, allocating from them, and using integer indexes instead of typed object pointers - all of these are a small amount of extra work compared to using native language features.

I'd like to point out that most of the benefits explained in the article are already given to you by default on the Java virtual machine, even if you designed tree object classes the straightforward way:

> Smaller Nodes: A pointer costs 8 bytes to store on a modern 64-bit system, but unless your planning on storing over 4 billion nodes in memory, an index can be stored in just 4 bytes.

You can use the compressed OOPs (ordinary object pointers) JVM option, which on 64-bit JVMs this drops the size of a pointer from 8 bytes to 4 bytes.

> Faster Access: [...] nodes are stored contiguously in memory, the data structure will fit into fewer memory pages and more nodes will fit in the cpu’s cache line, which generally improves access times significantly

If you are using a copying garbage collector (as opposed to reference counting or mark-and-sweep), then memory allocation is basically incrementing a pointer, and consecutively allocated nodes in time are consecutive in memory as well.

> Less Allocation Overhead: [...] make a separate allocation for each individual node, one at a time. This is a very naive way of allocating memory, however, as each memory allocation comes with a small but significant overhead

Also not true for a garbage-collected memory system with bump allocation. The memory allocator only needs to keep a single pointer to keep track of where the next allocation needs to be. The memory system doesn't need to keep track of which blocks are in use or keep free lists - because those are implied by tracing all objects from the known roots. What I'm saying is, the amount of bookkeeping for a C-style malloc()+free() system is completely different than a copying garbage collector.

> Instant Frees: [...] entire structure has to be traversed to find and individually free each node [...] freeing the structure becomes just a single free call

This is very much the key benefit of copying garbage collectors: Unreachable objects require zero effort to free. If you null out the pointer to the root of the tree, then the whole tree is unreachable and no work is needed to traverse or free each individual object.

Now, am I claiming that copying garbage collection is the solution to all problems? No, not at all. But I am pointing out that as evidenced by the article, this style of memory allocation and deallocation is a common pattern, and it fits extremely well with copying garbage collection. I am more than willing to admit that GCs are more complicated to design, less suitable for hard real-time requirements, etc. So, a small number of incredibly smart people design the general GC systems instead of a larger number of ordinary programmers coming up with the tricks described in the article.
by Febe1212 | 2025-09-03 02:31:18+00:00
I built BAGen, a completely free tool for creating before-after photo comparisons. The idea came from my own need to create these comparisons regularly and wanting something simple and straightforward. BAGen keeps it simple: upload two photos, get a clean comparison in seconds. The slider feature lets you smoothly transition between before and after shots. You can export as images, GIFs, or videos. No sign-up, no watermarks, no hidden fees. Would love your feedback! What would you use this for? Any features you think are missing? Try it out and let me know what you think!
by 6r17 | 2025-09-03 02:31:19+00:00
I'm writing a distributed DB rn ; and all the algs and tech they are using, SWIM ; hash ring ; the questions they are asking themselves - are pretty much standard ; it is not easy but it's a great field with different depth ; lot of successful companies don't dive that deep because it's uncharted experimentation failure & document process that is very very expensive to justify in a traditional context. I don't see how I would sell what i'm doing rn without getting it right first - and there is no point in proposing a new technology if there is no operational guarantees - And tbh a lot of people who are using kafka or doing distributed work are mostly doing the equivalent of setting up kafa consumers and publishers and that is enough and *it is fine*.
by vova_hn | 2025-09-03 02:32:23+00:00
> Green threads are a step further than the async keyword because they have none of the function coloring stuff.

I would say that green threads still have "function coloring stuff", we just decided that every function will be async-colored.

Now, what happens if you try to cross an FFI-border and try to call a function that knows nothing about your green-thread runtime is an entirely different story...
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-03 02:33:36+00:00
There’s lots of exceptions. The lead pipe hysteria and low pressure gas replacement is exempt from all of that.

Some states are more schizophrenic than others. New York is simultaneously mandating replacement with high pressure gas mains that require biannual inspection and banning gas lines.

Lead pipes are an engineering and chemistry issue. Pipes that are functioning properly don’t need replacement.
by setr | 2025-09-03 02:33:58+00:00
The main value of regexes is expressing a fairly convoluted ask in a fairly concise form. While I’d expect LLMs to eventually generate regexes correctly, I’m not sure how you’re going to prompt the thing in a way that’s not harder than writing regexes directly.

Excluding the classic problems where you shouldn’t be using a regex in the first place (parsing email, names, html, etc) and the “draw the rest of the owl” where it simply solves everything from the input alone
by bccdee | 2025-09-03 02:34:06+00:00
I'm still reeling that someone had the gall to write a sentence like this and call it "good civics." It's a love letter to totalitarianism.

> Then, fourth and finally (drum roll, please!), they'll need to allow courts to jail the accused until: (a) the communication has been decrypted by someone; (b) the maximum penalty for the charged crime has been exceeded; or (c) the court decides to release the accused.
by photonthug | 2025-09-03 02:34:14+00:00
You're acting like this is related to necessary maintenance / safety, why give corporate the benefit of the doubt without knowing about the vehicle involved?

Even things like washing machines and coffee makers will soft-brick themselves these days asking you to "start self clean-cycle with Foo(tm) substance" and then won't perform their function without some kind of forced reset. That part of the airplane ride where the PA is blasting some kind of "join our miles club" literally at a captive audience with no choice but to listen? It's not safety related either. My headphones that I would like to use to drown out the PA advertisement literally stop working if they detect speech, and the only way to disable this "feature" is to download their app.

This is just growth-hacking "zero-cost advertisements to a targeted audience" stuff that's extremely disrespectful at best, and kinda looks like it's edging closer to threats and extortion.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-09-03 02:34:23+00:00
I did chuckle a bit, but the idea of mottainai is just way more prevalent within Japan, compared to Western countries. I can't speak for other Asian countries, but it's very easy to feel that compared to North America and Europe (places that I've lived in). Funnily, I've felt it in post-soviet countries as well, but that's coming from the feeling of scarcity in the beforetimes.
by NullHypothesist | 2025-09-03 02:35:17+00:00
I like the sentiment here. Governance is the algorithm on which societies run (culture, too, sure, but if you're starting a new city, culture tends to come out of governance more than the other way around), and we need to try out more ways of running societies.

Some will fail, for sure. But just because you can point to some examples of new cities or nations that fail doesn't mean it's not worth trying and that the impact can't be incredibly huge when it goes right (e.g. America in 1776). If you pointed to a handful of failed startups and said, "I can list 7 start ups that ended terribly, therefore you should never start a company" that's naive.

That said, just thinking about pretty buildings won't get you very far either (that said, I love me a good pretty building).

I appreciate the nuance of this post; it's not "build things = good, let's build cities" nor "build things = bad, preserve status quo at all costs"

I'd love to see more thoughtful attempts emerge in this space, and happy a gaping hole in many current attempts is being pointed out.
by tzs | 2025-09-03 02:35:43+00:00
> A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.

Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
by spindump8930 | 2025-09-03 02:37:40+00:00
It's good to have this support in APIs but grammar constrained decoding has been around for quite a while, even before the contemporary LLM era (e.g. [1] is similar in spirit). Local vs global planning is a huge issue here though - if you enforce local constraints during decoding time, an LLM might be forced to make suboptimal token decisions. This could result in a "global" (i.e. all tokens) miss, where the probability of the constrained output is far lower than the probability of the optimal response (which may also conform to the grammar). Algorithms like beam search can alleviate this, but it's still difficult. This is one of the reasons that XML tags work better than JSON outputs - less constraints on "weird" tokens.

[1] https://aclanthology.org/P17-2012/
by braedynm | 2025-09-03 02:38:55+00:00
I built Studiio because most study sessions turn into tab-tetris: timer app, notes app, white noise, calculator, links… focus dies with every switch.

What it is (single screen):

Pomodoro + break timers

“Socrates AI” → guided questions and hints (teaches, not tells)

Study sounds (rain/white/nature/vibe)

Quick notes (scratchpad), links/resources, daily quote

Calculator, weather glance, theme toggle

What’s different:

One page for the whole session → less context switching/cognitive load

Socratic prompts instead of answer dumps

Privacy-friendly defaults; minimal friction (open → Start)

Who it’s for: students (MS/HS/early undergrad) and anyone who studies better with structure.

Tech: [React + Vite + Tailwind]. State saved [locally]. Code: [“closed for now”]. Live demo: https://studiio.xyz/

Roadmap (would love feedback):

Spaced-repetition nudges, progress ring/streaks, keyboard shortcuts

PWA “install as app” mode

Export notes/links to Notion/Drive

Accessibility passes (screen reader + high-contrast tweaks)

Questions for HN:

Anything you’d remove from the screen to reduce friction further?

Are the default Pomodoro/break times sensible?

Does the Socratic prompt style help you think, or slow you down?

Thanks for taking a look.

—
by shortstuffsushi | 2025-09-03 02:40:24+00:00
While a lot of these ideas are touted as "good for the org," in the case of LLMs, it's more like guard rails against something that can't reason things out. That doesn't mean that the practices are bad, but I would much prefer that these LLMs (or some better mechanism) everyone is being pushed to use could actual reason, remember, and improve, so that this sort of guarding wouldn't be a requirement for correct code.
by glenstein | 2025-09-03 02:40:49+00:00
Like others have noted, I think it's far from obvious that Google's LLM prompt is the best experience in the space, I would say it's clearly not in the top tier and even that relatively speaking, I consider it bad compared to the best options.

Assuming we're talking about the AI generated blurbs at the top of search results, there are loads of problems. For one they frequently don't load at all. For another search is an awkward place for them to be. I interact with search differently than with a chat interface where you're embedding a query in a kind of conversational context such that both your query and the answer are rich in contextual meaning. With search I'm typically more fact finding and in a fight against Google's page rank optimizations to try and break through to get my information I need. In a search context AI prompts don't benefit from context rich prompts and aren't able to give context-rich answers and kind of give generic background that isn't necessarily what I asked for. To really benefit from the search prompts I would have to be using the search bar in a prompt way, which would likely degrade the search results. And generally this hybrid interaction is not very natural or easy to optimize, and we all know nobody is asking for it, it's just bolted on to neutralize the temptation to leave search behind in favor of an LLM chat.

And though less important, material design as applied to Google web sites in the browser is not good design, it's ugly and the wrong way to have a prompt interaction. This is also the case for Gemini from a web browser. Meanwhile GPT and Claude are a bit more comfortable with information density and are better visual and interactive experiences because of it.