MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-21 13:27:58+00:00
> Oh, I'm very pro Rust.

Maybe you don't want to admit it at this point, but you've spent literal hours of your time (more likely tens of hours, in fact given the sheer volume of comments) on this very forum explaining why Rust was dead on arrival because it was too complex.

Now I get that such a position is hard to defend now that Rust has pretty much won and is running on everyone's phone and computer, but such a volume of disparagement on every single Rust post didn't go unnoticed.

I'm glad you've fixed your anger issue, unless you're just being an hypocrite right now.
by JohnFen | 2025-09-21 13:28:07+00:00
That insane over-optimization is how folks are getting down to (and below) 10 pounds.

I'm not even remotely an ultralight backpacker, but I do count ounces (no matter what your weight limit is, you can't escape making tradeoffs to stay within it). Your hiking load is a great example of how quickly apparently insignificant quantities can add up. Saving fractions of an ounce multiple times gets you large savings far more quickly than you'd think.
by setr | 2025-09-21 13:28:12+00:00
The game simulation will get more detailed/granular as aesthetics dial down in perceived value. You can always go bigger/wider/more procedural/more multiplayer.

This is also why every hard problem eventually shows up — games are just simulation + interaction, and eventually everything that can be simulated will have some attempted implementation out there, struggling along. (For some reason, this does not appear to stop at “interesting” things to simulate — see all the literal simulators on steam)
by croes | 2025-09-21 13:28:15+00:00
This is also very wrong

> A factor of 1966 is a number that divides the number without remainder.

>The factors of 1966 are 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 17, 22, 33, 34, 51, 66, 102, 187, 374, 589, 1178, 1966.

If I google for the factors of 1966 the Google AI gives the same wrong factors.
by themgt | 2025-09-21 13:28:16+00:00
The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil.

It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.

The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
by bluedino | 2025-09-21 13:28:48+00:00
Graphics programming "in the 90s" encompasses a pretty wide range.

You had raw access to things like VGA cards and then different tricks per each individual card when it came to things like SVGA

http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/index.php

You had a few things like UniVBE that tried to create a common platform for VESA cards to be used

https://wiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/Scitech_UniVBE

Meanwhile, you had things like video drivers for Windows, usually basic 2D functionality:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-9x-video-minidriver-sou...

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/antique-display-driving/

In the mid-90's we started getting 3D hardware like 3Dfx and Rendition cards, they each had their proprietary interfaces.

And then finally, the 3D hardware was adopted by standards like OpenGL and DirectX.
by maddmann | 2025-09-21 13:30:13+00:00
It seems like a very backwards approach to testing a new technology: instead of “let me figure out how to use this tool”, the approach I see a lot is “let me continually use this tool in an known incorrect way”

Of course there is valuable knowledge in understanding limitations but that is not the approach the author is taking here, imo the author seems disingenuous.
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-21 13:30:24+00:00
The difference between successful and failing teams has often been a good product manager. And that often means someone skilled at navigating the politics to ensure the team has runway to accomplish what it needs to. I’m not good at that work, but I’m grateful for those who do it.

Even when I’ve shipped an obviously good change, it can be bulldozed by political forces.

I don’t know how you get work done in a reasonably sized group of people without good political navigators.
by thewisenerd | 2025-09-21 13:30:36+00:00
> To be clear, I would expect a moderately intelligent teenager to be able to find two lists and compare them. If an intern gave me the same attention to detail as above, we'd be having a cosy little chat about their attitude to work.

sure, but when I expect this [1] from _any_ full time hire, my "expectations are too high from people" and "everybody has their strengths"

[1] find a list of valid html5 elements, find a list of TLDs, have an understanding of ccTLDs and gTLDs
by unleaded | 2025-09-21 13:30:44+00:00
I had a strange AI experience the other day. I asked Kimi K2 to write a 6809 indexed operand decoder in C, and this is what it gave:

uint16_t ea_indexed(void) { uint8_t post = *PC++; uint16_t base, off = 0; /* 1. pick base register */ static const uint16_t *const base_tbl[4] = { &X, &Y, &U, &S }; base = *base_tbl[(post >> 5) & 3]; /* 2. work out the effective address */ if ((post & 0x80) == 0) { /* 5-bit signed offset */ off = (int8_t)(post << 3) >> 3; } else if ((post & 0x60) == 0x20) { /* 8- or 16-bit offset */ if (post & 0x10) { /* 16-bit */ off = (int16_t)fetch_be16(PC); PC += 2; } else { /* 8-bit */ off = (int8_t)*PC++; } } else if ((post & 0x60) == 0x40) { /* auto inc/dec */ int8_t step = ((post & 0x0F) == 0x0) ? 1 : ((post & 0x0F) == 0x1) ? 2 : ((post & 0x0F) == 0x2) ? -1 : ((post & 0x0F) == 0x3) ? -2 : 0; if (step > 0) base += step; /* post-increment */ off = step < 0 ? step : 0; /* pre-decrement already applied */ if (step < 0) base += step; } else if ((post & 0x60) == 0x60) { /* accumulator offset */ static const uint8_t scale[4] = {1,1,2,1}; /* A,B,D,illegal */ uint8_t acc = (post >> 3) & 3; if (acc == 0) off = A; else if (acc == 1) off = B; else if (acc == 2) off = (A<<8)|B; /* D */ off *= scale[acc]; } else { /* 11x111xx is illegal */ illegal(); } uint16_t ea = base + off; /* 3. optional indirect */ if (post & 0x10) ea = read16(ea); return ea; }

( full convo: https://text.is/4ZW2J )

From looking at Page 150 of https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Motoro... it looked pretty much perfect except for the accumulator addressing. That's impressive...

Then in another chat I asked it "give a technical description of how the 6809 indexed operands are decoded" and it just can't do it. It always gets the fundamentals wrong and makes pretty much everything up. Try it yourself, doesn't have to be Kimi most other AIs get it wrong too.

My assumption is that it's learned to how to represent it in code from reading emulator sources, but hasn't quite mapped it well enough to be able to explain it in English.. or something like that.*
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-21 13:31:01+00:00
Professors have been publishing papers advocating for legal bans of gender affirming care for ages. They've been publishing papers on gender dysphoria and the medical impact of transition for ages. Heck, there are law professors on topics like "against civil rights."

For covid, there are not only oodles of papers on the topic you describe here, but entire books written by academics on the topic. These people remain employed at premier institutions. The question of the cost benefit analysis of remote schooling (costs to education outcomes and costs to parents having less available childcare against costs to public health) has been a particular vigorous topic of discussion.
by fzwang | 2025-09-21 13:31:04+00:00
I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability machine, per Dan Davies [1].

I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.

For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
by anthonylevine | 2025-09-21 13:31:16+00:00
> It's a coincidence when the output includes facts,

That's not what a coincidence is.

A coincidence is: "a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection."

Are you saying that training it on a subset of specific data and it responding with that data "does not have a causal connection"> Do you know how statistical pattern matching works?
by taneq | 2025-09-21 13:31:25+00:00
Hard to tell but from the videos and the described toolchain it sounds like the video is actually completely 2D and they're just presenting it inside a 'holographic' environment. Think of it like a model theatre with a Pepper's Ghost illusion in the middle, except with some fancypants optics to make the display actually be much thinner than the 'theatre' insde.
by K0balt | 2025-09-21 13:31:26+00:00
The training data is not automatically in the context scope, and on list tasks LLMs have nearly no way to ensure completeness due to their fundamental characteristics.

To do a task like this with LLMs, you need to use a document for your source lists or bring them directly into context, then a smart model with good prompting might zero-shot it.

But if you want any confidence in the answer, you need to use tools: “here is two lists, write a python script to find the exact matches, and return a new list with only the exact matches. Write a test dataset and verify that there are no errors, omissions, or duplicates.”

LLMs plus tools / code are amazing. LLMs on their own are a professor with an intermittent heroin problem.
Show HN: Simple to follow Postgres backup and restore guide
by freakynit | 2025-09-21 13:31:54+00:00
Uses pgBackRest.

Sharing in case anyone else is looking for an easy to follow guide to setup backups and restore for PostgreSQL. Have intentionally kept this minimal.

https://github.com/freakynit/postgre-backup-and-restore-guid...

Thanks
by anthonylevine | 2025-09-21 13:32:29+00:00
> you claim that training an LLM on regulations would produce a system capable of answering questions about that regulation.

Huh? But it does do that? What do you think training an LLM entails?

Are you of the belief that an LLM trained on non-medical data would have the same statical chance of answering a medical question correctly?

we're at the "Redefining what words means in order to not have to admit I was wrong" stage of this argument
by the_gastropod | 2025-09-21 13:33:25+00:00
Calling the rule in the bible that calls for the stoning of gay people, and I quote, from the video: “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” is absolutely advocating for the stoning of gay people. You are the one extending grace to defend a monster just because he is dead. https://fair.org/home/action-alert-snopes-thinks-kirk-was-ki...

I also think you seem to be unfamiliar with his work, and are giving him the benefit of the doubt in this isolated example you’ve familiarized yourself with. Please. Familiarize yourself with more. You’ll uncover a pattern of unserious and hateful nonsense.

Since this has devolved into accusations that I’m lying, being slimy, and calling my very-obviously-not baseless claims “baseless smears”, I think it’s time I pull the plug on this little exchange. Take care.
by trollbridge | 2025-09-21 13:33:59+00:00
Writing graphics card drivers in the 1990s was a nightmare, and often the most complex part of an operating system, particularly ones that supported protected mode and virtual DOS machines.

Windows/386's graphics card driver was so integrated with the protected-mode kernel that it had an entirely different kernel for each graphics card. It came out of the box with support for CGA and EGA, and a later version added Herculues, VGA, and 8514/A. That was it.

By Windows 3.0, it had a more modular architecture - but this made the drivers even harder to write. A driver that would run in user space had to be written in 16-bit assembly or C. And then a secondary driver that would run in kernel space had to be written in 32-bit assembler, and that driver had to completely virtualise the device for DOS apps (and also had to provide a virtual device the aforementioned 16-bit driver could use).

Drivers for OS/2 got even more complex: the above 16-bit Windows driver was still needed. Plus a 32-bit protected-mode driver for OS/2 apps. Plus a "base" 16-bit driver for character mode when the system was booting, although most cards could use the generic VGA or SVGA driver for that. Plus the 32-bit virtualisation driver for DOS apps. Plus a specialised 16-bit Windows driver that would share the display with the 32-bit protected-mode driver so that both Windows and OS/2 apps could be on the display at the same time.

XFree86 was the usual way to support graphics cards on Linux, alongside very simple kernel-based drivers for character support - or more complex drivers for framebuffer support. If you wanted to run XFree86 on OS/2, you had to have a separate executable (just like Linux) for the specific graphics driver. So an OS/2 machine could end up having this many graphics drivers:

- Base video driver, e.g. BVHSVGA - 16-bit Windows full screen driver - 16-bit Windows seamless driver - 32-bit OS/2 Presentation Manager driver - 32-bit virtualisation driver - 32-bit XFree86 driver

NT would be yet another driver, although at least on NT it was just a single kernel space driver, and Windows 95 yet another. Windows 95 needed the same virtualisation driver as prior versions. NT didn't typically provide that, but NT was also notorious for poor support for DOS games because of that.

Some vendors actually supported all of these. You'd get a couple disks with a graphics card for GEM, DOS (VESA), OS/2 (16-bit and 32-bit), Windows 2.x, 3.x, NT 3.x, and even SCO Unix. The workload to write all these drivers was insane.
by damsos | 2025-09-21 13:34:09+00:00
When I was promoted to a manager role, I was initially frustrated. I felt like my impact had actually gone DOWN after the promotion.

I used to ship features every day. Now I spend all day in meetings, not delivering anything tangible.

I was lost and confused as hell.

As an IC, impact feels straightforward. You write code, ship features, fix bugs. Direct line from your work to results.

But as a manager? Your impact is indirect. And it's initially hard to grasp.
by brightball | 2025-09-21 13:34:16+00:00
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view?

When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.

I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.

My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-09-21 13:34:22+00:00
This is true across literally millions of HR people across the whole country. Every one trying to make their job a little bit easier and thus creating an externality with the monstrous negative effect on the entire education system and years of people lives pursuing pointless degrees at great cost and debt that may take some lifetimes to pay off. Absolute madness.
by edent | 2025-09-21 13:34:27+00:00
How do you think most people use tools?

Go sit on public transport and look at how people use their devices. They don't fiddle with settings or dive deep into configuration menus.

I literally just opened the tools and used what they gave me. They're sold on the promise that "this thing is really clever and will answer any question!!" so why should I have to spend time futzing with it?
by Lapel2742 | 2025-09-21 13:34:28+00:00
> This works great in Claude Sonnet 4.1: 'Please could you research a list of valid TLDs and a list of valid HTML5 elements, then cross reference them to produce a list of HTML5 elements which are also valid TLDs. Use search to find URLs to the lists, then use the analysis tool to write a script that downloads the lists, normalises and intersects them.'

Ok, I only have to:

1. Generally solve the problem for the AI

2. Make a step by step plan for the AI to execute

3. Debug the script I get back and check by hand if it uses reliable sources.

4. Run that script.

For what do I need the AI?
by dvdkon | 2025-09-21 13:34:54+00:00
Seeing the comments here, I thought I'd quickly share my experience at Matfyz (Charles University in Prague), specifically the computer science programme:

I applied for admission and was accepted based on having not-too-terrible grades from an optional high school exit test, but later all admission tests were cancelled due to COVID. The idea is to admit hundreds of applicants and keep those who pass the nontrivial first semester, which I much prefer to hard exams.

Despite some missteps caused by COVID and just me being me, I really enjoyed my years of study and am now continuing in the masters programme.

Some lectures were great, and most were at least decent. I learned to check who taught what class and ask around for feedback, and I'll shamelessly admit to choosing my specialisation based mostly on that feedback and personal experiences.

I almost never felt that rote memorisation was being asked of me, or that it was the key to success. The vast majority of issues I had could be solved by understanding more, not just knowing more. Some examiners even allowed small cheatsheets (and plenty of people still didn't pass, so no free exams).

I know that not all university students in the Czech Republic have had such a good experience. I've heard about plenty of problems with stubborn teachers or unfriendly bureaucracy, but on the whole I'd say it's about more than the degree.
by orwin | 2025-09-21 13:35:00+00:00
I know someone who started uni at 24, after 7 year of working as line cook then chef. She seems to have the opposite experience that you have. She has had a lot of support from the professors in her first year, and only wanted to reach bachelor. Then the seocnd year came, she started to really understand biology, and changed her goals from nutrition to pharmaco/biochemistry, changing her courses with the help of the admin. Then in Master 1, she once again pivoted towards genetics (therapeutic engineering to be exact), and it seems her M2 will push her toward a doctorate in genetics and anthropology, which is yet another pivot.

For myself uni wasn't a success, and maybe we whould require children to work before getting to uni if they don't know what they wat to do yet, but at least for some, Uni is great and function exactly as it should.
by lonjil | 2025-09-21 13:35:12+00:00
> (surprisingly, Firefox is not attributed this - they also do not support it yet, and they are not doing anything _other_ than awaiting Chrome's work for it!)

The fuck are you talking about? The jxl-rs library Firefox is waiting on is developed by mostly the exact same people who made libjxl which you say sucks so much.

In any case, JXL obviously has mindshare due to the features it has as a format, not the merits of the reference decoder.
by scandox | 2025-09-21 13:35:21+00:00
I think the reality of what has gone on has several faces which are all worth thinking about:

1. A group of people that want to be different without harming anyone and be left alone

2. A group of people demanding certain specific and new legal rights with respect to how they are different

3. A group of people advocating for new social and linguistic norms around said difference

3. A group of people socially shaming people who failed to respect said norms

4. A group of people socially shaming those who opposed new specific legal rights

5. A group of people vocally opposing said legal and social changes

6. A group of people advocating legal restrictions to prevent or punish said different life choices

7. A group of people fighting said restrictions
by m0llusk | 2025-09-21 13:36:24+00:00
This is a very intense piece, but misses some critical points. Germany after WWI was suffering terribly under reparations that European Allies and the US insisted on. Previously wealthy professionals went broke and begged in the streets for scraps. When Hitler swept aside reparations there was a great economic updraft as Germans rebuilt their economy and got back to work. The politics of the time was driven by the economy. The US appears to be entering into a period of stagnation and a breakdown of global trading upon which it had become dependent and that is a very different situation with economic factors hitting politics in ways unlike past crises.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-21 13:37:13+00:00
There was one study that said that in a specific setting and was amplified heavily on forums by anti-AI people.

There have been many more studies showing productivity gains across a variety of tasks that preceded that one.

That study wasn't necessarily wrong about the specific methodology they had for onboarding people to use AI. But if I remember correctly it was funded by an organization that was slightly skeptical of AI.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-21 13:37:13+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ultralight/comments/1li5rxw/20000ma...

Looks like a guy there measured it and it is 14.7 which is more than I thought it would be.

> So at a nominal 3.7 volts that’s around 14700mAh, which is around 73-74% efficiency. That’s fairly standard. If you perform the same tests with other batteries rated at 20k mAh, you’ll generally see a similar usable capacity.

I was thinking of getting the Haribo one because I like to camp and climb mountains, but I found an old Ravpower battery bank (RP-P819) my Mom got all of us maybe a decade ago and it is 16,750 mAh on the label and weighs 308.5g. I'm not worried about ultralight enough to make that into e-waste and get the Haribo. I guess technology hasn't changed that much with regard to battery packs. The age of the plateau continues.
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-21 13:38:06+00:00
This is great and all, but for me it feels like much more of an achievement when I reach the summit with 30kg+ of mixed gear and child on my back - and there’s nothing quite like the feeling of putting it all down and feeling like you might just float away.

Then again I am the kind of masochist who used to run ultramarathons with a backpack full of rocks just for the jollies.