MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-09-09 10:46:04+00:00
It's not just the complex encodings though, there's also the variable instruction length, and the instruction semantics that mean you need microcode.

Obviously they've done an amazing job of working around it, but that adds a ton of complexity. At the very least it's going to mean you spend engineering resources on something that ARM & RISC-V don't even have to worry about.

This seems a little like a Java programmer saying "garbage collection is solved". Like, yeah you've made an amazingly complicated concurrent compacting garbage collector that is really fast and certainly fast enough almost all of the time. But it's still not as fast as not doing garbage collection. If you didn't have the "we really want people to use x86 because my job depends on it" factor then why would you use CISC?
by jlokier | 2025-09-09 10:46:15+00:00
You can actually use an alternative authenticator app for Microsoft logins. I use Aegis on my phone for it.

They don't make it clear in the messaging during the sign-up flow, which just says Microsoft Authenticator everywhere. But when you proceed through the steps to get a TOTP code for Microsoft Authenticator, there's a step with a link to something like "I want to use an another authenticor app", which presents a QR code for any generic TOTP app.
by seductivebarry | 2025-09-09 10:46:23+00:00
We add trackers, observers, and RUM scripts to understand how customers use our applications. The irony is that those same scripts often make the experience worse, especially on mid-range and low-end devices.

This essay looks at how monitoring tools can distort the very thing they measure, why performance costs are often hidden until they hit production, and how to rebalance the trade-off.
by impure-aqua | 2025-09-09 10:46:43+00:00
In the UK it has become very common to need to scan a QR code on your table to order at a restaurant, which takes you to a website.

Most certainly you can still order at the bar the old fashioned way, but since COVID, physical menus have been removed, so how is your group meant to decide what it wants to order before one of you goes up on its behalf? (You cannot all go up if you want to hold the table.)

I don't even particularly mind the experience of using the website; the interface enables the display of all ingredients & allows you to specify allergens they need to avoid. If the kitchen runs out of an item, they can mark it as unavailable in the webpage. Finally, fighting to order at a busy bar was never a fun experience to begin with (it is the norm in non-fine-dining experiences in the UK to not have your order taken at your table.) But, this does require you allow arbitrary internet access on your device, which complexifies the blocking situation.
by Uehreka | 2025-09-09 10:46:52+00:00
> It does nothing but derail the conversation into absurdism.

The conversation (about whether AI is “intelligent”) was already absurd, I’m just pointing it out ;)

The more important conversation is about whether AI is useful, dangerous, and/or worth it. If AI is competent enough at a task to replace a human for 1/10 the cost, it doesn’t really matter if it “has a mortal soul” or “responds to sensory stimuli” or “can modify its weights in real time”, we need to be talking about what that job loss means for society.

That’s my main frustration: that the “is it intelligent” debate devolves into pointless unsettleable philosophical questions and sucks up all the oxygen, and the actual things of consequence go undiscussed.
by lordhumphrey | 2025-09-09 10:46:56+00:00
Extremely interesting! I did ask myself if all those people would like having their photos online, what with the PRC across the pond. But perhaps I'm being "old-fashioned" there.

Very much appreciate the insider story. I've had a quick browse of your blog and will go back to it when I get a bit more time. Kudos to you for pursuing your interests boldly.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-09 10:47:00+00:00
I'm an unashamed, unabashed, could-not-care-less "casual" when it comes to games, which definitely shows up even more in multiplayer.

I played Minecraft with some online friends and I was off messing around, exploring, and doing nothing worthwhile, and got back to "base" where they had like.. monster farms and stuff?! Because they were trying to finish the newly released IDK.. expansion, ASAP?

It was a very clear "oh you and I are not here for the same reason" moment. :D
by menaerus | 2025-09-09 10:48:59+00:00
> But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance

It's literally one of the main Apple M chips advantage over Intel/AMD. At the time when M chip came out, it was the only chip that managed to consume ~100GB/s of MBW with just a single thread.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240902200818/https://www.anand...

> From a single core perspective, meaning from a single software thread, things are quite impressive for the chip, as it’s able to stress the memory fabric to up to 102GB/s. This is extremely impressive and outperforms any other design in the industry by multiple factors, we had already noted that the M1 chip was able to fully saturate its memory bandwidth with a single core and that the bottleneck had been on the DRAM itself.
by ninkendo | 2025-09-09 10:49:01+00:00
> > ...something is wrong with you.

> Are ad hominems back in vogue?

GP was simply mirroring the language of its parent post:

> Whenever someone just doesn't seem to care i'm concerned something is wrong with them.

Which IMO is indeed way out of line.

Speaking for myself, no, nothings “wrong” with me. I watch YouTube enough that I consider it a valuable service. So do what you may think is insane: I pay for it. And it gives me no ads.
by aurareturn | 2025-09-09 10:49:08+00:00
In the same video, they also measure perf/watt under heavy load, and it's close to the M1, but not the latest gen M4. I think that's pretty good considering it's a first gen product.

Which video and timestamp? Are you aware that LNL throttles heavily when on battery life?

On battery life, M1 is a whopping 1.5x faster in single thread.[0] That makes M4 2.47x faster when compared to LNL on battery.

So no, LNL is very far behind even M1. That's why there are no fanless LNL laptops.

[0]https://b2c-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Intel-...

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

[0]https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020
by a022311 | 2025-09-09 10:50:32+00:00
Despite being on Firefox and seeing the effects half-working (at least we get performance ;D), this looks like the best implementation I've seen up until now (for some reason I was researching it a lot the last few days).

What I loved most though is the website design and the carefully crafted interactive visualizations! For me, they're on the same level as those of Bartosz Ciechanowski and Josh Comeau. I really want to see the source code...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-09-09 10:51:00+00:00
I'm aware that England is not Scotland...

But I was in Scotland a few years back (from Colorado) and I was constantly surprised by the incredible amount of water that came out of each faucet whenever I turned it on. Like, I get that nobody wants to wash their hands in a fine mist, but there's a point beyond which more means nothing.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-09 10:51:25+00:00
I don't believe anything Microsoft's marketing department says either.

I've had similar issues with Amazon's equivalent too, where I tried to use EFS for a tiny website and I got something like 0.1 IOPS!

I do like the design of ZeroFS, and it irks me that competing solutions make local caching and buffering weirdly difficult. For example, Azure Premium SSD v2 disks no longer support local SSD caches! It's also annoyingly hard to combine the local cache disks you do get with remote disks using Windows Server, it insists on trying to detect the "role" of each disk instead of just letting admins specify that.

Using something like ZeroFS could be a nice trick for getting decent price/performance on public cloud platforms. My only concern is integrity and durability: what testing have you done to validate that it doesn't lose data even in corner-cases?
by jemmyw | 2025-09-09 10:51:35+00:00
That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors. They are motivated to do things to get more customers. Yes, there are many cases where supermarkets have been bad actors, but that's solvable with competition regulation. Water service is very different, and the current setup in the UK seems pretty insane - you can't have competition on who supplies water to your house. People aren't going to move location because of the quality of the water supply until things get very bad. They are motivated to spend as little as possible.

You can set up a system where companies are involved in the delivery of water in a way that let's them compete. For example, national entity owns the pipes and needs to provide a given service, companies compete for pipe maintenance, IT services, etc. It's hardly difficult to think up a system that is mostly free market and better in every way than what the people from the UK have to suffer through.
by LightBug1 | 2025-09-09 10:52:06+00:00
Because we were the fools who sold our water off to private companies.

And our beautiful private companies did what they do best. Rinsed every pound they could from those companies, and saddled the water companies with debt in order to rinse even more money.

And now they're going bankrupt ... or, at best, just staying afloat.

Needed capital investment? Long forgotten about ...

To do that they'll need to, you know, not raise debt to pay for the capital investment, there isn't any capacity for that. No, they'll need to double peoples water bills to pay for it.

And all of this over happened under the watchful eye of a "Regulator".

Has been one of the most absolutely disgraceful episodes in UK capitalism.

Thanks, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. You're a hero to some ... an absolute disaster to others.
by ktosobcy | 2025-09-09 10:52:24+00:00
Everything boils down to the thread model.

Not everyone is paranoid at extremum.

> PGP has no forward secrecy and OTR in XMPP lacks future secrecy, multi-device support etc.

Have you ever considered that perfect-forward-secrecy is not needed by 99% of the people? And PGP (OX) can be enough of encryption that gives you multi-device support.

Btw. OTR is long dead…
by tremon | 2025-09-09 10:52:38+00:00
They're saying that using public funds to build out private infrastructure is a huge transfer of wealth from the public to the rich, and if the subsequent profits of that investment disappear into the same private pockets (or even abroad), the ROI calculation becomes so unfavourable that there's no sound financial reason to invest. There's a huge difference between investing in government-owned infrastructure vs privately-owned.
by CoUHKT57BSe | 2025-09-09 10:52:50+00:00
I'm not entirely sure that the blog is totally correct in this part. I've always been fascinated by censorship (especially when it comes to movies/entertainment) and have seen/read a bunch of stuff about vhs in the 80's. Here in the UK we had a term, 'video nasties' for a bunch of horror films that were banned (Evil Dead being a very prominent example). Anyway, the general concensus I've always been under after watching/reading all the documentaries about that stuff is that the reason why the porn industry used vhs and ultimately won the format war was because the prudish japanese execs at the sony would not alow 'smut' on their precious new format and if the industry could not license the use of that format then they had to use vhs. The porn industry didn't choose vhs over betamax, vhs was the only option available to it.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-09-09 10:52:52+00:00
The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel

From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply.

I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click
by aurareturn | 2025-09-09 10:53:07+00:00
If you look the battery life benchmarks they did at around the 5:00 mark in the third video, you can see that it achieves similar battery life compared to the an M3 Macbook in typical day-to-day use. This reflects the experience most users will have with the device.

No. The typical day to day use of LNL is significantly slower than even M1. LNL throttles like crazy when on battery in order to achieve similar battery life.

https://b2c-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Intel-...
by TuxSH | 2025-09-09 10:53:28+00:00
> Also span had no bounds checking

While there was no reason not to have .at(), lack of bound checks by default isn't a bad thing, as inlined bound checks have the potential to highly pessimize code (esp. in loops); also standard library hardening is a thing.

IMO there's much more value to be had in migrating C code (and pre-C++11 code, too) to C++ (or Rust, depending on one's tastes); RAII - that is to say, the ability to automatically run destructors on scope exit - and in particular shared_ptr/unique_ptr/bespoke intrustive pointers drastically reduce the risks of use-after-free
by contrarian1234 | 2025-09-09 10:53:42+00:00
Given the toxic effect of social media in the region (Myanmar comes to mind), trying to force social media companies to have legal presence in the country seemed sensible.

When the choice is a stream of inane fake news and viral sensationalist ragebait, or only government approved news.. I'm not entirely sure which is better?

I'm guessing probably the latter. At least you know it's bullshit and your neighbors aren't trying to murder some minorities or shooting up ivermectin or whatever

Hope Nepal comes out of this alright and more people don't get hurt. A collapse of the government (even a bad one) usually leads to nothing good.
by michaelt | 2025-09-09 10:54:15+00:00
The thing is, if a water company is in good financial health, with low debt and lots of money to invest in infrastructure, it’s completely legal for private equity to buy the company, stop investing in infrastructure, take out loans until a third of customer bills go on interest payments, and take the loaned money as ‘management fees’.

Then dump untreated sewerage in rivers and demand more money from bill payers, because they “can’t afford” to maintain the infrastructure.

In most industries a company so poorly managed would lose customers, go bankrupt, and be replaced by a better run company. But water companies? They have a monopoly, and everyone needs water to live.
by dspillett | 2025-09-09 10:54:20+00:00
> How often do you see loading a CSS stylesheet fail to load?

I wouldn't say often, but it certianly happens often enough that I make sure my own designs work well enough (the content is visible at least, even if it is hellish ugly) if external resources like that fail to load.

The most frequent cause is a site that is overloaded due to a hug from HN or similar, the main request going through OK but some of the subsequent ones timing out. It is getting less common with servers that support HTTP2/HTTP3 so pipeline better, as the usual failure point in these cases is in opening a connection not while reading the response (or the server generating that response).

It can also happen if static content is served from a different place, and that is down but the host serving the main content is not.
by motorest | 2025-09-09 10:54:26+00:00
> The vast majority of C programmers will agree that they don't care for any of the new features,(...)

I think this belief is based on faulty assumptions, such as survivorship bias.

C++ became popular largely because it started off by extending C with the introduction of important features that the developer community wanted to use. The popularity of C++ over C attests how much developers wanted to add features to C.

C++ also started being used over C in domains where it was not an excellent fit, such as embedded programming, because the C community prefered to deal with C++'s higher cognitive load as an acceptable tradeoff to leverage important features missing from C.

The success of projects such as Rust and even Zig, Nim also comes at the expense of C's inability to improve the developer experience.

Not to mention the fact that some projects are still developed in C because of a mix of inertia and lack of framework support.

So to claim that the C programmers do not want change, first you need to ignore the vast majority that do want but already dropped C in favor of languages that weren't frozen in time.

It's also unbelievable to claim that a language that precedes the concept of developer experience represents the apex of language design. This belief lands somewhere between Stockholm syndrome and being mentally constrained to not look beyond a tool.
by 0xf3ffff | 2025-09-09 10:54:51+00:00
+1 for NextDNS. Last week I experimented with building a Brick[0]-like solution from my Android phone, by using an old badge I had lying around acting as an NFC trigger to launch a Tasker automation that enables/disables filtering profiles in NextDNS via REST API. It's working nicely, although it takes a while to effectively enable/disable filtering, I assume because of DNS caching on the phone. Also sometimes I actually need YouTube/Reddit/Instagram/etc. to look up something, so for now I settled on the slightly less nuclear option of using ScreenZen[1] to make my app opening a tad bit more mindful. I sometimes found myself going around the restricted app opening count/time limits by using my iPad, but overall my mindless screen time is decreasing, so I don't stress it too much. I don't have any issues with notifications really as I usually set them up to only receive what I deem important from the get go when I install a new app, and I also have Do Not Disturb and Routines enabled most of the time, plus a smartwatch to take a quick glimpse at messages if needed.

[0] https://getbrick.app/ [1] https://www.screenzen.co/
by pfdietz | 2025-09-09 10:54:51+00:00
> "Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks.

See the system described in the OP link at this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942

Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-09 10:55:21+00:00
People loved Tesla and Musk while he was pretending to do green and progressive politics. That was a huge boost to the brand, because the cars, the batteries, and Starlink all made sense as an ecosystem that came with attractive branding and customer identification.

Then he did a 180 and set it all on fire. It's now a top-down zeitgeist, not a bottom-up one, and the most understated thing anyone can say about that is that it's causing growing resentment.
by KronisLV | 2025-09-09 10:55:40+00:00
The GPT-OSS-120B release was pretty decent and you could run it on vLLM, Ollama and a bunch of other stuff on day one, despite MXFP4, are you not entertained? I mean, it's even close to GPT-5 mini in some benchmarks: https://llm-stats.com/

As for the Chinese models, yes, there are quite a few good ones.

For programming and development, my current daily driver is the Qwen3 Coder 480B model: https://qwen3lm.com/

I have it running on Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.ai/pricing

Personally I think Claude still has the best results, but Qwen3 is loosely in the same ballpark and Cerebras inference is measured in thousands of tokens per second, in addition to giving me 24M tokens per day for 50 bucks a month in total. That was enough to get me to switch over.

Aside from that the GLM-4.5 is pretty good: https://glm45.org/

And so is ERNIE 4.5: https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/posts/ernie4.5/

Either way, happy to see what the future holds for Mistral, it's cool to have EU options too! Either way, more competition prevents complacency and stagnation, and should be a good thing for everyone.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-09 10:55:53+00:00
> several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved

The corruption issue is still there, it's just much better disguised and kept away from the general public. Random individuals are not expected or generally safe to pay bribes to police in the UK; we imagine that's all there is to it. But at the higher levels all sorts of problems are not solved because there's a financial interest, or simply an establishment personal connection.

The Fujitsu/Post Office scandal was perhaps the worst recent example.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-09 10:56:52+00:00
Zen 5 also seems to have a bit of a underperforming memory subsystem, from what I can gather.

Hardware Unboxed just did an interesting video[1] comparing gaming performance of 7600X Zen 4 and 9700X Zen 5 processors, and also the 9800X3D for reference. In some games the 9700X Zen 5 had a decent lead over the Zen 4, but in others it had exactly the same performance. But the 9800X3D would then have a massive lead over the 9700X.

For example, in Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark, the 7600X had 182 FPS while the 9700X had 185 FPS, yet the 9800X3D had a massive 266 FPS.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emB-eyFwbJg
by throw310822 | 2025-09-09 10:56:56+00:00
> The Turing test was never meant to measure intelligence, let alone define it.

Original proposal:

"I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous [...] Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."

Clearly Turing is saying "we cannot precisely define what thinking means, so let's instead check if we can tell apart a human and a machine when they communicate freely through a terminal". It's not about fooling humans (what would be the point of it?) but about replacing the ambiguous question "can they think" with an operative definition that can be tested unambiguously. What Turing is saying is that a machine that passes the test is "as good as if it were thinking".

> Machines have arguably been able to do this for decades.

Absolutely not and it's surprisingly uninformed to claim so.
by diggan | 2025-09-09 10:57:33+00:00
Guess nowadays they recommend everyone to use Firefox or some other non-crippling browser then also?

I helped my wife with something the other day, noticed the ads everywhere, while I was sure I had installed uBlock for her in the past. Went to the Chrome's addons page, and Google apparently is automatically disabling uBlock and calling it unsupported, yet you can enable it until next time you restart Chrome. But seems Chrome is actively trying to get rid of adblockers lately.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-09 10:58:26+00:00
The issue is that most member states and the EU itself are not business-friendly.

For instance, incorporation online, for cheap, with no red tape, and in a matter of hours should be the norm everywhere. The UK has it.

Even at EU level the mindset is not pro-business and competition among member states is frowned upon (that's partly why they always want "harmonisation" so that there is no pressure to improve).