MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-09-26 01:47:22+00:00
A state machine is a very specific thing in Comp Sci, and I’m not clear you have a strong grasp on it.

You’re not a state machine. A state machine does one serial task, which is why the input+state can create a consistent and deterministic output+state. There are no secondary input streams or exogenous factors to consider for calculating a state machine transition.

Humans create output from many streams of input, arriving at across many different time horizons. Because of this, you cannot create a deterministic model of a human’s state transition for a given input - a requirement of state machines.

This isn’t philosophical or semantics. Mathematically, you’re not a state machine.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-09-26 01:48:39+00:00
As a US citizen, it'd be great to see the EU create its own digital economy, free itself of US hardware and software hegemony, and foster an environment for its denizens to out-create and revitalize the moribund state of the industry and the net. If there's a lack of resources, talent, or potential upsides standing in the way, I don't see it.

As for Apple, WTF gives a US company any right to demand anything from Europe? Chutzpa?
by b8 | 2025-09-26 01:48:46+00:00
geohot has/had a weird obsession with Elon for a few years now. He copied what Elon did a lot and is sort of like an Elon Stan. Which led to him agreeing and competing with Elon a lot. However, after geohot interned at Twitter/X I think he moved on from Elon and liking his views etc.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-26 01:49:21+00:00
I mean, they suggest creating a "more appropriate fit for purpose legislative instrument". Seems like you're kinda splitting hairs?

I support the EU's right to shape their digital environment. But if you're being threatened with fines on the order of $38 billion which are levied based on vague, ever-changing rules, then of course you will want that situation to go away while the law gets fixed.

On the other hand, cynically speaking, maybe "fighting Apple's influence" through arbitrary fines is actually the point.
by mmoustafa | 2025-09-26 01:50:00+00:00
I think maybe unclear in my comment, I’m referring to scaling within the cities they’re in. e.g. in SF it still takes 15m for a Waymo to arrive as opposed to Uber’s 3m and it costs more. I would’ve expected Uber drivers to be out of a job, which is not the case (I also drive occasionally)
by fy20 | 2025-09-26 01:50:12+00:00
AMD was a no-brainer in the mid 2000s if you were running Linux. It was typically cheaper than Intel, lower power consumption (= less heat, less fan noise), had 64bit so you could run more memory, and dual core support was more widespread. Linux was easily able to take advantage of all of these, were as for Windows it was trickier.
by iamcalledrob | 2025-09-26 01:51:09+00:00
This isn't a great test setup. It's testing RTT rather than the peak throughput of Redis.

I'd suggest using Redis pipelining -- or better: using the excellent rueidis redis client which performs auto-pipelining. Wouldn't be surprising to see a 10x performance boost.

https://github.com/redis/rueidis
by abstractspoon | 2025-09-26 01:52:36+00:00
As someone who went from structural engineering (in the UK) to software (in Australia) I can say that that path is trivial because it's possible to get a job in software without substantial qualifications or training. I was a self taught programmer, took a computing master's just to have a piece of paper and then started working. The reverse is much harder because you wouldn't get a job without a dedicated degree and the process of gaining your professional qualifications is very onerous. So unless you made the switch in your 20s you are going to be playing catch-up for a very long time. Just my 2c
by MaulingMonkey | 2025-09-26 01:52:42+00:00
> That's my point; I think after a while you instinctly repeat a command with sudo tacked on (see XKCD), and I wonder if I'm any safer from myself like that?

We agree that this is a dangerous / security-defeating habit to develop.

If someone realizes they're developing a pattern of such commands, it might be worth considering if there's an alternative. Some configuration or other suid binary which, being more specialized or tailor-purpouse, might be able to accomplish the same task with lower risk than a generalized sudo command.

This is often a difficult task.

Some orgs introduce additional hurdles to sudo/admin access (especially to e.g. production machines) in part to break such habits and encourage developing such alternatives.

> unsafe

There are usually safe alternatives.

If you use linters which require you to write safety documentation every time you break out an `unsafe { ... }` block, and require documentation of preconditions every time you write a new `unsafe fn`, and you have coworkers who will insist on a proper soliloquy of justification every time you touch either?

The difficult task won't be writing the safe alternative, it will be writing the unsafe one. And perhaps that difficulty will sometimes be justified, but it's not nearly so habit forming.
by arachnid92 | 2025-09-26 01:53:20+00:00
Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and I used Walmart+ for grocery deliveries basically every week for a year without any issues up until a couple of months ago. Suddenly, they started fucking up every single order, delivering things to the wrong address, missing items, or even claiming to have delivered an order that never arrived. After calling and complaining for the 10th time in a row, we gave up. We were so pissed off we even made a point of canceling the service, even though we get it for free as a credit card perk.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-26 01:53:26+00:00
I'm fairly sure there's some sort of dynamic load balancing at work. I read an anecdote from someone had a test where they asked it to draw a little image (something like an ascii cat, but probably not exactly that since it seems a bit basic), and if the result came back poor they didn't bother using it until a different time of day.

Of course it could all be placebo, but when you intuitively think about it, somewhere on the road the the hundreds of billions in datacenter capex, one would think that there will be periods where compute and demand are out of sync. It's also perfectly understandable why now would be a time to be seeing that.
by rasz | 2025-09-26 01:53:46+00:00
Threw few short python scripts at 2.5. Got stupid messages like "OMG Significant Flaw!!1 all of your functions have non-obvious dependency on this global variable declared in main, nothing will work if you dont execute main first!!1" I mean sure, technically correct, the best kind of LLM correct.

It kept finding those fatal flaws and starting to explain them to then slowly finish with "oh yes this works as intended".
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-26 01:54:08+00:00
Conversations aren’t being shut down.

Individual people are are trying to steer the conversations in one direction, and other individuals are exercising their right to not follow that direction.

This is akin to showing up on a house party, full of people in small groups discussing every topic under the sun. But you wanna talk about Israel. So you move from group to group and try to steer the conversation toward Israel. And each group in their own way rebuffs you. Some simply ignore you, some change the topic back, some tell you you’re being rude etc. etc.. You may not like this. This may not be the house party for you. That’s fine, but your logic suggests that you believe you have the right to force people to talk about the thing that you want to talk about, and you don’t.

Is it good or bad that people don’t want to talk about Israel? I don’t know. But just because you think it would be a good idea. It doesn’t mean you can force the rest of us to agree.
by acdha | 2025-09-26 01:55:10+00:00
Yes, my thought was that the lifecycle is different. The average JVM is probably running for days on average so a huge percentage of the total runtime is in code which had been aggressively optimized by the JIT whereas a lot of JavaScript isn’t used enough to reach that point so their respective developers are going to have different tuning goals. I’d expect Python to be closer to Java in that regard, with some harder to optimize features than Java but less than JavaScript owing to the richer language and better typing.
by dang | 2025-09-26 01:57:22+00:00
Can you please edit out personal swipes from your HN comments? You did it repeatedly, and the site guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's great, of course, to provide correct information. But please do it without putdowns; you don't need them, and they acidify discussion.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-26 01:57:51+00:00
I work at Factory, but this is just my own thinking, not the official company line.

It’s a system for interacting with LLMs in multiple ways to do all the neat agenty things you might want to do with them. Find it convenient to work in a web browser with code actions running in a cloud VM? Sure. Prefer to work with a TUI client in your terminal (or from within Emacs, as I was using it today)? You bet. As a headless command line tool that you can use to script up cron jobs or wire into a Slack bot or run in a GitHub action? You can do that. And in each of those situations, you can choose the model you want to use, without separately creating an account with each provider.

That’s the gist of it from my perspective as an engineer. There’s more to it than that, but these are the bits that I personally love.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-09-26 01:58:06+00:00
The EU should tell Goggle to go take a long walk off a short dock.

>The DMA’s biggest challenge remains: How do we boost innovation and deliver cutting-edge products to Europe while navigating complex and untested new rules?

Why should Europe want to cave to Goggle's desire to deepen its clawhold on Europe's market? To help it extend its monopoly deep into the rest of civilization?
by jborean93 | 2025-09-26 01:58:44+00:00
The subsystem in question would be the one to handle the logic for the syscall. So the POSIX subsystem would use the reparse data buffer as needed. It's just that the Win32 subsystem added its own symlink one in Vista/2008.

This is all a guess, the POSIX subsystems were a bit before my time and I've never actually used them. I just know how symlinks work on Windows/NTFS and when they were added.
by kjs3 | 2025-09-26 02:00:56+00:00
PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls

Itanic wasn't exactly HP-PA v.3, but it was a kissing cousin. Most of the HP shops I worked with believed the rhetoric it was going to be a straightforward if not completely painless upgrade from the PA-8x00 gear they were currently using.

Not so much.

The MIPS 10k line on the other hand...sigh...what might have been.

I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense.

And you were right.
by tolerance | 2025-09-26 02:01:14+00:00
I get the point that the author is trying to make here and to an extent I think it’s prudent. If only it wasn’t bogged down by allusions that are withering in cultural relevancy.

AI is not a faithful representation of human intelligence—or the human essence at all, for that matter—and prolonged dependence on its technologies will subdue human expression and the means in which we come to know about ourselves and life around us.

He is exercising his point through his prose. A cursory glance at his Wikipedia bio and this passage gives insight into the objective of this article:

> As Socrates sees things, the proper use of logos is to work toward, and to be transformed by, an increasingly clear grasp of the good. He regards this as an erotic undertaking. The more clearly we see the good, the more we long to bring ourselves into closer proximity to it. And the most promising path to the apprehension and internalization of the good is prolonged union and thoughtful conversation with a worthy lover.

The problem is that he’s attempting to display the art of literary lovemaking in the age of hook-up culture.

Hint: It may serve this crop of readers to start immediately from the section titled “Another Creation Story”.

Aside: I’d like to see a study that scores contemporary literacy rates using articles from the Hedgehog Review instead of Jane Austen.
by ycombigators | 2025-09-26 02:01:53+00:00
Yes.

milk (noun):

1. A whitish liquid containing proteins, fats, lactose, and various vitamins and minerals that is produced by the mammary glands of all mature female mammals after they have given birth and serves as nourishment for their young.

2. The milk of cows, goats, or other animals, used as food by humans.

3. Any of various potable liquids resembling milk, such as coconut milk or soymilk.
by acdha | 2025-09-26 02:01:56+00:00
I have friends who are gay, trans, non-Christian, or brown. Not all right-wingers say that they aren’t fully people but many do, and the more libertarian ones aren’t exactly rushing to shut that down. It is very hard to trust a group of people unwilling to recognize my neighbors as fully human.

In the federal space, we’ve seen purges of women and minorities, shutdowns of groups which work on things like civil rights or pollution in poor communities, widespread refusal to pay money as promised, and attempts to punish organizations for 1st amendment activities. There is zero expectation of good-faith from anyone who supports that.
by throw0101d | 2025-09-26 02:02:06+00:00
> Yeah, but at some point you have to realize you can't afford a car any more and you should sell it. You can get another one when you are on top of the debt.

The Pentagon spends in two weeks what USAID (or NASA) spent in a year. The proverbial oil change is not what is causing the financial issue in the analogical car example: in fact, a bit of preventative spending (oil change: USAID social programs) may be cheaper because it reduces the chances of a large expense (engine rebuild: major war/conflict/attack).

> Staff at the State Department’s Office of Countering Violent Extremism and Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which led U.S. anti-violent extremism efforts, were laid off, the units shuttered, on July 11, 2025.

> This dismantling of the country’s terrorism and extremism prevention programs began in February 2025. That’s when staff of USAID’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization were put on leave.

* https://theconversation.com/trump-administration-cuts-to-ter...

Do you want to spend money on having to deal with terrorist cell attacks, or do you want to potentially not have the cells form in the first place?

* https://www.polisci.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Foreign%20A...

And if there is concern about deficits/debt, perhaps don't cut revenues (taxes), or lay off IRS workers that can bring in more revenue.
by CSSer | 2025-09-26 02:02:24+00:00
Moreover some images SHOULD NOT have alt text or at least shouldn't have their associated alt text displayed in all contexts. I put this in all caps because this is a pervasive and common myth. Granted, all images on Bluesky probably should have alt text because ostensibly an image as part of a post is probably content. However, in cases where an image is purely decorative and not meaningfully relevant to the page, a blind or low-vision person doesn't need to, nor do they want to, hear your weird interpretation of some abstract art. If you disagree, take it up with W3C. This isn't just my opinion.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/
by mindslight | 2025-09-26 02:02:36+00:00
Yes, of course. I agree 100% that the designed-to-be-ewaste market is terrible. If I had my way, any manufacturer-privileging signing scheme would be illegal. So would the anticompetitive bundling of software with hardware devices, for that matter.

My point was that the threat of prohibiting libre Linux isn't from all manufacturers deciding to lock out installing Linux on their devices. But rather from remote attestation making it so that Google (et al) are able to force you to run a locked down operating system as a technically-enforced condition of interacting with their servers.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-26 02:02:49+00:00
It's like a bit from The Smoke Ring (or Integral Trees) by Larry Niven, where a very weird planetary configuration made a human-habitable ecosystem out of an orbiting ring of gas. [0]

The locals refer to "East" as in the direction of orbit (prograde), "In" as towards the central star, and teach their children: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, North and South take you back."

[0] https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/physics/gravity/physics-...
by krapp | 2025-09-26 02:02:51+00:00
>Yes but a flat-earther is a useful idiot for precisely zero dangerous social movements.

Incorrect. As with most if not all conspiracy theories, flat-earthism incorporates anger at "the establishment" because "the establishment" is hiding the truth. And this is the hook. If you can be convinced that a secret cabal is manipulating all science, controlling all governments, censoring all media and filtering all information in order to keep the basic nature of reality hidden from humanity - which flat earthers do believe - then you're susceptible to someone suggesting who that cabal might be. You know who.
by al_be_back | 2025-09-26 02:03:14+00:00
Finally, a complete modular portable desktop, made in Europe, for about $350 usd (keyboard, mouse, camera, mic, display, power supply).

I'm impressed. Although, a little late in the race to compete with US or Chinese PC makers. However, they've a good chance to influence drone and robotic computing, same goes for Arduino.
by bdhcuidbebe | 2025-09-26 02:03:18+00:00
> The second problem is solved by services like Transifex.

Just wanted to mention another of those services, that I discovered by contributing translation work for the jellyfin project:

https://weblate.org/

The jellyfin status can be seen here:

https://translate.jellyfin.org/projects/jellyfin/
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-26 02:04:58+00:00
Thanks, this was going to be essentially my response. I'm glad you beat me to it so I didn't have to look up the dates.

But for the interested, the Von Neumann became one of the lead developers on the ENIAC. The Von Neumann architecture is based on a writeup he did of the EDVAC. Von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam worked out monte carlo simulations for the Manhattan project.

The first programmable electronic computer was developed at the same time as randomized physics simulations and with the same people playing leading roles.
by arp242 | 2025-09-26 02:04:59+00:00
When I last benchmarked Redis vs. PostgreSQL for a simple k/v cache it was about ~1ms for PostgreSQL to fetch a key, and ~0.5ms for Redis with a similar setup as in this post (although I used "value bytea" instead of "value string" – I don't know if it matters, probably not; 1ms was fast enough that I didn't care to test).

I didn't measure setting keys or req/sec because for my use case keys were updated infrequently.

I generally find ms to be a more useful metric than reqs/sec or latency at full load, as this is not a typical load. Or at least wasn't for my use case.

Of course all depends on your use case etc. etc. In some cases throughput does matter. I would encourage everyone to run their own benchmarks suited to their own use case to be sure – should be quick and easy.

As I rule I recommend starting with PostgreSQL and using something else only if you're heavily using the cache or you run in to problems. Redis isn't too hard to run, but still just one less service to worry about. Or alternatively, just use a in-memory DB. Not always appropriate of course, but sometimes it is.
by bonyt | 2025-09-26 02:05:15+00:00
The PDF format supports this, at least Adobe Reader can validate a signed PDF if it's signed in a certain way[1]. I know DocuSign does this - and Reader even has a little button to view the signed version (embedded in the PDF, I think)[2]. [1]: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/e-sign-documents/man... [2]: Example in Adobe Reader: https://i.moveything.com/1cf1e4ea5619 (redacted partly by me)
by hattmall | 2025-09-26 02:05:46+00:00
What is there to indicate "we" or anyone is serious about reducing healthcare costs? The only thing that will reduce costs is competitive pressure. The last major healthcare reform in the US was incredibly anti-competitive and designed with a goal of significantly raising costs but transferring those costs to the government. How could healthcare costs ever go down when the ONLY way for insurers to increase profits is for costs to go up as their profit is capped at a percentage of expenses.
by ls612 | 2025-09-26 02:05:58+00:00
I use Gemini almost exclusively for coding and 2.5 Pro is extremely good at it. It has revised hundreds of lines of academic code for me at a time and the results run correctly with only minor revision.

I will also say whatever they use for the AI search summary is good enough for me like 50% of the time I google something, but those are generally the simpler 50% of queries.
by tw04 | 2025-09-26 02:06:22+00:00
> This is like saying that self-driving cars won't ever become a thing because someone behind the wheel needs to be to blame.

Which is literally the case so far. No manufacturer has shown any willingness to take on the liability of self driving at any scale to date. Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road with the finances and lawyers of Google backing it.

Let me know when the bean counters sign off on fleets in the millions of vehicles.
by epistasis | 2025-09-26 02:06:48+00:00
I don't know if it's the same thing, but it feels like an analogy:

Protein structure prediction is now considered to be "solved," but the way it was solved was not through physics applied to what is clearly a physics problem. Instead it was solved with lots of data, with protein language modeling, and with deep nets applied to contact maps (which are an old tool in the space), and some refinement at the end.

The end result is correct not because physics simulations are capable of doing the same thing and we could check Alphafold against it, but because we have thousands of solved crystal structures from decades of grueling lab work and electron density map reconstruction from thousands of people.

We still need that crystal structure to be sure of anything, but we can get really good first guesses with AlphaFold and the models that followed, and it has opened new avenues of research because a very very expensive certainty now has very very cheap mostly-right guesses.

When it comes to very complicated things, physics tends to fall down and we need to try non-physics modeling, and/or come up with non-physics abstraction.
by array_key_first | 2025-09-26 02:06:52+00:00
> Not to mention that most people consuming CSAM are not technically savvy. It is known that such material goes through mainstream messengers.

The reason is because it works. They're not stupid - they can use signal.

The reality is that the privacy options not only exist, they're really good - often better and easier to use than the mainstream stuff.

They will just pivot to other tools.
by gyomu | 2025-09-26 02:08:02+00:00
If we’re talking about a reset, then the EU should ban Google/Apple/Amazon/Huawei/Xiaomi/Meta/etc products and services in their entirety, and finance/incentivize local companies to provide replacements.

As a EU citizen I don’t see why those companies should have the disproportionate amount of control and oversight in our daily lives they have today while our bureaucracies are stuck in a constant game of cat and mouse against them, as they have proven countless times they see EU regulation as hurdles to be worked around rather than fundamental rules to play by.
by graycat | 2025-09-26 02:08:21+00:00
Some good Bach:

Rostropovich

Prelude from Bach Cello Suite No.1 BWV 1007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml14kGHCBg0

Also Maurice Gendron as at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDPdCJ7nVss&list=PLuc6tv6pjL...

This piece can also do well on violin -- just transpose up an octave and a fifth. I did that on violin, and it was easy, but making really good music out of it, as Rostropovich, is different.

For a violin performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3a9F-LEdiA