MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-09-08 08:59:03+00:00
One of the major contributors to Soundblaster's decline was DirectX.

Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound. There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.

With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.

Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.

Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
by hebejebelus | 2025-09-08 08:59:18+00:00
Ha, I'm not into programming for the sake of it. I vibe-code all the time now and don't think I've written a line of code by hand in over a year. I'm really not trying to criticise this library itself and I agree that in many ways it's quite good.

What I think I'm trying to say is that this specific kind of thing now takes everyone the same amount of time to create. It's "cheapened" this specific type of code. I'm not trying to say this particular library is bad or anything, just that converting some small library from one language to another no longer really holds much value, since essentially everyone can do exactly the same thing exactly the same way now, for the same time cost.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-08 08:59:37+00:00
> You can't tune an instrument to 1/4 of a hz

I mean you can, but for stringed instruments keeping it to an absolute is hard. its the relative that you care about, at least for an instrument with a static fret. pretty much everything other non-keyboard instrument is down to you to adjust on the fly.

when you are within 1hz you get a beat at roughly 1hz, which is normally fairly easy to pickup.

Its part of the reason why brass instruments are never "wide" in stereo on recordings, because they tend to phase like a mother fucker. (there are ways around it)
by jlei523 | 2025-09-08 09:00:25+00:00
Also I wanted to add that LLMs (at least free ones) are pretty dumb sometimes and do not notice obvious thing. For example, when writing tests they generate lot of duplicated code and do not move it into a helper function, or do not combine tests using parametrization. I have to do it manually every time.

Do you prompt it to reduce duplicated code?
by Terr_ | 2025-09-08 09:01:58+00:00
> incapable of synthesising new ideas

I'd argue they don't synthesize any ideas, even old ones. They skip that classic step to emit text, and the human reading that text generates their own idea and (unconsciously, incorrectly) assumes there must've an original idea that caused the text on the other side.

So perhaps it's more like: "LLMs aren't great at indirectly triggering humans into imagining useful novel ideas." (Especially when the user is trying to avoid having to think.)

Yeah, I know, it sounds like quibbling, but I believe it's necessary. This whole subject is an epistemic and anthropomorphic minefield. A lot of our habitual language connotations and metaphors can mislead.
by na4ma4 | 2025-09-08 09:01:59+00:00
The article is interesting, but what does the title have to do with it ?

> What we really needed to make distributed task queueing robust are durable queues ...

> Durable queues were rare when I was at Reddit, but they’re more and more popular now.

It sounds like the answer was known at the time but there wasn't the resources to solve it ?
by blkhawk | 2025-09-08 09:02:17+00:00
because the cards already sell at very very good prices with 16GB and optimizations in generative AI is bringing down memory requirements. Optimizing profits means yyou sell with the least amount of VRAM possible not only to save the direct cost of the RAM but also to guard future profit and your other market segments. the cost of the ram itself is almost nothing compared to that. any intel competitor can more easily release products with more than 16GB and smoke them. Intel tries for a market segment that was only served by gaming cards twice as expensive up until now. this frees those up to be finally sold at MSRP.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-08 09:02:54+00:00
> but I think it would make a lot of sense that once the job was seen as lucrative and similar in qualities (like the skill needed) to other jobs culturally associated with men, that the culture similarly rebranded computers as being for boys.

This sounds very revisionist.

When I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, absolutely no one spoke of "working with computers" as a glamorous career path or associated it with well paid jobs. Much to the opposite, being interested in computers made you into a sort of social pariah in school. Girls wouldn't touch computers much for that reason - hell, my group of friends would fall over one another to accommodate any girl that showed even a remote interest in anything nerdy, not that those were in plentiful supply. It was quite pathetic really.

It was much later that "working with computers" was associated with being well off in terms of money, more or less at the same time when there was an explosion of active efforts to get more women into coding.

And honestly, especially as a father of a little girl, I welcome the effort to make it more egalitarian and all. But let's not pretend that 30 years ago women were being held back from computers by a shadowy conspiracy to keep them from cushy jobs. They just didn't enjoy the thing.
by imiric | 2025-09-08 09:05:14+00:00
Hhmm I did underclock the RAM to 4800 MHz, since running it at the stock 6400 MHz would overheat the system (it's a mini PC) and cause artifacting. And, practically, I don't need higher frequencies, since I'm using the machine as an HTPC and for casual desktop use. In fact, from what I've read, high frequencies can introduce stability issues on these APUs, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

But I'll play around with this and the timings, and check if there's a BIOS update that addresses this. Though I still think that AMD's drivers and firmware should be robust enough to support any RAM configuration (within reason), so it would be a problem for them to resolve regardless.

Thanks for the suggestion!
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-08 09:05:36+00:00
Yeah, no. Every MVP I've ever seen has been riddled with problems. Hell, even publicly launched projects are a mess most of the times. How many social networks we've had in the past 5 years that were pwned right after launch? I remember at least 4 or 5 very public failures (firebase tokens, client-side apis and so on). Those are just the most public ones.

Everyone wants to pretend that the software used to be better, but the reality is that MVPs and sometimes even public launches were always a house of cards.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-08 09:05:49+00:00
The amount of cynicism motivated by amateur hatred is way way less than the amount of optimism generated by professional greed and profit motive.

Imagine someone in 2006: "All these cynics and doomsayers about the US housing market are just envious and bitter that they didn't get in on the ground floor with their own investments."

Perhaps some were, but if we're going to start discounting opinions based on ulterior motives, there's a much bigger elephant in the room.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-09-08 09:06:12+00:00
you've hit the nail on the head here. AI rollout has this hilarious consequence where "lower" departments have for a long time insultated the c-suite against their worst excesses and worst mistakes. Now that barrier is slowly crumbling due to AI-first, giving the c-suite an incredibly rare opportunity to discover how bad some of its ideas are in practice and there's less opportunity to blame those outcomes on others.
by guenthert | 2025-09-08 09:06:18+00:00
Not only a small screen by modern standards, but the hardware lacked the needed resolution. The marketing brochure claims a 10x10 dot matrix. That will be for the 80 column mode. That works out to respectable 800 pixel horizontally, barely sufficient 6x10 pixel in 132 column mode. There was even a double-high, double-width mode for easier reading ;-)

Interesting here perhaps is that even back then it was recognized, that for different situations, different display modes were of advantage.
Ask HN: What are your interests outside tech? (Developer marketing research)
by sneurgaonkar | 2025-09-08 09:06:55+00:00
I'm working on a marketing strategy for a developer-focused product and want to understand the community beyond the usual stereotypes. Rather than relying on personas from surveys or AI, I'd love to hear directly from HN folks about your actual interests and preferences.

A few things I'm curious about:

* How do you spend your free time? Any hobbies, sports, or creative pursuits? * What content do you consume? (podcasts, YouTube channels, books, shows) * Do you have side projects outside of work? What motivates those? * How do you prefer to learn about new tools/products relevant to your work? * What marketing approaches actually resonate with you vs. what feels tone-deaf?

I realize the HN community is incredibly diverse, so I'm not looking for a single "developer type" but rather hoping to understand the breadth of interests and personalities.

If you're willing to share, what would you want companies targeting developers to know about effectively reaching people like you?

Thanks for any insights you're willing to share!
by enronmusk | 2025-09-08 09:06:57+00:00
Yes, I have read the article and I agree Intel should be shamed (and even sued) for inaccurate statements. But it doesn't change the fact it has never been a good idea to run desktop processors at their throttling temperature -- it's not good for performance, it's not good for longevity and stability, and it's also terrible for efficiency (performance per watt).

Anyway, OP's cooler should be able to cool down 250W CPUs below 100C. He must have done something wrong for this to not happen. That's my point -- the motherboard likely overclocked the CPU and he failed to properly cool it down or set a power limit (PL1/PL2). He could have easily avoided all this trouble.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-08 09:07:20+00:00
But (at least for a long time), "run the linter automatically" wasn't available, not until Go's gofmt put the idea into people's heads that they could leave it to a tool. I think there were some formatting tools before then, but e.g. jslint/eslint had a lot of gaps which I unfortunately ended up pointing out in code reviews a lot. Which was nitpicking / bikeshedding, in hindsight.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-08 09:07:44+00:00
> What are some solutions to the complicated problems?

You want a book sized comment? And it would be a different book for every country on the planet. And it wouldn't matter because people will vote based on their fears anyway.

> I don't mean to put words in your mouth but what you are describing is an anti-Fascist worldview.

Oh, Golly, that is just terrible.

> To be clear, that means you believe Hitler-esque figures and fascism leading to mass destruction are recurring patterns to be avoided.

No shit.

> So would being anti-Fascist require a commitment to more immigration?

I can't quite follow your logic here.

> Would you say criticism of immigration should be suppressed because it's being used by demagogues to gain power?

I can't follow your logic here either.

See, that's the problem. You ask for what my solutions would be to complicated problems and then you ask questions on the order of 'when did you stop beating your wife' expecting a simple and short answer to a problem that requires much thought and reflection on root causes and what can be done about them.

With that mindset I'd say you are no longer arguing in good faith anymore but just looking for ways to win silly points. If you really want to have a discussion about what could be done about this it would require you first to get off that horse that you are on that assumes that progress can be made by answering dumb questions like those.

Let's start with some more intelligent questions:

- What is the root cause of emigration for the people that choose to emigrate?

- Are those root causes amendable to change or are they givens?

- If they are amendable to change what is the timescale on which that change would need to take place for it to have an effect on emigration?

- What other parties are required to effect this change, is it just two countries or is it more of them?

- What budgets would be required to effect these changes?

- Is there political and societal buy in in the countries that will end up paying for that?

And so on. And each of those is a project of multiple months and can most likely only be properly researched in any two countries so that makes this a vastly complicated project requiring significant resources. Unfortunately the organizations that could - and to some degree have done - do this kind of work have been pretty much dismantled in the USA.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-08 09:09:01+00:00
> Nor was what we were going for

And where did you intend to go? In front of "State cuts the services" you went "Oh I get advantages staying without them". Yes but see, there are 30 million people there that may have had different choice, and some of them with rational choice (and fully evidently so: the World Video Archive is in the ban), and those 30Mln are within other billions that may be in a similar situation. (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".

> [Missing out on social media] is quite literally the bare fact itself

Very certainly not: Nepal has blocked YouTube... Being forbidden access the worldwide video library cannot be reduced to "cannot be able to post comments" (that many serious YT users will not do, not even having an account, by the way).

> a characterization

Gross logical fault: there is a coercion in there, and reframing it as protection does not remove the presence of the coercion, which remains a debatable problem. And by going towards "protection" you are confirming my point («not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war»), which is again an extremely serious problem.

> I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses

And a number will reveal that the situation can be construed as serious. Were you to defend the idea that it were not serious, relativism will not help the substantial solidity of the argument.

> Did I ever question its seriousness?

Well, look, if the article is "they blocked the services", and you go you "feel better after doing without them", that heavily suggests you downplaying the seriousness!

Of course we could also have discussions about "could we revaluate the optimal level of those services in life balance", but maybe really not in front of "the State has decided for you"!

> there's lots of downsides to these platforms

Yes. That is also extensively discussed. But it is not in context: here, the matter is something decided for somebody else, and that there are a number of bigger problems (e.g. organized misinformation) that overseeing entities (States) will mismanage in their inability to counter them.

> Wake-up calls

You will probably be reassured that many of us are very much aware that having released transnational masses of substantial infants into echo chambers - to mention one of the foremost consequences - is a hell of a problem.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-09-08 09:09:15+00:00
> When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense

It does on the surface, but what doesn't make sense is to register with a credit card and not read the terms very carefully: both for the cloud service and for the bank service.

In this aspect cash is so much better because you have only one contract to worry about...
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-08 09:09:59+00:00
I believe some formatters have an option where you can specify a "do not reformat" block (or override formatting settings) via specific comments. As an exception, I'm okay with that. Most code (but I'm thinking business applications, not kernel drivers) benefits from default code formatting rules though.

And sometimes, if the code doesn't look good after automatic formatting, the code itself needs to be fixed. I'm specifically thinking about e.g. long or nested ternary statements; as soon as the auto formatter spreads it over multiple lines, you should probably refactor it.
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-08 09:10:38+00:00
> cultural norms are meant to be broken

Err... What?

Most cultural norms are excellent. Things such as being culturally unacceptable to have revenge killings, cultural norms about politeness, etc and so forth.

By all means, break negative cultural norms that hold society back. But it's also important to recognize that cultural norms are important to actually have a functioning society.
by InMice | 2025-09-08 09:10:46+00:00
Have you tried using powerprofilesctl to change the power profile to 'performance' instead of 'balanced' or 'power saver'? I think this would prevent the lowest idle states at least. Just a guesss, never had this problem myself.

My modern CPU problems are DDR5 and the pre-boot timing thing never completing. So a build of a 9700x that I did that WAS supposed to be located remotely from me has to sit in my office and have its hand held thru every reboot cuz you never know quite know when its doing to decide it needs to retime and randomly never come back. Requires pulling the plug from the back and waiting a few minutes then powering back, then waiting 30 minutes for 64gb of ddr5 to do its timing thing.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-09-08 09:11:40+00:00
> I’ve found ChatGPT and other LLMS can struggle to evaluate evidence - to understand the biases behind sources - ie taking data from a sketchy think tank as gospel.

This is what I keep finding, it mostly repeats surface level "common knowledge." It usually take a few back and forths to get to whether or not something is actually true - asking for the numbers, asking for the sources, asking for the excerpt from the sources where they actually provide that information, verifying to make sure it's not hallucinating, etc. A lot of the time, it turns out its initial response was completely wrong.

I imagine most people just take the initial (often wrong) response at face value, though, especially since it tends to repeat what most people already believe.
by kragen | 2025-09-08 09:12:05+00:00
Both the RISC-V and Thumb code here are no longer recursive fib; GCC has quite correctly transformed one of the recursions into a normal nonrecursive loop by exploiting the commutative and associative properties of integer addition. I infer that perhaps the same thing may be true of the MSP430 code from the presence of only a single call instruction, but I don't see the loop; perhaps the br to 0 will be relinked to go to .L3 before execution?

I haven't seen MSP430 code before, due to my somewhat embarrassing and unfair distaste for TI as a company, and I agree that it is a very nice encoding indeed!

If you insist that the code contain at least two recursive calls, two subtractions, an addition, and a conditional for the base case, even Thumb2 and RVC no longer look so competitive with stack machines. If not, there is no particular reason to leave one of the recursions in; you may as well optimize that out too, thus reducing an exponential-time algorithm to a linear-time one (or linear to logarithmic, if the parameter is the number of bits of input.) This also makes it smaller, something like (untested):

mov r1, #1 mov r2, #1 1: subs r0, #1 itt lo movlo r0, r1 bxlo lr mov r3, r2 adds r2, r1 mov r1, r3 b 1b

I think that's maybe 22 bytes?

But I don't think that tells us much about the relative densities of stack code, register code, accumulator code, and belt code, because it's a very different mix of operations.
by southp | 2025-09-08 09:12:16+00:00
I'm new in this area and I've learned a lot from the replies. Thanks for sharing, folks :) Just to clarify, when I said "to turn LLMs into chips", I didn't mean to run it on CPU/GPU/TPU or any general purpose computing units, but to hardwire the entire LLM as a chip. Rethinking about it, the answer is likely yes since it's serializable. However, given how fast the models are evolving, the business value might be quite dim at the moment.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-08 09:12:50+00:00
Bad design if that isn't in place for a new free-tier experiment.

This is the problem right here. I moved from AWS and specifically Beanstalk because I don't want to be some "certified AWS goblin". I just wanted to host something sensibly.

Other hosting companies don't have this problem and while I cannot complain about AWS as a service, this can be improved if there would be the will to do so. I believe there are other incentives at work here and that isn't a service to the customer.
by kristopolous | 2025-09-08 09:13:31+00:00
for ai workloads? You're wrong. I use mine as a server, just ssh into it. I don't even have a keyboard or display hooked up to it.

You can get 96gb of vram and about 40-70% the speed of a 4090 for $4000.

Especially when you are running a large number of applications you want to talk to each other it makes sense ... the only way to do it on a 4090 is to hit disk, shut the application down, start up the other applciation, read from disk ... it's slowwww... the other option is a multi-gpu system but then it gets into real money.

trust me, it's a gamechanger. I just have it sitting in a closet. Use it all the time.

The other nice thing is unlike with any Nvidia product, you can walk into an apple store, pay the retail price and get it right away. No scalpers, no hunting.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-08 09:13:32+00:00
I see what you’re saying, but I also haven’t ever used anything but the first two formats, and my goal was always readability not emphasis.

Storing the AST instead of the text is a lossy encoding, but would we lose something more valuable than what we gain? If your example is the best thing we’d lose - i’d say it’s still net a massive win.

and there are ways to emphasize different parts, that would survive the roundtrip to AST. E.g. one way to emphasize depth:

setValue([bar, glob], 1) setValue([bar, plu, a1], 21)

or to emphasize the data:

configure(bar, 1, 21, fol)

Or heck you could allow style overides if you really wanted to preserve this kind of styling:

// $formatblk: tabular_keypaths, aligned_assignments bar .glob = 1 bar .plu .a1 = 21 // $formatblk-end
by mitch_said | 2025-09-08 09:13:33+00:00
Classic Brooks piece, always worth a re-read. Still informs how our team makes decisions today.

Though I recommend a full read, for those who want a gloss, I made a mind map that identifies the major questions posed by the essay, with summary answers and supporting rationale: https://app.gwriter.io/#/mindmap/view/b52b7d35-4d8d-4164-ba5...
by keiferski | 2025-09-08 09:15:02+00:00
"Original" depends on what time period you're referring to, because the people before the Slavs weren't there for that long themselves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_migrations

But in reference to the Slavic migrations, I think they likely headed west and south:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period