MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kg | 2025-09-27 22:14:09+00:00
I would be curious to see whether it's a common opinion that DirectX was a bad thing for the games industry. It was preceded by a patchwork of messy graphics/audio/input APIs, many of them proprietary, and when it started to gain prominence, Linux gaming was mostly a mirage.

A lot of people still choose to build games on Direct3D 11 or even 9 for convenience, and now thanks to Proton games built that way run fine on Linux and Steam Deck. Plus technologies like shadercross and mojoshader mean that those HLSL shaders are fairly portable, though that comes at the cost of a pile of weird hacks.

One good thing is that one of the console vendors now supports Vulkan, so building your game around Vulkan gives you a head start on console and means your game will run on Windows, Linux and Mac (though the last one requires some effort via something like MoltenVK) - but this is a relatively new thing. It's great to see either way, since in the past the consoles all used bespoke graphics APIs (except XBox, which used customized DirectX).

An OpenGL-based renderer would have historically been even more of an albatross when porting to consoles than DX, since (aside from some short-lived, semi-broken support on PS3) native high-performance OpenGL has never been a feature on anything other than Linux and Mac. In comparison DirectX has been native on XBox since the beginning, and that was a boon in the XBox 360 era when it was the dominant console.

IMO historically picking a graphics API has always been about tradeoffs, and realities favored DirectX until at least the end of the XBox 360 era, if not longer than that.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-09-27 22:16:28+00:00
It seems to me that the activity will just be continued. For some reason Finland didn't want to runt it anymore and Norway took over.

"""The Finnish Meteorological Institute is to discontinue its air monitoring in Svalbard, and on October 1st, the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) will take over ownership of its air sampling equipment."""
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-27 22:16:35+00:00
I dunno what the point is. This user is weirdly noisy if you look at the history, directly addressing the moderators at times, etc.

Back when I was spamming a site (had no email check so it was easy) to drive traffic for my blog I had a few hundred sock puppet accounts which were all really bland and tried not to stick out and made sure to vote for many other peoole’s blogs randomly so it wouldn’t be obvious that they were part of something. I never got caught and it ended when I lost the database of accounts from a hard drive crash.

This guy is getting lots of posts [dead] and still barreling on. If it was some kind of sophisticated influence operation I’d expect them to be more saavy (maybe even keep backups!)
by decafninja | 2025-09-27 22:17:30+00:00
In my 30s, church became my only source of friends and acquaintances. However even then, I only made two “true” friends I still meet up with outside of church. Three, if I count my wife who I consider my best friend :)

The rest seemed like friends while we attended the same church, but quickly vanished as soon as we left (the particular church, not the faith). Maybe more of those relationships could have been nurtured to last if given more effort, but as both my wife and I are introverts, it wasn’t easy.

I’m in my early 40s now. We still attend church, but we find the whole social aspect of it draining. We attend worship…then go home.
by fruitworks | 2025-09-27 22:18:56+00:00
the most recent attempt with linux is pretty good, but it was held back by the slow hardware and driver support.

If the pinephone had enough power to record a video, and maybe better waydroid integration I would use it. I like the convenience of using the same apps as on my laptop, and being able to develop on the same platform that I am targeting. That is a unique selling point.

Apple has the funding to do this, but they choose not to. It would damage their whole market segmentation scheme. It is a penetration strategy
by zamadatix | 2025-09-27 22:20:13+00:00
Android and ChromeOS are merging for these kinds of experiences https://chromeunboxed.com/its-official-google-says-the-andro... and both have already opened up to running anything you'd like in Linux on the side. That said, Android wasn't exactly my first pick of flexibility either.

> Buy a laptop you’ll be ok.

This kind of comment is uncalled for. Anyways, as mentioned, I do the screenshare to a MacBook today. The advantage of having both is clearly for Apple though, not me.
by closeparen | 2025-09-27 22:20:15+00:00
Java has exceptions and can mock at runtime using reflection. Go is much worse. If you have glue code that calls 5 methods in sequence, you need to set up build rules to generate 5 mocks for the corresponding interfaces. And then if you’re like me, re-sync the editor so it picks up the generated symbols. Then you need to write 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 mock expectations for the 5 test cases to reach each error return branch. Oh and the mock expectation arguments are immune to automated refactoring because they’re all interface{}. So if you want to change the arguments of a method that’s implicated in a lot of test cases, lol good luck.

People get over this and even grow to appreciate it from the perspective of the production code, but from the unit testing side it’s been an unrelenting nightmare from the time I started using the language professionally ~10 years ago until we got Copilot.

It’s total slop. Perfect for the slop generating machine.
by nickysielicki | 2025-09-27 22:20:55+00:00
The modern ML cards are much more raw than people realize. This isn’t a highly mature ecosystem with stable software, there are horrible bugs. It’s gotten better, but there are still big problems, and the biggest problem is that so many people are too stupid to use new releases with the fixes. They stick to the versions they already have because of nothing other than superstition.

Go look at the llama 3 whitepaper and look at how frequently their training jobs died and needed to be restarted. Quoting:

> During a 54-day snapshot period of pre-training, we experienced a total of 466 job interruptions. Of these, 47 were planned interruptions due to automated maintenance operations such as firmware upgrades or operator-initiated operations like configuration or dataset updates. The remaining 419 were unexpected interruptions, which are classified in Table 5. Approximately 78% of the unexpected interruptions are attributed to confirmed hardware issues, such as GPU or host component failures, or suspected hardware-related issues like silent data corruption and unplanned individual host maintenance events.

[edit: to be clear, this is not meant to be a dig on the meta training team. They probably know what they’re doing. Rather, it’s meant to give an idea of how immature the nvidia ecosystem was when they trained llama 3 in early 2024. This is the kind of failure rates you can expect if you opt into using the same outdated software they were forced to use at the time.]

The firmware and driver quality is not what people think it is. There’s also a lot of low-level software like NCCL and the toolkit that exacerbates issues in specific drivers and firmware versions. Grep for “workaround” in the NCCL source code and you’ll see some of them. It’s impossible to validate and test all permutations. It’s also worth mentioning that the drivers interact with a lot of other kernel subsystems. I’d point to HMM, the heterogeneous memory manager, which is hugely important for nvidia-uvm, which was only introduced in v6.1 and sees a lot of activity.

Or go look at the amount of patches being applied to mlx5. Not all of those patches get back ported into stable trees. God help you if your network stack uses an out of tree driver.
by JLO64 | 2025-09-27 22:22:27+00:00
I purchased my standing desk just over a year ago to help with my back issues and admittedly haven’t been coding with it at a standing level. That said, I’ve found it to be invaluable as my cats can’t jump onto it at it’s maximum height so my deskpad and electronics are safe from them.

I really don’t like typing on it while it’s standing since I’m not used to it. That said, I have multiple hour long zoom calls per week for my job where all I do is talk, so I should really try standing for those…
by nativeit | 2025-09-27 22:22:45+00:00
That’s almost certainly because it actually started life as a human-developed GitHub repo.

Not suggesting it wasn’t useful, or that it’s not remarkably convenient. Just easy to forget just how much went into providing it, in terms of the human labor involved with its training data, financial investments, and raw resources. In the broader context, it’s an unbelievably inefficient way to get to where we got. But as long we are here, I guess we should enjoy it.
by E39M5S62 | 2025-09-27 22:23:25+00:00
If you're doing repeated connections to the same host to run one-off commands, SSH multiplexing would be helpful for you. SSH in and it'll open up a local unix domain socket. Point additional client connections to the UDS and they'll just go over the existing connection with out requiring round trips or remote authentication. The socket can be configured to keep itself alive for a while and then close after inactivity. Huge huge speed boost over repeated fresh TCP connections.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-27 22:23:38+00:00
PassMark single threaded test is a very simple synthetic benchmark according to their docs:

> The single threaded test is an aggregate of the floating point, string sorting and data compression tests.

It’s an impressive score, but there’s more to performance in real apps than these three simple tests. This is a reflection of the high burst clock speed of the chip and the great job they did keeping it fed, but PassMark single threaded is about the simplest measurement you can do.

Modern CPUs aren’t really optimized for peak floating point throughput because any GPU will do a much better job at that. It’s also not clear if they actually use SIMD features of the chips, where desktop and server class parts should be able to walk away from the Apple phone chip due to their higher power limit alone.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-27 22:24:15+00:00
Friends come from having opportunities for interaction with people. People take that for granted though early in life when they are essentially forced into these situations through schooling, but after completing that don't give themselves such opportunities any longer. If you find yourself without friends in middle age, evaluate your own time. Are there opportunities in your life to speak to others? Taking up hobbies where you have a chance of interacting with others is a great way to make friends.

In other words, friends won't drop into your lap. You have to go where fish are actually biting and cast out your line.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-27 22:24:18+00:00
It really is. Too much of our industry operates on some perverse savior complex where they believe themselves the only capable humans on the planet and everyone else to be inferior in some way (often intellectually, but there’s plenty of -isms too).

These topics are incredibly salient to discuss if we’re going to improve our industry and society. Everything is political, and should be discussed in the context of technology here - which this article is highly relevant for.
by tuukkah | 2025-09-27 22:25:37+00:00
The first anomaly was detected by the Finnish defence forces in Kajaani already the previous day, Sunday evening at 8:40pm local time, but they didn't understand the small deviation was very important and probably suspected it was a minor error in the measurements. Only on Monday at 10am the Nuclear Safety Authority started to investigate properly and published information at 4pm - not early enough to let Forsmark know they wouldn't have needed to evacuate the plant as a precaution.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-27 22:25:48+00:00
The problem lies in that Apple already gets 100% of the profit from being vertically integrated today (so the offer would not only need to be large, but more than what one could reasonably hope to make in return). If it were just that Apple had a really good CPU then both Apple and the 3rd party(ies) would be able to come to the table with a net positive deal, but vertical integration makes it so only 1 party (Apple, in this case) can come out ahead until they are dethroned for other reasons completely.
by integralid | 2025-09-27 22:26:05+00:00
TFA is pretty cool and the technology is exciting. Nevertheless...

Tech people always think that everything can be solved with better technology. See, we made a protocol for uncensorable communication, now privacy is restored and the evil government plan is thwarted.

No, if e2e becomes illegal, noncompliant apps outlawed and taken out of appstores, if by using this people will risks a fine or prison time or even just police checking you're not actually a pedophile who needs to hide something - regular people won't use it. A small fraction of privacy nerds may do, but that's not significant on a social level. This won't solve recent world privacy problems.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-27 22:26:18+00:00
I was dreamin' when I wrote this So sue me if I go too fast But life is just a party And parties weren't meant to last War is all around us My mind says, "Prepare to fight" So if I gotta die I'm gonna listen to my body tonight Yeah

[Chorus: Prince and All] They say 2000, zero-zero, party over, oops, out of time So tonight, I'm gonna party like it's 1999 Yeah, yeah, shh
by d3Xt3r | 2025-09-27 22:26:41+00:00
One of the things I really like about Mosh is the responsiveness - there's no lag when typing text, if feels like you're really working on a local shell.

I'm guessing SSH3 doesn't do anything to improve that aspect? (although I guess QUIC will help a bit, but isn't quite the same as Mosh is it?)
by pengaru | 2025-09-27 22:27:18+00:00
My friends are objectively bad for my health vs. how well I take care of myself without their influences.

What I suspect is common WRT these studies is lonely people become self-destructive, reaching for stuff like alcohol and/or comfort eating, i.e. harmful substitutes for relationships they miss.

But I don't really have those issues. I can be super content spending most time solitary with regular impersonal interactions at cafes and grocery stores. Just having a modicum of peaceful sharing of space with others tops up my socializing needs, beyond that it's fast into diminishing returns territory.

- extremely introverted person who never developed a dependence on others for self-worth and/or happiness
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-27 22:27:27+00:00
Ehh. A lot of people play games. I can make the fans spin heavy on my m3 pro. Especially when most games on mac today mean running through a translation layer and weren't multithreaded to begin with. Throttling is a nonstarter for games. Might be ok for compiling but for gaming the lag induced by throttling makes it entirely unplayable.
by fogzen | 2025-09-27 22:27:27+00:00
AT seems cool — but it’s not built on the web. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

I can’t link to a Bluesky post. I can’t use Bluesky from the browser. It’s a silo’d network.

The indie web has the right idea: Use the web, build ontop of blogs, degrade gracefully. We could have central aggregators just like Bluesky crawling the web with microformats.

The polished experience with Bluesky has little to do with the tech and everything to do with financing and talent. Give me millions of dollars in grants and I’m sure I can build a polished UX too.
by pedalpete | 2025-09-27 22:27:51+00:00
I wish these studies would dive deeper into the mechanisms that prompt healthy aging, rather than just saying "social ties".

The few that come to mind are laughter, stress, exercise, and cognitive engagement.

It might be interesting to see if diet changes as a result of social ties as well. We can make an educated guess that stronger social ties means less time eating alone.

Surely it isn't just the social ties themselves.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-27 22:30:48+00:00
that graph showing zero growth without "tech spending" seems to indicate that.

What puzzles me is that human brains require only about 20 watts of power, plus food, shelter, relationships, medical care, and 20 years of experiential and educational training effort, so why do LLMs need so much more power, if they are piggybacking on digital human training data?
by F3nd0 | 2025-09-27 22:31:32+00:00
TeXmacs is pretty great. I feel like its internals still feel a bit arcane, though. Just editing documents through the graphical interface is fine, but if you happen to use some commonplace symbols or diacritics a lot, opening the file as plain text will quickly remind you of it, with bespoke ASCII representations showing up in their place.
by dabinat | 2025-09-27 22:32:02+00:00
I live in Portland and while there are homeless people downtown it’s a great city to live in and I’ve never felt unsafe. Fox News has been saying for years that Portland is basically a war-torn shell of a city in which people huddle in their homes afraid of the criminals freely roaming the streets. They’ve even used footage from riots in 2020 and pretended it was present-day [0]. It’s terrifying that we have a president who believes and takes action based on what he sees on TV.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/05/trump-portla...
by mhh__ | 2025-09-27 22:32:04+00:00
I don't have any links but I have seen a photo of a stall at some electronics market in Shenzhen selling what seemed to be LLMs on a System on module.

So you buy a kind of deepseek module with an SPI/i2c/usb whatever interface you can swap out. Not clue if this is of any use but thought it was cool
by ajaykumar2000 | 2025-09-27 22:32:07+00:00
I've built PortPilot, a production-ready Electron app that lives in your macOS menu bar and provides real-time monitoring of network ports and memory usage. Key Features: Live Port Monitoring - See all active TCP listening ports with user-friendly descriptions Memory Usage Tracking - Monitor system memory with top consumers and one-click process termination Process Management - Kill processes by PID directly from the menu with graceful (SIGTERM) or force (SIGKILL) options Clean UI - Template icon that adapts to light/dark themes, contextual menus with rich information

The app is particularly useful for developers who need to quickly identify which processes are using specific ports or consuming memory, without opening terminal windows or using multiple tools.
by schiffern | 2025-09-27 22:32:44+00:00
There have been proposals to remediate contaminated agricultural areas by sporulating and harvesting mushroom species that concentrate radiocesium.

What amazes me is the mushroom mycelium are actually sorting out the radioactive material grain by grain, which would be highly impractical any other way.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/stein1/
by AdrianB1 | 2025-09-27 22:32:46+00:00
I like Yamaha, I have an older one in my living room, but for the $550 (local price) I am not extatic of what it offers. The digital part is a joke, it has a DAC in it but I cannot use a laptop as a digital source over USB, it has an Ethernet port, but it cannot use it for an embedded management web site, you need to run a phone app for that. My $15 relay controlling the lights has WiFi and embedded management web site, a $550 AV received does not. Also you cannot play movies, only music, even if it has in it what it takes for that. Figured out why?

And this is not Yamaha, everyone is selling the same stuff. You can find cheaper Chinese integrated DAC + amplifiers, WiFi and BT with more modern stuff in it. Yes, the amp part is much lower quality, but you need features, convenience, great user experience, not just good audio. At least with the cheap soundbar you don't have high expectations, no disappointments.
by omikun | 2025-09-27 22:32:50+00:00
X86 compete based on clock speed for the longest time so they use cell libraries designed for higher that. This means the transistors are larger and less dense. Arm cores are targeted at energy efficiency first so they use denser cells that doesn’t clock as fast. The trade off is they can have larger reorder buffers and larger scheduling windows to squeeze better ipc. As frequency scaling slows but not so much density scaling you get better results going the slower route.
by phatskat | 2025-09-27 22:35:26+00:00
> This problem is as old as software.

Sure, I agree, and the problem is absolutely magnified by AI. If a back door gets into Thunderbird, or Google decides to start scanning and sharing all of your email, that’s one point of failure.

An MCP may connect to any number of systems that require a level of trust, and if any one thing abuses that trust it puts the entire system at risk. Now you’re potentially leaking email, server keys, recovery codes, private documents, personal photos, encrypted chats - whatever you give your AI access to becomes available to a single rogue actor.
by walterbell | 2025-09-27 22:35:37+00:00
Some resources on vision therapy.

Presbyopia convergence therapy: https://raygottlieb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/presbyopi...

Myopia under-correction therapy: https://losetheglasses.org & https://web.archive.org/web/20230528211849/https://wiki.redu...

Local vision therapists: https://www.covd.org/page/About_Us
by ijk | 2025-09-27 22:36:24+00:00
It's a little more subtle than that: They're approximating the language used by someone describing the taste of chocolate; this may or may not have had any relation to the actual practice of eating chocolate in the mind of the original writer. Or writers, because the LLM has learned the pattern from data in aggregate, not from one example.

I think we tend to underestimate how much the written language aspect filters everything; it is actually rather unnatural and removed from the human sensory experience.
by Eisenstein | 2025-09-27 22:36:48+00:00
> It's an empirical fact that in all the years from the founding to the passage of the 17th Amendment the US federal government was much smaller than it quickly became in the years following its passage, so all of the available evidence is consistent with the theory.

This is appeal to history. We don't know if repealing the 17th Amendment would do anything at all like what happened 300 years ago.

> Moreover, the mechanism of operation makes logical sense. Senators want to keep their seats and state legislators don't want to have their own regulations preempted by federal laws unnecessarily and don't want excessive federal spending because money collected in federal taxes can't be collected in state taxes and taxpayers have a threshold level of total taxation they're willing to put up with

You are assuming a whole lot in that logic.

1. That state legislators wouldn't collude with the executive due to party affiliation

2. That spending more money at the federal level would require them to raise taxes

There is no logic or evidence when you get rid of the history and the wrong assumptions.
Show HN: A Slideshow Generator for TikTok
by ewantindale | 2025-09-27 22:36:55+00:00
This is a tool for anyone building accounts or doing marketing on TikTok.

It helps you create slideshows (image carousels) using AI to generate the captions and images.

I built this because I had been posting TikTok slideshows to market my apps, and I was just using ChatGPT for both the scripts and the image generation, which took multiple prompts, and was quite tedious.

This app combines all that so that you can just enter one prompt and create the whole slideshow.

Then there's an editor to tweak/fix anything that isn't quite right before downloading/exporting to TikTok.

You can also use your own images or any of the image collections in the app to fit your niche (motivation, gym, sunsets, mindfulness, running, etc)

There are a ton of features I haven't built yet because I've been trying to nail the core functionality of the app first and make it as simple as possible to use.

I'd welcome any feedback, thanks :)