MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kllrnohj | 2025-09-26 03:37:28+00:00
I think that's a combination of things:

1) The company "sold out". That is, in times of limited supply they prioritized fulfilling large compute module orders instead of the hobbyist market that initially supported them. To be fair if I was running that company I'd have done the exact same thing, it's obviously the right financial choice. Just, you know, it'll sting for the market that was shunned.

2) They got expensive. Especially for the Pi 4 which was still dreadfully slow. That slowness was excusable at $25. Not great but okay at $35. But when suddenly it was near enough to $100+ by the time you got all the required "accessories"? Or like the Pi 5 16gb is $132 like what on earth.

3) They got 'flaky'. It used to be the pi was the rock-solid option in the space. But now they keep making weird low-reliability decisions. Like the Pi 5 "expects" a rather uniquely high amp USB-C charger. 5A @ 5V is not a common USB-C charger feature. So whatever you happen to grab is probably not sufficient, and you'll have those annoying low power warnings randomly. They chose to have dual 4k HDMI ports and went with micro-HDMI. Which is a flaky connector you probably don't have cables for (and also dual 4K? on a pi?). They kept using microSD cards. The CPU power draw increased significantly, which for the performance delta is more than justified, except it still ships without any cooling.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-26 03:37:49+00:00
> It specifically says on the card, and in other places that it is not to be used for identification.

The US tried that back when Social Security Numbers were introduced. It specifically said it was for tax-purposes (a context where it might've been adequately-secure) and not to be used for anything else.

Yet without any actual penalties against "other places", it got misused everywhere by companies trying to save a buck on primary-key choice and authenticating people.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-26 03:38:38+00:00
They also talk about the reversal of the Chicago river so the sewerage went down the Des Planes and onto the Mississippi instead of the great lakes. This was of benefit to Chicago residents since they drank out of lake Michigan. All the towns and cities on the Mississippi were never too pleased about this though :).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sanitary_and_Ship_Cana...
by nvader | 2025-09-26 03:39:07+00:00
I hope you remember to add monitoring for your cache expiry cron job so you can be notified if it ever fails to run due to a code change or configuration change. For example, database credentials might be rolled and if you forget to update the job your primary database could fill up.

Perhaps you could have a second cron job that runs to verify that the first one completed. It could look for a last-ran entry. You should put it in the same database, so maybe perhaps you could a key value store like redis for that.
by zharknado | 2025-09-26 03:39:15+00:00
I’ll play!

Chat thinks it’s a kana segmentation error in a list of possible hypothesized problems/causes that get mis-rendered as literal nouns, such as “XML風, 設定方法, 処理の流れ / 処理流” such that roughly “XML style” -> “-style” -> “wind”, “setting method” -> “-method” -> “pole”, “processing flow” -> “-flow” -> “dragon”

(Note that XMl, setting, and processing are just examples to illustrate.)

The LLM assures me that “Japanese writers often end diagnostic questions with a compact list of possible causes (A、B、Cでしょうか？).”

Its final verdict: “very likely the English “wind, pole, dragon” = MT literal translations of a compact Japanese list such as 〜風、〜法（方法）、〜流 (-style, -method, -flow). The pattern, repetition, and the fact they appear at question ends all support this strongly.”
by peterspath | 2025-09-26 03:39:31+00:00
The same can be said about the EU bureaucracies, why do they have a disproportionate amount of control and oversight in daily lives of EU citizens?

We need a full reset from them. Countries should get their powers back. Take it back from the non elected EU bureaucrats.

There are some very worrisome things going on in the EU with Chat Control, Ministry of Truth, Digital ID Systems, and Central Bank Digital Currencies.

Each individual piece will be introduced to fix something or prevent something. But it is a slippery slope to also use it for something else, and more and more. Before we know it we will live in a continent that is ruled by an authoritarian mob like in China.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-26 03:40:39+00:00
In other comments replying to another user you dismissed "criticisms from the 90s", but I think that's not entirely justified. If the bad things they did in the 90s are still having bad effects today, and they built their success on those bad things, then it's not really enough just to stop doing them; they would need to actively try to right those past wrongs.

However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.

To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.
by mothballed | 2025-09-26 03:40:46+00:00
>and that's notable because DOGE completely circumvented congress who is supposed to be the sole possessor of the power of the purse.

Congress has the constitutional power of the purse but that refers specifically to raising and appropriating money[].

The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money. Congress tried to usurp that power around the time of Nixon by stopping executive impoundment. But it's not clear if that's constitutional; it might be now under current SCOTUS interpretations but I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS reviews it and find that to be incorrect.

Personally I think congress usurping power of impoundment is a bright and clear violation of checks and balances built into the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending before it can actually get spent. DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.

[] https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Po...
by hawflakes | 2025-09-26 03:43:01+00:00
Did the PA-RISC shops run their old PA-RISC code with the Aries emulator?

One of the selling points for HP users was running old code via dynamic translation and x86 would just work on the hardware directly.

Another fun fact I remember from working at HP was that later PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because the HP-Intel agreement had Intel fabbing a certain amount of chips and since Merced was running behind... Intel-fabbed PA-RISC chips!

https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/parisc-p...
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 03:43:27+00:00
I see Zorin OS mentioned regularly in writeups like these to help people leaving Windows and looking for an alternative.

Maybe it's just a misunderstanding on my part, but Zorin seems to have a tiny (2-10 people, likely on the low end) roster of developers deeply involved.

Why would any distro with a tiny dev team be worth mentioning for people using Windows? Even pop!os is a very small team, but at least they have business hours and a support team.
by coder543 | 2025-09-26 03:43:52+00:00
I keep hoping Postgres will one day have the ability to mark a timestamp column as an expiry column. It would be useful for all kinds of things beyond caching, including session tokens, feature flags, background jobs, rate limiting, delayed deletion (as a variant of soft deletion), etc.

It seems like the autovacuum could take care of these expired rows during its periodic vacuum. The query planner could automatically add a condition that excludes any expired rows, preventing expired rows from being visible before autovacuum cleans them up.
by kllrnohj | 2025-09-26 03:44:01+00:00
The Pi 5 finally upgraded to an out-of-order CPU, so it's ~3x faster than a Pi 4. It's a huge jump. The caveat being it definitely needs a cooling solution now.

Pi 4: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/976221

Pi 5: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/9348462

but for funsies, an N150 (same price as a Pi 5 - arguably cheaper since it comes with a case, cooling, power supply, etc...): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/10304384
by dangus | 2025-09-26 03:44:35+00:00
At this point HN should have a list of tropes that are just banned topics.

These should include:

- Bring back the old web but only the good parts that my nostalgia filter remembers

- Software used to be fast and now it's not, look how long it takes for my magic pocket computer to transcode 4K videos and perform facial and object recognition on it

- Large download sizes have ruined everything, it takes my phone 1 minute to download a 500MB app over my 5G connection

- macOS is buggy and too much like iOS now, just like last year's release

- RSS feeds are the best

- iTunes/Apple Music is a bloated and horrible app, and I have been complaining about this for 20 years and I still use it/never used it in the first place

- React is bad because everyone is using it

- Electron bad

Did I miss any?
by manwe150 | 2025-09-26 03:44:42+00:00
I think the issue they are stating is the errors are either in the optimizer (needing alive2 equiavlent) or in the analysis passed. A memory safe language (in this case JavaScript) can convince a buggy compiler to do things out of spec. The attack surface of the interactions of the compiler might be more interesting or larger than of the compiler itself

Rust only guarantees it up to bugs in the analysis though, which is usually okay for rust, but not for truly adversarial inputs (JavaScript)

The better comparison might be ebpf, where you take the output of one compiler, then verify with a second compiler, then compile with a third compiler, so there are that many more gates you need to pass to get malicious input to produce exploitable output, while still getting speed
by remarkEon | 2025-09-26 03:45:59+00:00
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.

How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-26 03:46:03+00:00
This is a dangerous statement, although I don't think that was the author's intent:

> Before I get to other opinions, let me make clear that anything you can do to help you get a job is a good thing to do.

There are lots and lots of very evil things that will help you get a job, especially with companies that want to do evil things. Those are definitely not good things to do. I think the author intended a more restricted context like "any skill you can learn that will help you get a job is a good skill to learn from a technical perspective" (i.e., it might still be ethically wrong). This may seem pedantic but I've known some young graduates recently who went to work for very evil companies, and I think it's easy for impressionable minds to read statements like this and think "Yeah, see, everyone does it, who cares" without filling in the ethical background that the author assumes.
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 03:46:10+00:00
Go camping for 1 night and go screen-free. Or just go somewhere without TV/smartphone/internet/smartwatch (you have to really disconnect)

You'll magically find that your brain works just like you remember within a very short period of hours.

Sadly, even knowing the detriment to my life, it is still extremely hard for me to stay away from smartphones and note others seem to have the same issue.
by Venn1 | 2025-09-26 03:46:54+00:00
I've never been huge into social media or even blogging when that was en vogue, but I did set up a forum on my site a little over a year ago after realising how much of a black hole for technical discussion Discord has become. I use it as an easy way to document any screwball problems I run across when working with hardware and software, and occasionally people pop in and ask questions, so I'm glad I set it up.

Something I did notice is that Google recently added Discussions and forums as a metric in the Google Search Console, and forums is now an option in the More dropdown menu on Google.com.
by vlovich123 | 2025-09-26 03:46:58+00:00
Because the data structures for a linker aren’t dealing with byte buffers. I’m pretty sure you’ve got symbolic graph structures that you’re manipulating. And as they mention, sometimes you have fairly large object collections that you’re allocating and freeing and fast 4k allocations don’t help you with that kind of stuff. Consider that the link phase for something like Chrome can easily use 1gib of active memory and you see why your idea will probably fall flat on its face for what Wild is trying to accomplish in terms of being super high performance state of the art linker.
by Nursie | 2025-09-26 03:48:00+00:00
There was a big backlash and they eventually caved in and cancelled the scheme when the government changed.

I lived in South London at the time and sent a letter to my MP to protest about the creation of a database state and increased surveillance, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state.

About two months later I got a form response that started "Don't worry, it's not just an ID card, there will be a huge database behind it!"

Thanks. Way to show you didn't even read what I wrote.

I think in the intervening years that relationship has already fundamentally changed though. Privacy from government in most western countries seems to be something of a fading memory, it would be hard to make those same arguments in 2025.
by atonse | 2025-09-26 03:48:24+00:00
The same way you do security for manually written code. Rigorously. But in this case, you can also have AI also do your code reviews and suggest/write unit tests. Or write out a spec and refine it. Or point it to OWASP and say, look at this codebase and make a plan to check for these OWASP top 10.

And have another AI review your unit tests and code. It's pretty amazing how much nuance they pick up. And just rinse and repeat until the AI can't find anything anymore (or you notice it going in circles with suggestions)
by evbogue | 2025-09-26 03:50:34+00:00
I was there as the assistant head of river kayak safety, and it was a historic moment. if you were watching, i was the kayaker wrestling the malfunctioning bouybot back into place under state street. why they couldn't use old fashioned bouys instead of ai bouys? beyond me.

i've also accidentially fallen in the river a couple of times over the past two years, and i will confirm that the water is safe and getting colder every day this time of year.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-26 03:50:49+00:00
You don't get support and the laptop can fail on you on week 4 you're just SOL.

I understand the value of second hand, and randomly bought a discarded corporate HP tower for my home server. But I see it more as a hobby as I can probably fix most issues, than as a purchasing strategy I'd recommend to non technical people for instance.
by barnabyjones | 2025-09-26 03:51:15+00:00
>1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;

Only because of the immense wealth, freedom and culture brought by generations of struggle and tenacity. If it isn't defended, it can go away quickly, but the current generation probably won't bear the costs. I doubt that Europeans in the 22nd c. will enjoy such a comfortable life, though.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-26 03:51:52+00:00
Encryption is not the only privacy assurance that exists in democracies. For example, the government is (or at least was[1]) not allowed to open your mail. You could send CSAM Polaroids back and forth and nothing would happen.

Chat Control amounts to routine, warrantless interception of private communication. Something you see in states like the USSR.

[1] https://www.westernstandard.news/news/liberals-push-bill-to-...
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-26 03:52:16+00:00
The idea of insisting on a "clean" commit history always rubs me the wrong way. In my mind a commit is like hitting Ctrl-S. It's just saving a checkpoint in your work. And the commit history is supposed to show what actually happened, not a cleaned-up story about what happened.

I can see that it's good to be able to see that cleaned-up story, but I don't think the commit history should be that. There should be something else, a meta-statement about a bunch of commits, that summarizes it. But the commit history is still there if people later need to dig into how something was done. I saw some other comments talking about PRs as this unit, which maybe works, but I've always thought it would make more sense if the VCS had a notion of "commit sets" to which metadata could be attached. Then you could either look at such a set in collapsed form, with a single summary description of the whole set, or you could expand it out to look at the individual commits. In theory these could even be nested, although that might get messy and I think even just two levels would be very useful.
by bawolff | 2025-09-26 03:52:43+00:00
My impression is that JIT bugs would be similar to a bug in the rust compiler. No system is perfect and the rust compiler is just as susceptible to bugs as a jit engine is.

The difference being that your rust programs aren't usually written by malicious people. The goal is to prevent accidental memory safety issues not intentional ones. In contrast the JIT compiler is compiling code made by the adversary.
by pkdpic | 2025-09-26 03:53:27+00:00
It's so cool to see this pop up on Hacker News. And also a very cool / smart-seeming trend that could maybe play a role in a more utopian atomized art world. Whatever that means?

My favorite classic suggestion down this rabbit hole that they probably mention (pay walled) is Francis Bacon's full-insano-mode preserved studio. I didn't really get his work until I saw his studio. Fun fact they literally used a painting of his to design the chest-burster in Alien? (I just learned that somehow)

https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/studio

http://alienexplorations.blogspot.com/2015/02/ridley-inspire...
by exBarrelSpoiler | 2025-09-26 03:54:03+00:00
What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my[a] Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

Matthew 18:12-14
by sillywalk | 2025-09-26 03:54:32+00:00
> I have heard that the Alpha architecture maintainers said that their options for improvements were limited, and themselves advocated ending development.

Interesting. One of the main design principles for the Alpha was for longevity, and to have a thousand-times increase in performance over 25 years.[0]

[0] https://danluu.com/dick-sites-alpha-axp-architecture.pdf
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-26 03:54:42+00:00
The golden rule is to treat people how I would like to be treated, and I welcome opinions from my friends and family on my life choices. I might not agree, and if I disagree strongly enough I might resolve to find a community where people are more aligned with me - but I'd expect that community to also have opinions on what's a good or a bad way to live your life.
by ssl-3 | 2025-09-26 03:54:57+00:00
Knowing just a tiny bit about the history of the Chicago River, my first thought when I saw the headline was "Cholera! It's for everybody!"

But learning that they've actually -- finally -- solved that issue really outweighs whatever snark I may have had in mind.

(And for those who don't know: The Chicago River has a really interesting history that definitely includes cholera, and also includes reversing its direction of flow (!) to help solve problems like that.)
by leakycap | 2025-09-26 03:55:17+00:00
Not sure I see smoke or suspect fire here. The official company response is an unambiguous denial:

“We are aware of the recent false claims suggesting that a Brother firmware update may have restricted the use of third-party ink cartridges. Please be assured that Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines.”

“Brother printers do not intentionally degrade print quality based on whether a Brother Genuine or non-genuine ink/ toner cartridge is used.”

As much as I like cheaper toner... every time I've ever bought 3rd party toner or ink it has been seriously sub-par.
by Nursie | 2025-09-26 03:56:20+00:00
In the UK it has never been compulsory to carry ID, even when driving.

At a traffic stop the police have the option to require you to present documents at a police station within seven days if they think something is fishy.

And people do seem to exist quite happily without formal identification. As someone who has always had a passport and driving license it was a bit of an eye-opener to me, but if you don't drive and don't travel, some folks just get by without.

So if there is a requirement to have a Britcard, and to present your 'Britcard' when stopped for any reason, then it is definitely a change.
by hawflakes | 2025-09-26 03:56:51+00:00
Funny enough when Intel and DEC settled their lawsuit Intel got StrongARM[1] from DEC which was pretty fast for its time. It was a pretty cool, literally, chip that didn't need a heatsink. I had a Shark set-top appliance prototype. The offical name was DNARD — Digital Network Appliance Reference Design.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM [2] https://collection.maynardhistory.org/items/show/8946
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-09-26 03:57:22+00:00
Totally agree on the memory feature. You just have to look at the crap it tries to remember to see how useless it is and the kind of nonsense it will jam into the context.

“Cruffle is trying to make bath bombs using baking soda and citric acid and hasn’t decided what colorant to use” could be a memory. Yeah well I figured out what colorant to use… you wanna bet if it changed that memory? Nope! How would it even know? And how useful is that to keep in the first place? My memory was full of useless crap like that.

There is no way to edit the memories, decide when to add them to the context, etc. and adding controls for all of that is a level of micromanaging I do not want to do!

Seriously. I’ve yet to see any memory feature that is worth a single damn. Context management is absolutely crucial and letting random algorithms inject useless noise is going to degrade your experience.

About the only useful stuff for it to truly remember is basic facts like relationships (wife name is blah, kid is blah we live in blah blah). Things that make sense for it to know so you can mention things like “Mrs Duffle” and it knows instantly that is my wife and some bit about her background.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-09-26 03:57:23+00:00
The same way other things "help" migration. By making life very difficult for you if you aren't a proper citizen. I imagine the outcome for this would be to make it nearly impossible to do anything with the government or doing anything you might need an ID for, especially online. Some citizens will probably suffer too, but it is a price the government is willing to pay.