MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tracker1 | 2025-09-08 22:54:20+00:00
I think the last part is probably the biggest thing holding them back IMO... I tend not to install MS Office products on my personal devices, I haven't run Windows on a personal device in a few years. I've mostly maintained just my resume in word or libre-office format for well over a decade. I can't tell you how many times the LO format lost formatting, or just messed up between version upgrades. Same goes for opening a word version in LO.

That doesn't count the various times where it behaved weird, inconsistently had fields/tables that were impossible to edit, etc. I've had to completely recreate everything a couple times over the years. That's just one document, for one guy that I don't really touch that often.

Say what you will about Firefox vs Chrome in terms of usability, compared to MS Word using LibreOffice is worse than early betas of Netscape Navigator 4.0. It's both impressive and upsetting. OnlyOffice at least looks nicer, even if it doesn't really function any better. MS's online version of Word in the browser operates more consistently than either.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-08 22:54:38+00:00
> x86 decoding must be a pain

So one of the projects I've been working on and off again is the World's Worst x86 Decoder, which takes a principled approach to x86 decoding by throwing out most of the manual and instead reverse-engineering semantics based on running the instructions themselves to figure out what they do. It's still far from finished, but I've gotten it to the point that I can spit out decoder rules.

As a result, I feel pretty confident in saying that x86 decoding isn't that insane. For example, here's the bitset for the first two opcode maps on whether or not opcodes have a ModR/M operand: ModRM=1111000011110000111100001111000011110000111100001111000011110000000000000000000000000000000000000011000001010000000000000000000011111111111111110000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001100111100000000111100001111111100000000000000000000001100000011111100000000010011111111111111110000000011111111000000000000000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110000011110000000000000000111111111111111100011100000111111111011110111111111111110000000011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

I haven't done a k-map on that, but... you can see that a boolean circuit isn't that complicated. Also, it turns out that this isn't dependent on presence or absence of any prefixes. While I'm not a hardware designer, my gut says that you can probably do x86 instruction length-decoding in one cycle, which means the main limitation on the parallelism in the decoder is how wide you can build those muxes (which, to be fair, does have a cost).

That said, there is one instruction where I want to go back in time and beat up the x86 ISA designers. f6/0, f6/1, f7/0, and f7/1 [1] take in an extra immediate operand whereas f6/2 and et al do not. It's the sole case in the entire ISA where this happens.

[1] My notation for when x86 does its trick of using one of the register selector fields as extra bits for opcodes.
by whiterook6 | 2025-09-08 22:54:38+00:00
I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems.

That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share

- how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

- how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

-what about for streaming music? I really like Plex amp

- what do you like the most about jellyfin

- what do you miss most about Plex?

Thank you.
by foxyv | 2025-09-08 22:55:11+00:00
> The site was known for selling devices that allowed users to get around Nintendo's piracy protections, including the popular MIG Switch flashcart that lets buyers play official Nintendo games without the need for a physical cartridge.

These cartridges have also made the used Switch game cartridge market into a minefield. You never know if your cart has been cloned or not.
by jongjong | 2025-09-08 22:55:24+00:00
Makes sense. Once you become really good at writing code, it becomes increasingly obvious that the real challenge of software development is the social problem of pointing out subtle contradictions in requirements and suggesting resolutions/trade-offs in a way which earns you respect instead of hatred.

With some stakeholders, this is an almost impossible problem; sometimes this is because they lack vision and so their requirements are littered with impossible contradictions; other times, their ego is too big to accommodate any kind of push-back; even if you try to drip-feed the suggestions as gently as possible, they begin to resent you because they start to associate you with negative feelings such as self-doubt.

Schopenhauer explained this phenomena succinctly:

"A man must be still a greenhorn in the ways of the world, if he imagines that he can make himself popular in society by exhibiting intelligence and discernment. With the immense majority of people, such qualities excite hatred and resentment, which are rendered all the harder to bear by the fact that people are obliged to suppress — even from themselves — the real reason of their anger. What actually takes place is this. A man feels and perceives that the person with whom he is conversing is intellectually very much his superior. He thereupon secretly and half unconsciously concludes that his interlocutor must form a proportionately low and limited estimate of his abilities. That is a method of reasoning — an enthymeme — which rouses the bitterest feelings of sullen and rancorous hatred."

This is a really big problem because people who attain management positions are often very good at understanding and then manipulating what other people think about them; this is how they were able to rise to their current ranks. They are exactly the kinds of people who build these reflective mental maps/models of who thinks what about them; and they are good at plotting against those people who they believe may harbor negative thoughts about them.
by bigiain | 2025-09-08 22:55:25+00:00
I can't tell if I'm being paranoid or just realistic, when I suspect that FBI/Apple fights over decrypting/unlocking iPhones or iMessage are just part of Apple's security theater.

If I were Evil-Tim-Cook, I'd have a deal with the FBI (and other agencies) where I'd hand over some user's data, in return for them keeping that secret and occasionally very publicly taking Apple to court demanding they expose a specific user and intentionally losing - to bolster Apple's privacy reputation.
by egypturnash | 2025-09-08 22:55:31+00:00
Same.

So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.

The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."
by jonquest | 2025-09-08 22:56:37+00:00
Yes, the XZ attack affected Fedora nightly and Debian testing and unstable. Yes, it got caught before it made it into a stable distribution (this time).

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/understanding-red-hats-respon...

https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2024/msg00...
by iteria | 2025-09-08 22:57:01+00:00
I happen to read this book in my early career. I was mid-level. Beyond struggling with codebases, but hadn't yet developed an intuition with codebases. This book blew my mind then. It gave me whole new ways to thinking. I recommend it all the time to people in early career because how to handle a massive legacy codebase isn't obvious at all when you haven't been doing it for a long time.
by rhdunn | 2025-09-08 22:57:13+00:00
There are places where it says the equivalent of "Works the same as Word 95" [3], but does not specify in the specification what that means.

It's essentially a serialization of the binary format to XML.

ODF 1.4 is around 1,100 pages across all 4 parts whereas OOXML is over 6,000.

[1] https://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/08/microsofts-f...

[2] https://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/2007/08/micros...

[3] https://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-hire-guillaume-p...
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-09-08 22:57:24+00:00
TFA says it’s 470 miles of range under the WLTP which seems to be a fairly standardized test procedure for light vehicle fuel economy and emissions.

One could in good faith assume it means “install this in a normal light vehicle (sedan?) and you’re likely to get about 470 miles of range when driven under normal conditions”.

That said I agree that range is NOT the best way to measure a battery’s energy storage capacity - definitely not the right unit, it’s like measuring computing capacity in megahertz. Oh wait :)
by starkparker | 2025-09-08 22:57:26+00:00
This very much looks like both people involved are bad actors to each other. ICEBlock seems like a bad and potentially dangerous project led by someone not as competent as they project, despite best intentions, and Micah seems like someone who lept past incident reporting and into bludgeoning with public posts that reveal he's not as competent as he projects, despite best intentions. Hell's paving, etc.
by acdha | 2025-09-08 22:57:37+00:00
It varies but there are a lot of tools built around the idea of rapid updates so things like APIs can change quickly throughout a far more fragmented ecosystem. I suspect that we’re going to see a lot of places back off of that a bit to have something like monthly update cycles where there’s more time for scanning and review while still expecting people to upgrade more frequently than used to be common.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-08 22:58:00+00:00
> Do they think they're above it? Are they stupid and don't know what they vote for?

They're somewhat out of touch with tech, and caught up in police narratives around encrypted apps blocking their attempts to find pedos. Tech firm lobbyists sell them some lies about the capabilities of these systems.

Ultimately these are politicians stuck in the notion of "but the police can open your [physical] letters, this isn't any different" completely unaware of how times have moved on.

Matters like how people are already being harassed by CSAM being sent to their DMs, how people raid discord servers and try to have them taking down by spamming CSAM, etc, are completely lost on these politicians.

On top of that it's just cowardice. Not daring to be seen as "aiding pedos".
by eigenspace | 2025-09-08 22:58:00+00:00
I dont think it should be taken as a given that it'll happen. While this may be something the public is generally in favour of or ambivalent towards, there's a LOT of EU countries and MEPs that are not at all in favour of this, and already a few EU countries whose courts have ruled that this would violate their constitutions.

While its certainly possible it'll happen, it's far from certain. It can be stopped. Of all the currently 'undecided' countries, if just Germany came out against it, that'd be enough to sink it. Germans are pretty pro-privacy people, and the government would win no popularity by supporting it. Even if the German government supported it though, the German MEPs would likely still end up mostly voting no
by thewebguyd | 2025-09-08 22:58:21+00:00
Makes you wonder if Meta got one or more of those secret national security letters, or foreign equivalents.

Also makes me wonder about Google's change wrt android security patches - under the guise of "making it easier for OEMs" by moving to quarterly is actually just so that Paragon and other nation state spyware has access to the vulnerabilities for at least 4 months before they get patched.
by sans_souse | 2025-09-08 22:58:31+00:00
On September 25, 2010, the IP address 18.55.6.215, part of the MIT network, began sending hundreds of PDF download requests per minute to the JSTOR website, enough to slow the site's performance.[81] This prompted a block of the IP address. In the morning, another IP address, also from within the MIT network, began sending more PDF download requests, resulting in a temporary block on the firewall level of all MIT computers in the entire 18.0.0.0/8 range. A JSTOR employee emailed MIT on September 29, 2010: Note that this was an extreme case. We typically suspend just one individual IP at a time and do that relatively infrequently (perhaps 6 on a busy day, from 7000+ institutional subscribers). In this case, we saw a performance hit on the live site, which I have only seen about 3 or 4 times in my 5 years here. The pattern used was to create a new session for each PDF download or every few, which was terribly efficient, but not terribly subtle. In the end, we saw over 200K sessions in one hour's time during the peak.[82] According to authorities, Swartz downloaded the documents through a laptop connected to a networking switch in a controlled-access wiring closet at MIT.[15][16][83][84][85] The closet's door was kept unlocked, according to press reports.[80][86][87] When it was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz; his computer was left untouched. The recording was stopped once Swartz was identified, but rather than pursue a civil lawsuit against him, JSTOR settled with him in June 2011; under the terms of the settlement, he surrendered the downloaded data.[88][89]
by unbrice | 2025-09-08 22:58:35+00:00
Praised for its functionality and freedom, yet notorious for its weak moderation and ties with Russia, Telegram is increasingly used for malicious campaigns. From anti-vaccination and flat-Earth conspiracies to disinformation and illicit activity, its freewheeling growth challenges the EU’s information space and digital governance frameworks. Drawing on EU-wide data and Ukraine’s experience, this article explores how Telegram has become a main conduit of disinformation in Europe’s information space and the need for oversight of its activities.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-08 22:59:23+00:00
Investing in these sorts of names is strongly negative expected value, and we're talking something that becomes strongly apparent within hours. I was trading these sorts of names earlier in the year for a couple of months (good broker, expensive scanners, custom written execution scripts, etc, about as good as it gets for non- proprietary trading firm participants), and it's no joke.

First of all you're getting up at 4 or 5 am every day. The space is also swarming with scams every day. Chinese IPOs, gamed PR releases which insiders dump into, etc. Then for the few that actually are truly "in play", it's just a brutal battlefield. They are illiquid and spreads are huge. You have to buy tens of thousands of shares and fees are horrible even with well negotiated commissions. Big fish with ten thousand hours of screen time dominate the tape. Hidden orders everywhere.

These names will drop 50% faster than you can blink, and if you have stop losses they will get broken and reversed just as fast, so risk management is impossibly hard to optimize.

I'd like to think I'm a fairly good trader, but this was like moving from "slow" race car driving to those cracked out Dance Dance Revolution videos you see.

On the other hand, the sheer amount of hilarity and absurdity every morning is a sight to behold. Every day there are 10 names just as insane as this one. Most narratives are played out before market open though. This really is a realm of 4am to 8am traders.
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-09-08 22:59:39+00:00
I ran plex for years but gave up once they started tracking all activity.

Jellyfin is way to administer. Clients are rough and often crash. Influx is often the best choice for IOS but has its own... weird decisions on how to handle libraries.

The main thing I miss is being able to download transcoded media for mobile devices so I can watch on a plane.
by ajross | 2025-09-08 22:59:47+00:00
> Why can't they decode 100 instructions per cycle?

Well, obviously because there aren't 100 individual parallel execution units to which those instructions could be issued. And lower down the stack because a 3000 bit[1] wide cache would be extremely difficult to manage. An instruction fetch would be six (!) cache lines wide, causing clear latency and bottleneck problems (or conversely would demand your icache be 6x wider, causing locality/granularity problems as many leaf functions are smaller than that).

But also because real world code just isn't that parallel. Even assuming perfect branch prediction the number of instructions between unpredictable things like function pointer calls or computed jumps is much less than 100 in most performance-sensitive algorithms.

And even if you could, the circuit complexity of decoding variable length instructions is superlinear. In x86, every byte can be an instruction boundary, but most aren't, and your decoder needs to be able to handle that.

[1] I have in my head somewhere that "the average x86_64 instruction is 3.75 bytes long", but that may be off by a bit. Somewhere around that range, anyway.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-08 22:59:53+00:00
It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.

If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.
by meesles | 2025-09-08 23:00:05+00:00
I'll fill in what I can -

>- how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

Jellyfin is just the software, not a hosted solution. I use a simple server/seedbox, with sane configs (good providers have automated this), which results in a secure public-facing admin console with a username/password. They have basic user management features to include other users in your server.

> - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

Jellyfin has a broad ecosystem of apps on a bunch of platforms, each with their pros and cons. I recommend poking around. When figuring my setup out, I downloaded 3 or 4 different Android apps to pick the one I liked (support for multiple servers which isn't a given in all the apps)

> -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex amp IMO Plex has always been substandard here since they hoisted the music interface into the same one they use for everything else, so it's really lacking in filters/administration features I depend on. That said Jellyfin supports music and has the same simple feature set.

> - what do you like the most about jellyfin

It's free and untethered to a company's whims. It also does a lot less of the social/DVR stuff that I have no interest in.

>- what do you miss most about Plex?

Their app experience was a bit more premium, and their support for multiple servers is better than Jellyfin since they own the servers/hosting to do it. I also really used to enjoy the 'remote' functionality where I could skip episodes by clicking next on the Plex app in my phone. This hasn't worked for a few years for me despite heavy troubleshooting.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-08 23:00:19+00:00
Right, there were no street lights where I grew up because street lights cost money and the people where I lived were rich partly because they paid few taxes, so no money for street lights. I happened to move to a city when it wasn't yet concerned about the environmental impact or cost, so I went from "Of course the main road doesn't have lights, what are we made of money?" to "Of course jogging tracks in the city parks have 24/7 street lighting. what if you wanted to go jogging at midnight, you can't jog in the dark!". Today those tracks don't have lighting 'cos there's no money and the wildlife hates it but thirty years ago, sure.

However some back roads aren't even B roads, the classification keeps going through C and D but it's local numbering, the numbers are just for local maintenance crews - so a C-1234 could be duplicated a few miles away in another local government territory and that would be confusing for drivers so they won't write C-1234 on a sign, they'll just say what's in that direction or maybe a local name for the road.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-08 23:01:06+00:00
Not to the point of one group wanting to enact genocide on another, so that's completely irrelevant, and you know it. If Facebook hadn't existed, would the genocide still have happened? Since you seem to be in a deflecting mood, I'm going to answer for you: yes. If you have one group that hates another, removing a technological means of communication solves nothing.
by choilive | 2025-09-08 23:01:08+00:00
In most cases, efficiency and performance are pretty synonymous for CPUs. The faster you can get work done (and turn off the silicon, which is admittedly a higher design priority for mobile CPUs) the more efficient you are.

The level of talent Apple has cannot be understated, they have some true CPU design wizards. This level of efficiency cannot be achieved without making every aspect of the CPU as fast as possible; their implementation of the ARM ISA is incredible. Lots of companies make ARM chips, but none of them are Apple level performance.

As a gross simplification, where the energy/performance tradeoff actually happens is after the design is basically baked. You crank up the voltage and clock speed to get more perf at the cost of efficiency.
by vannevar | 2025-09-08 23:01:20+00:00
Yes, the money flows uphill. Having more wealth means being able to make more wealth, faster. It's a feedback loop. True, some of that comes from printing money. But value is actually being created all the time (which means some new money must be printed all the time), and capital will capture an ever-increasing share of the increasing pie. The rate of this increase is faster than the wealth is created. You can see this in the widening income growth gap between the top and the bottom. In turns out that a rising tide can indeed raise all boats, but it raises the boats at the top of the income curve much faster than those at the bottom, to the point where the boats at the bottom are only infinitesimally better off while the income of the rich is multiplied many times over.
by nullc | 2025-09-08 23:01:26+00:00
Even in places with generally strong protection against state search you have almost no privacy if someone drags you into civil court. Not only can state opponents attack you there including through pretextual claims, but you're also open to attack by numerous non-governmental entities.

Online/electronic privacy advocacy is in my view overly fixated on direct state invasions via law enforcement powers and corporate surveillance through ad data, while largely ignoring threats via hacking or civil litigation.

The best policy is to not record things that shouldn't be made public. The next best step is to not retain recorded things longer than needed. Modern software/operating systems largely make either of those steps quite difficult, leaking tons of data with every use, making it impossible to reliably delete material, etc. But nothing less is effective against the full spectrum of threats, not even strong encryption. (but obviously strong encryption is good and critical for what you do record and retain!)