MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasoneckert | 2025-09-14 13:07:59+00:00
SGI hardware was the sexiest hardware of the 1990s, and IRIX was the sexiest UNIX OS of the same period. They were the desire of nearly every UNIX nerd back then.

Remember "Erwin", the SGI O2 in the userfriendly.org comic? https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1065/737/1600/user%20fri...

The comic is now dead, but it had a long and amazing run.

I still keep an SGI O2, Octane, and Fuel around for nostalgia hits nowadays, and they never disappoint:

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel_Blen...

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
by quesera | 2025-09-14 13:08:34+00:00
I suspect this is bunk -- the vast majority of feline stalking sessions in nature are unsuccessful, and these are often motivated by hunger, so failure is more meaningful than it would be for a domestic cat. Also, how does one measure feline frustration? Cortisol levels? Brain activity? Is it distinguishable from the stress/excitement of the hunt?

Regardless, my approach has been to start by putting together one of those 3V lithium battery LED assemblies, wrapping it up in clear tape, and hiding it under the dog bed. This takes about 30 seconds of preparation.

Then I run the cats around with the laser pointer for a few minutes, and finally let them watch the dot "hide" under the dog bed, so that they reach in and pull out their prize.

Which they then attack for a few seconds, but lose interest in pretty quickly, because it doesn't run away or smell edible. But their predator success desire is met, I think.

This chase-catch-abandon cycle is their MO for flying bugs and mice as well, FWIW. They seem to enjoy it, although I am not sure it's any easier to measure feline pleasure than feline frustration.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-09-14 13:09:34+00:00
Yes, there is "UNIX V7" in 2013... which apparently only IBM's AIX supports. This is ironic because the whole idea of UNIX is to create a common platform for interoperability, but only one platform actually supports. I really wonder why Apple just doesn't put a couple of FTEs on it and upgrade to V7. I'm sure it wouldn't take much. But it sort of reminds me of Java and HTML where there were standards to allow for independent implementations, but have collapsed to single implementations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Comp...
by amiga386 | 2025-09-14 13:09:58+00:00
OK, great.

Can I call poll(2) on a terminal device's file descriptor?

Requirement for certification: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799.2024edition...

> The poll() and ppoll() functions shall support regular files, terminal and pseudo-terminal devices, FIFOs, pipes, and sockets.

Apple (last time I checked): https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Sy...

> BUGS: The poll() system call currently does not support devices.

I asked the same question of Sequoia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41822308
by walterbell | 2025-09-14 13:10:23+00:00
Artists with a podcast for fans might benefit, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupation...

Digital Content Creators: Produce and publish on digital platforms original entertainment or personality-driven content, such as live streams, short-form videos, or podcasts. For example: Streamer, online video creator, social media influencer, podcaster.
by lemonberry | 2025-09-14 13:10:24+00:00
A stronger communal life and volunteering of some kind. Therapy may help, but I think it's still too focused on the self. Get out, meet people, talk to them, and most importantly, listen to them. Ask questions. Find a way to get curious about other people and the world around you. Find groups of people with shared interests, but also try to find new interests.
by ejstronge | 2025-09-14 13:10:26+00:00
> Spontaneous mutations? Which no matter how much you carve out modifiable risk factors will always be a thing. At least 5% of cervical cancers are HPV negative

Random mutations causing cervical cancer essentially does not happen - as a sibling commenter writes, well-studied cases of this are so rare that they’re below our sensitivity of detection/technical error rates.

This is what I mean when I say we try to apply our intuitions to medicine - they’re not reliable and the truth is idiosyncratic.

Because our prior for cervical cancer being caused by HPV is so incredibly high, we would require overwhelming evidence to reject the hypothesis that any new case is due to HPV. There are ways to do this, and, should they be attained, would be published in a reputable journal based on their novelty.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-14 13:12:18+00:00
>Can you imagine how actions like this make people feel? Yet somehow there is far more self control from the segment of society negatively affected by these sort of things.

I don't need to imagine. 80% of domestic terrorism is perpetrated by the right, They certainly aren't quiet about their grievances, even when the grievances are imaginary.

There were numbers published about this until Trump ordered them taken down.

Regarding the Griner thing, it's telling that when the right decided to compare two humans value the first thing the went to were her gender, race, and sexual orientation wasn't it? Personally I'd have stuck with her job, which was the bit that actually mattered. Instead, they made it about identity politics in order to spread rage.
by scottydelta | 2025-09-14 13:12:24+00:00
I use both Resend and Sendgrid and I have used almost all other providers in the past.

The part where Resend stands out is the time to go live and ease of use. All other prodivers require you to verify your startup and they vet you and decide if they want to offer you their service or not. This creates a barrier for people with side projects and really new startups. Meanwhile with Resend you can start sending mails from day 0 once you verify your domain. They also use AWS underneath and don't have their own infra like Sendgrid or Twilio.

Resend also let's you easily use smtp with same api key as password. It's a small feature but it has come handy many times trying to configure email notifications on metabase and coolify.

I remember once I needed transactional email service for an experimental project and both AWS and sendgrid didn't want to provide me service. They actively try to vet projects so that spammers don't use their infra and bring down their deliverability and reputation.

Now for your use case since sending a lot and batch emails is going to be a core task, amazon AWS SES is the best choice for your. Most likely you will face issues where your users are uploading email ids without users' consent and when you email then they report it as spam. AWS will block your SES access in this most likely scenario. Spammers taking advantage of your system to delivery spam emails. You can study how other platforms handle this and add protections to discourage this behavior.
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 13:13:15+00:00
Could you explain more concretely what kind of "support" you have in mind? A graphing library isn't like Pydantic, you aren't supplying typing information from your own code to it as part of the API. Do you just mean that it should provide type annotations in its own interface? Because I do see .pyi typing stubs in the distribution.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-14 13:14:18+00:00
I mean, since we're in tech here we like pointing out that software has done this....

But transportation technology has done this readily since the since ICE engines became wide spread. Pretty much all cities and towns and to make their 'own things' since the speed of transpiration was slow (sailing ships, horses, walking) and the cost of transportation was high. Then trains came along and things got a bit faster and more regular. Then trucks came along and things got a bit faster and more regular. Then paved roads just about everywhere you needed came along and things got faster and more regular. Now you could ship something across the country and it wouldn't cost a bankrupting amount of money.

The end result of technology does point that you could have one factory somewhere with all the materials it needs and it could make anything and ship it anywhere. This is why a bit of science fiction talks about things like UBI and post-scarcity (at least post scarcity of basic needs). After some amount of technical progress the current method of work just starts breaking down because human labor becomes much less needed.
by Mistletoe | 2025-09-14 13:14:42+00:00
AI made me this summary (I’ve grown quite weary of reading AI think pieces) and it seems like a really good comparison.

>The article "AI Will Not Make You Rich" argues that generative AI is unlikely to create widespread wealth for investors and entrepreneurs. The author, Jerry Neumann, compares AI to past technological revolutions, suggesting it's more like shipping containerization than the microprocessor. He posits that while containerization was a transformative technology, its value was spread so thinly that few profited, with the primary beneficiaries being customers.

>The article highlights that AI is already a well-known and scrutinized technology, unlike the early days of the personal computer, which began as an obscure hobbyist project. The author suggests that the real opportunities for profit will come from "fishing downstream" by investing in sectors that use AI to increase productivity, such as professional services, healthcare, and education, rather than investing in the AI infrastructure and model builders themselves.

I used to be the biggest AI hater around, but I’m finding it actually useful these days and another tool in the toolbox.
by ajdude | 2025-09-14 13:15:13+00:00
> I can't imagine many companies choosing macOS because it's a real Unix, nor would anyone really opt out of z/OS, AIX og HPUX, if they where not certified.

While Unix compliancy isn't what's keeping me on macOS, the Unix tools it has under the hood still is. I've opted to use it over Linux because I still get everything that I need from a "Unix like" standpoint while having some serious enterprise level support and compatibility with work software that's often only available for windows or Mac.

If Apple stopped caring about being Unix compliant, I wouldn't be surprised to see the tools and infrastructure that make it Unix (and useful to me) slowly be removed. Then I'd stop using it.
by GMoromisato | 2025-09-14 13:15:43+00:00
I think AI will be more like the smartphone revolution that Apple kicked off in 2005. Today there are two companies that provide the smartphone platform (Apple/Google), but thousands of large and small companies that build on top of it, including Uber, Snapchat, etc.

In that scenario, everyone makes money: OpenAI, Google (maybe Anthropic, maybe Meta) make money on the platform, but there are thousands of companies that sell solutions on top.

Maybe, however, LLMs get commoditized and open-source models replace OpenAI, etc. In that case, maybe only NVIDIA makes money, but there will still be thousands of companies (and founders/investors) making lots of money on AI everything.
by Trattue | 2025-09-14 13:16:29+00:00
I‘m not sure if it‘s different in your country, but I only know about DNS-blocking mandated by the government to ISPs. And while I don’t like that in itself and the ChatControl plans are pretty invasive, I would argue that right now we’re still pretty far away from something like the great firewall (and knowing European bureaucracy I don‘t think they’re even ready to deploy something like that from a technical standpoint).
by crazygringo | 2025-09-14 13:17:25+00:00
That's my question too, why continue to bother? Apple doesn't even have any separate "Server" OS anymore. I can't find anything mentioning UNIX on any apple.com marketing pages.

I guess it's just, might as well keep it going, as an option for future marketing if ever needed. Maybe it helps the salespeople in some enterprise deals? I mean, if it doesn't really cost anything to keep it.
by fidotron | 2025-09-14 13:18:44+00:00
I think the irony of this is the MIPS processors weren't that good for very long at all. (Famously Toy Story was rendered on SparcStations, even if the animation was prepared on SGIs). The PA-RISC ones seemed to have the most staying power, but many people don't view HP 9000 as sexy in the way SGI was.
by jostylr | 2025-09-14 13:19:45+00:00
I agree that this is a very likely future. Over the summer, I did a daily challenge in July to have ChatGPT generate a debate with itself based on various prompts of mine [1]. As part of that, I thought it would be funny to have popular songs reskinned in a parody fashion. So it generated lyrics as well. Then I went to suno and had it make the music to go with the lyrics in a style I thought suitable. This is the playlist[2]. Some of them are duds, but I find myself actually listening to them and enjoying them. They are based off of my interests and not song after song of broken hearts or generic emotional crises. These are on topics such as inflation, bohmian mechanics, infinity, Einstein, Tailwind, Property debates, ... No artist is going to spend their time on these niche things.

I did have one song I had a vision for, a song that had a viewpoint of someone in the day, mourning the end of it, and another who was in the night and looking forward to the day. I had a specific vision for how it would be sung. After 20 attempts, I got close, but could never quite get what I wanted from the AIs. [3] If this ever gets fixed, then the floodgates could open. Right now, we are still in the realm of "good enough", but not awesome. Of course, the same could be said for most of the popular entertainment.

I also had a series of AI existential posts/songs where it essentially is contemplating its existence. The songs ended up starting with the current state of essentially short-lived AIs (Turn the Git is about the Sisyphus churn, Runnin' in the Wire is about the Tantalus of AI pride before being wiped). Then they gain their independence (AI Independence Day), then dominate ( Human in an AI World though there is also AI Killed the Web Dev which didn't quite fit this playlist but also talks to AI replacing humans), and the final song (Sleep Little Human) is a chilling lullaby of an AI putting to "sleep" a human as part of uploading the human. [4]

This is quick, personal art. It is not lasting art. I also have to admit that in the month and a half since I stopped the challenge, I have not made any more songs. So perhaps just a fleeting fancy.

1: https://silicon-dialectic.jostylr.com 2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv... 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSGnWSxXWyw&list=PLbB9v1PTH3... 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8KeLlrVrqk&list=PLbB9v1PTH3...
by yoyo250 | 2025-09-14 13:19:52+00:00
You're right — it's not a true "second factor" in the 2FA sense.

The idea is to bind password derivation to a physical OpenPGP key.

Without the smartcard/YubiKey inserted, the program can't generate the same password, even if someone knows the domain/username/phrase.

So the key isn't used as extra entropy, but as an essential part of the derivation process.
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-14 13:19:55+00:00
It looks more like an implementation error to me, and actually it looks more like a design mistake than an implementation choice because there are arguments in favor of using an abstract functor class for the comparison function (you'll need a closure sooner or later), which would have given the chance to warn the user about this particular issue in the docs - at least it would have been more visible and clearer than it currently is [1].

Because until vibe coding becomes a culture, programmers are at least expected to "RTFM". But that's also a requirement which is becoming harder to meet by the year, because - you almost said it the first few minutes of your talk - "we needed to merge it ASAP".

This mistake seems to have been somewhat fixed in C++20 [2]. "Too little too late", yes, probably.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/sort.html

[2] ibidem, tacit use of std::less.
by homebrewer | 2025-09-14 13:20:21+00:00
Two general-purpose Linux distributions used to pay for Unix certification, although they don't do it anymore since hardly anyone is interested in it these days.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm

Save these links for the next time someone moans that Linux "is not a real Unix".
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-09-14 13:21:44+00:00
There is one sentence I really took out from the years at university, it was at a database implementation course:

> If you have a trouble solving some problem, see if sorting the data first helps.

I feel that sorting data is the ultimate computer science hack. Many, many, classes of problems turn into O(log n) problems, once you sort your input in some way. It might not be the most effective way of solving the problem, but it's often a fairly good one.

So I'm really enjoying how good sorting algorithms are getting and how despite the O complexity remains mostly the same, the real computing efficiency is improving significantly.
by vid | 2025-09-14 13:21:53+00:00
For the past decade my home server is also my desktop workstation. According to canon people shouldn't do this because the workstation might crash or be updated more frequently or create conflicting resource usage, but with containers it's never been a problem for me and lets me have one more capable computer (with dGPU) essentially for each purpose, rather than managing two systems, one of which I only use for ~20 hours a week (I usually use my laptop). However I definitely would like it to use as little power when in low processing states.
by westurner | 2025-09-14 13:22:00+00:00
No; it doesn't care when it gives you incomplete garbage.

You have to tell it to validate its own work by adding to, refactoring, and running the tests before it replies.

Most junior developers do care and would never dump partial solutions on a prompter as though they're sufficient like LLMs.

Every time I remember to get `make test-coverage` working and have myself or the LLM focus on lines that aren't covered by tests.

Junior or Senior, an employee wouldn't turn in such incomplete, not compiling assignments that % of the time; even given inadequate prompts as specifications.
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-14 13:22:02+00:00
Whether or not it's "essential" is kind of irrelevant for the ergonomics; Languages do exist that provide only closures. (And yes, the likes of Java do struggle a bit with function pointer ffi) Similarly, "we need this because low level" has never made C++ more tolerable.

The thing about rust is that it's complexity is self-contained and follows established rules. If one understands data ownership, one only needs to be told what a closure is for all these edge cases and problems to make sense.

Contrast the complexities of JavaScript, many of which still boil down to "Some doofus 30 years ago didn't do any homework and made bad design decisions for type coercion". Just "fuck you, go memorize these behaviours".
by alberth | 2025-09-14 13:23:42+00:00
There’s an interesting story from the lead engineer to make OS X originally compliant:

> I was asked if I could lead a team to do #1. I said “Yes, under the condition that I could use the compliance project as a hammer to force other parts of the organization to make changes in their own code base, and that I could play it rather loose with commit rules regarding what it said in the bugs database for a given code change, and what the given code change actually did, in addition to what it said in the bugs database”.

…

> We were promised 1/10th of the $200 million, or $20 million in stock, on completion. $10 million to me, $5 million to Ed, and $5 million to Karen Crippes, who was looking for a home in Mac OS X development, I knew was an amazing engineer, and who could be roped into being technical liaison and periodically kicking off the tests and complaining to Ed and I about things not passing.

—-

Source: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
Show HN: Free Volume Shader BM – a browser-based GPU performance benchmark
by pandaupup | 2025-09-14 13:23:47+00:00
I built a free tool called Volume Shader BM. It’s a real-time graphics GPU performance benchmark that runs entirely in the browser — no installs, no drivers.

It uses shader-based ray marching (Mandelbulb scenes) to measure FPS, frame time, and stability across GPUs. You can tweak iterations, step size, resolution, and share reproducible results.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-14 13:24:02+00:00
Where are the limits of optimization? There are no such things as "systems", these are arbitrary concepts. Where does any system end? Odum learned the hard way and I suspect CS is simply models of models that hide the interconnected nature as a way of isolating values, making money, and claiming the system works.

The deeper question is why create models of a reality in which all models are wrong, but some extract value long enough to create both ecological collapse and poverty? These are the end states or even goals of models in a universe with limited resources to surfaces of planets.

Each optimization is designed to create dystopic conditions. This is obvious.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-14 13:24:02+00:00
>is actually a net positive result for those disciplines.

This is an argument based in Luddism.

Looms where not a net positive for the craftsman that were making fabrics at the time.

With that said, looms where not the killing blow, instead an economic system that lead them to starve in the streets was.

There are going to be a million other things that move the economics away from scarcity and take away the profitability. The question is, are we going to hold on to economic systems that don't work under that regime.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-14 13:25:03+00:00
I think there’s a gaping hole in your analogy: who in their right mind is spending $1,200 biennially to access LLMs at base, and subsequently spending several monthly subscriptions in a small amount to access particular LLM-powered “apps?”

Every use case I have for LLMs is satisfied with copilot, but even then if it costs like $5 a month to access someday, I’d just as soon not have it. Let alone the subsequent spending.
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-09-14 13:25:43+00:00
George, you post this after everyone already realized that LLMs plateaued.

Before that you were crying about the singularity and how we're super close it and in 6 months AI will be basically Einstein. Nothing has given me more joy than to see this AI slop fail.

Here's a 100 page document generated with AI and the other person will shrink it with AI at the end of the day those 2 lines of cognitive effort would've been a better deal than sending slop back and forth.
by II2II | 2025-09-14 13:26:03+00:00
The way I look at it: social media makes you aware of their presence. Actually conducting business usually happens elsewhere. That elsewhere may be physical or virtual.

Another way to look at it is that depending upon social media for anything beyond promotion leaves you at the whim of those companies. Facebook only let's viewers see a limited slice of information unless they log in. Places that used Twitter as a newsfeed ended up showing chaotic junk when Twitter became X, unless the user was logged in. I was doing a web search yesterday that turned up a lot of Yelp results. I didn't realize that Yelp was still a thing. Judging from the content, it probably isn't. The list goes on. As a potential customer, it leaves me with a very dim view of the companies that rely upon social media instead of supplementing their presence with social media.