MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by satisfice | 2025-10-15 04:12:23+00:00
In the early nineties I was test manager of the Borland Profiler. I didn’t supervise the tester of the profiler closely enough, and discovered only when customers complained that the profiler results were off by a quarter second on every single measurement reported.

It turns out that the tester had not been looking closely at the output, other than to verify that output consisted of numbers. He didn’t have any ideas about how to test it, so he opted for mere aesthetics.

This is one of many incidents that convinced me to look closely and carefully at the work of testers I depend upon. Testing is so easy to fake.
by wraptile | 2025-10-15 04:12:56+00:00
> because people are generally happy with their phones.

Maybe thats exactly why it can succeed now. The phone tech has plateud to the point where a 5 year old phone performs almost identically as a new one and this is when people can afford to experiment and take more risks.

Also its much easier for free software to catch up now as most problems are already solved and/or easy to copy.
by daxfohl | 2025-10-15 04:14:53+00:00
Basically, the event horizon is the event horizon is the event horizon. If two non-steady-state matter/anti black holes merge (like before everything has hit the singularities), it will cause explosions inside the BH, but energy is mass is energy is mass, so for an external observer it's indiscernable. It will look no different from two all-matter BHs merging.
by Worldblender | 2025-10-15 04:14:57+00:00
Finally! It took the FSF long enough to catch up with the overwhelming usage of mobile devices, but it's better late than never.

I like that this project is trying to tackle something much more challenging that can't be done with just software: reverse engineering device firmware and binary blobs, the pieces of software that actually make hardware components interface with an OS. Understanding how this stuff functions is key to being able to write replacement software, so we may have less non-free software to deal with. I don't have any experience in trying to reverse engineer software, so the best I can do for now is cheer on from outside, unless I want to try my hands at this stuff later.

I also like that this project is not intending to produce an Android-based distro, but focusing more on reverse engineering. Although I read that the results are targeted at helping developers of Android-compatible OSes, the results can hopefully be used by non-Android [GNU/]Linux distros and perhaps other *nix stuff, like the BSD distros. The FSF (by way of developer Rob Savoye) recognizing that a project like this is not going to be quick, easy, or cheap, and is a long term effort is good, as that likely means this project isn't going to be easily abandoned just because of not being able to produce quick results.

I hope that this whole effort can eventually let us break free of the Apple-Google mobile device duopoly, as it sure is getting tiring for me to stick with one of these two companies for my mobile computing needs.
by cozzyd | 2025-10-15 04:15:35+00:00
And to be clear, I'm not necessarily against running readsb I just don't want to run random bash scripts that mess with a running system...

It looks like readsb is an evolution of dump1090 with potentially more features? I'll look into it when we consider reworking our software. For now I added a quick socat and I'll find out soon if it worked (no planes currently over Summit...). It would be nice if these websites advertised "Start feeding from your running dump1090 instance with socat tcp:localhost:30005 tcp:foo.bar:30004, here is a systemd service that does that."

edit: it worked! airplanes.live now tracking QTR28V from Seattle to Doha.

But to conserve bandwidth, it might make sense to send through a compressed ssh tunnel to something not in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-15 04:15:39+00:00
Maybe, but that pain point isn't something free software is going to fix. Obviously not everyone has the same problems with their phone, but largely I think they fall into a few categories: notification overload, apps designed to keep you scrolling for every last minute of the day, and dark patterns or other design choices aimed at separating users from as much of their money as possible.

Every single one of these is fixable on any modern phone. Stop using social media, take a hatchet to what apps can send you notifications and when, and be more mindful of what tricks are commonly deployed to steal your attention, time, and money.

But people can't even manage that. They don't even have to do anything, they just have to stop doing certain things, but they can't or won't. Those same people aren't going to go through the effort to switch, and even if they did they would end up re-creating the same thing that makes them miserable currently.
by sailfast | 2025-10-15 04:16:06+00:00
ADM Rickover was no small part of the success of the nuclear program if I recall it right. Rigorous standards and a culture of safety.

I also wonder if culturally DODEA is cut from a similar cloth and had a similarly strong founding impetus / strategy. The pentagon / DoD contains multitudes, and the culture of each branch, agency, etc are all different in different ways. Some for the better… some worse.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-15 04:16:42+00:00
Heat pumps (they work down to -10F, and can be supplemented with fossil or wood heating, if needed).

https://www.nhpr.org/new-england-news/2024-07-24/new-england...

https://portal.ct.gov/deep/energy/new-england-heat-pump-acce...
by david38 | 2025-10-15 04:17:36+00:00
Standard engineering. You fix the thing that breaks the system first. Fix that, the next bug appears. Rinse, repeat.

You don’t think we have been doing this already? Car safety improved, general violence, death by food poisoning, etc. Now we have contacts, knee replacement surgery, meniscus surgery, widespread information on fitness for the elderly, etc.

You have many specialized fields slowly improving. The top focus changes as the previous top problems get solutions.
by pickledonions49 | 2025-10-15 04:17:48+00:00
From what I can tell, some professionals seem to perceive it as a way to not write the easy stuff and only deal with the harder, more specific stuff that llms don't get (because they are incapable of new ideas). I don't know all the facts, but it seems as though this "home cooked software" boom will be really dull because of llm limitations. It always seems like I am actually learning something when copying code from books, maybe that is one reason why the 80s was interesting in terms of software, but what do I know, I wasn't alive.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-10-15 04:17:58+00:00
People are injured by celebratory fire all the time. That said, getting hit by a stray bullet of any sort is very very rare, which is the reason the stories stick in your head. Children get killed and injured (or injure others) by playing with unsecured guns as well.

The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-15 04:18:08+00:00
It depends on what definition of "uncomplicated" you'll assume, but that's pretty much how I perceive my Librem 5. It's fairly inspectable and relatively easy to understand as a computing device - no weird stuff like hundreds of disk partitions that you can't touch without risking bricking the phone like on Qualcomm devices, but a fairly regular GNU/Linux installation with well-defined boundaries on what's open and what's not - and it runs web apps pretty well. I have things like my bank, public transit planner, ride-hailing, webmail, RSS reader, Matrix client, package delivery status, even Facebook & Messenger for the handful of people that can still be only reached there - all "installed" as web apps using Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). Some of them required a bit of fiddling to discover which user-agent leads to a usable experience, but the results have been pretty good so far. In case I really need to run some Android app for some reason, I can boot Waydroid up and launch it there, though I use it very rarely. No corporate economic interests, no privacy invasions, no invasive notifications or ads, it simply works the way I want it to work. I just have to be careful with battery usage, but it's manageable :)
by rtpg | 2025-10-15 04:18:29+00:00
Do military K-12 schools not face similar dynamics? It's not like the kids are who are in the military, right?

Obviously there are still different dynamics between an arbitrary public school and a school on a military base in Kanagawa for many reasons, but I have to imagine that there are similar diversity of goals and lack of "throwing out" the kids in these schools.

Just seems like the flavor of challenges that public schools face and k-12 mil schools face are a bit similar, except for a huge one: the kids in the mil schools are much more likely to have three square meals a day(etc etc).
by timv | 2025-10-15 04:18:56+00:00
The argument here is that they're confident that the bounds check isn't needed, and would prefer the compiler not insert one.

The choices therefore are:

1. No bound check

2. Bounds check inserted, but that branch isn't covered by tests

3. Bounds check inserted, and that branch is covered by tests

I'm skeptical of the claim that if (3) is infeasible then the next best option is (1)

Because if it is indeed an impossible scenario, then the lack of coverage shouldn't matter. If it's not an impossible scenario then you have an untested case with option (1) - you've overrun the bounds of an array, which may not be a branch in the code but is definitely a different behaviour than the one you tested.
by IAmGraydon | 2025-10-15 04:19:06+00:00
It’s shareholder driven. They have to act like they’re still innovative even though they have no idea where to actually innovate at this point. So they chose to change something very visible that they could point to as a big innovative change to keep share prices moving in the right direction. Ever heard of end-stage capitalism? Well, this is it - when every principle is sacrificed in the name of revenue.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-15 04:19:51+00:00
> These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age.

Before the last glacial period == 100,000 year ago. This is 12,000 years ago. If we assume (big big assumption here) that there's only really a single unbroken line of civilization, and also assume (big big assumption) roughly exponential growth till now, then no, 100kya would be too long ago.

But those two assumptions are not really safe to make. It's just that we _can't_ know yet.

I suspect that the Sphinx water erosion thing is real and correct, and the Sphinx much older than ancient Egypt.
by calibas | 2025-10-15 04:21:54+00:00
> _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_

Surveillance makes their jobs easier, so there's a kind of natural tendency towards authoritarianism. We've known about this for a long time, the 4th Amendment was created to put limits on government surveillance.

If you're wondering why the government would allow private businesses to spy on everybody when the government itself isn't allowed to, that's because this allows for the government to effectively bypass the 4th Amendment. The government spying on everybody is against the Constitution, but a private business spying on everybody and selling the data to the government is "legal".
by hakfoo | 2025-10-15 04:22:54+00:00
If they can hold on for another 20 years, the PRC could probably have Taiwan without firing a shot.

The US isn't going to get back manufacturing capacity on China's scale, and without real long-term economic plans beyond "bet it all on AGI", what they do have is going to be further strained. They can pump pork into the defense industry specifically, but probably not forever. You can't make a functional economy out of twelve fighter-jet plants and 500,000,000 hectares of unsellable soy.

So over time, you've got a defense partner that's finding it harder and harder to play World Police on a grand scale, and a trading partner that's less and less wealthy and able to dictate terms. Eventually, Taipei will pick up a BRICS application form out of self-interest.
by 1313ed01 | 2025-10-15 04:22:59+00:00
If anyone wants to do this in DOS, one thing I learned from the 1991 BLUE Book is that BLOAD can be used to load a binary file straight to graphics card memory. https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

There was a site hosting the author's freeware utilities (now only on the web archive?), and one is a graphics editor made for that purpose ("EBS: Screen editor for BLOAD pages"):

https://web.archive.org/web/20060410121551/http://scottserve...

From a quick search BLOAD is available in Commodore BASIC as well. Would be interesting to hear how it compares to the optimized loop that PRINTs the image, if the same trick works on a C64?

* No... BLOAD was added in some later version, e.g. for C128, not any of the versions running on C64 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BASIC_7.0#Commodore_BASIC_Comm... ... But I guess the speed of reading a few kB from a C64 disk drive compared to a 1991 PC hard disk may make it a pretty bad idea anyway if speed is important. On the other hand it would make the program itself smaller and faster to load, so difficult to guess if the total time to render the screen would have increased or not.
by dang | 2025-10-15 04:23:25+00:00
Related:

Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 - Jan 2024 (118 comments)

Disk Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377826 - Oct 2022 (65 comments)

Disk Prices on Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156292 - Jan 2020 (222 comments)
by wtfwhateven | 2025-10-15 04:23:47+00:00
Not surprised

“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,”

"I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he said, without elaborating. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

were lies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...
by propagandist | 2025-10-15 04:25:47+00:00
For what it's worth, my opinion is that there was no a better platform than social media to host that material.

The media companies are virtually all editorially aligned with one side, and they put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to the news about this subject.

The mainstream reporting is so clinically sanitized that it loses all potency and the sense of urgency. They were never going to be conduits for this material.

The best platform is the one that allows you to reach a wide audience so the onus is on them to archive, not on the vulnerable people being hunted with impunity.
by musicale | 2025-10-15 04:26:16+00:00
So CHERI makes a 2.5 GHz ARM CPU slower than an underpowered Atom? For what benchmarks?

(Disclosure: I had a ~1GHz? atom mini-PC recently until it bricked. It could technically boot Windows 10 or Linux, but it was not fast.)

Do you think that MTE will make an Apple M5 slower than an Atom as well?
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-10-15 04:28:28+00:00
> So you can have the technology that allows you to comment here (Starlink),

People have been posting on chat / message boards for a few decades now. This is not novel. Not sure the quality of discussion has improved since the modem days (14.4k was my first).

> or drive home from work (GPS)

Tens of millions of us learned how to read maps and road signs once upon a time. You can actually fit several states' worth of maps into most car glove compartments, it is quite wild.

> or cure cancer (various ISS research)

There has been lots of cheering of all the cuts that DOGE made, including cancer and other disease related research and prevention, so this seems a rather moot point.

> survive as a species

Oh yes! First crewed mission to mars according to Musk is just what, 3 years away now?
by t8sr | 2025-10-15 04:29:01+00:00
1. Your argument is about the grammar of a sentence about black holes on Wikipedia? This isn’t some kind of gotcha.

2. I missed the dwarf part, but think about what you’re arguing: the mass range of a loosely defined category (the lower bound of a few thousands is not one I’ve ever heard, btw) that has nothing to do with the paper in question. Collections of stars of any kind produce light. This doesn’t. What are you saying?

What do you think physicists do all day?
by seszett | 2025-10-15 04:29:10+00:00
> For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted

In practice, that just means you trust a Chinese black box Android ROM from a random manufacturer, but not a fresh Lineage OS. To run some banking apps there, one has to root it and install all kinds of crap to hide the fact that your phone is running an OS you actually can trust.

I don't think it's right, I don't think non-manufacturer provided ROMs are a real danger in practice, or rooted phones, and I think this is all just security theater and an excuse to control what people do on their own devices.
by kstrauser | 2025-10-15 04:29:24+00:00
Wow, this reminded me that tape drives exist.

The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.

The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.

Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.
by gbear605 | 2025-10-15 04:30:00+00:00
Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-15 04:30:17+00:00
COS's airfield is also used by PSFB so you'll see different patterns than a normal airport. You find similar patterns, though, near other military bases like here, near Pensacola and Eglin:

https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=Planes&zoom=8&lat=29.7992&lng=...
by lmm | 2025-10-15 04:30:32+00:00
> The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.

If they pay for the phone and ship it to you then I agree. Otherwise, they have an obligation to serve their community (part of their banking charter) and that may include meeting their customers where they are, rather than offering an app with unreasonable usage requirements.
by aeonfox | 2025-10-15 04:30:40+00:00
Enjoyed this balanced perspective on Elixir.

In regards to this:

> My bet? The language with the best feedback loop to LLMs wins. TypeScript has a huge advantage here. Static types give LLMs clear signals about correctness.

Tencent designed their own methodology of testing LLMs across languages. Elixir topped the lot on AutoCodeBench in terms of problems solved correctly:

https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark?tab=rea...

An alternate bet might be that context efficiency wins. The more expressive, comprehensible, and idiomatic languages have the advantage.
by seabombs | 2025-10-15 04:31:01+00:00
In my experience, the people using AI to make programs are still programmers. As in, they were trained in programming pre-AI. Managers are using AI to output manager stuff - documents, spreadsheets, etc. Similarly, marketers are using AI to write ad copy, not the marketing manager.

This may change as tools become better known or adopted. But for know the same people who did the job before are now using AI in that job.

FWIW, in my IRL experience, all the work output of those using AI for whatever task has been of poorer quality than without.
by aw1621107 | 2025-10-15 04:31:30+00:00
> And even if there's some fundamental issue with how traits work that hasn't been resolved for six years, that can get brushed off as merely a compiler bug.

Is it getting brushed off as merely a compiler bug? At least if I'm thinking of the same bug as you [0] the discussion there seems to be more along the lines of the devs treating it as a "proper" language issue, not a compiler bug. At least as far as I can tell there hasn't been a resolution to the design issue, let alone any work towards implementing a fix in the compiler.

The soundness issue that I see more frequently get "brushed off as merely a compiler bug" is the lifetime variance one underpinning cve-rs [1], which IIRC the devs have long decided what the proper behavior should be but actually implementing said behavior is blocked behind some major compiler reworks.

> has made a lot of backwards-incompatible changes

Not sure I've seen much evidence for "a lot" of compatibility breaks outside of the edition system. Perhaps I'm just particularly (un)lucky?

> because there is no such thing as a design issue in "the Rust language"

I'm not sure any of the Rust devs would agree? Have any of them made a claim along those lines?

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/57893

[1]: https://github.com/Speykious/cve-rs
by aiunt | 2025-10-15 04:32:28+00:00
John Oliver is well-known for his shameless propagandizing even more so than Bari Weiss is. He particularly relies on lies of omission and attacking strawman arguments. This video is the pot calling the kettle black.

Moral smugness combined with a total lack of intellectual curiosity, dressed up as comedy, does not make for reliable analysis on anything.
by freeqaz | 2025-10-15 04:32:28+00:00
I think the better comparison, for consumers, is how fast is LPDDR5 compared to the normal DDR5 attached to your CPU?

Or, to be more specific, what is the speed when your GPU is out of RAM and it's reading from main memory over the PCI-E bus?

PCI-E 5.0: 64GB/s @ 16x or 32GB/s @ 8x 2x 48GB (96GB) of DDR5 in an AM5 rig: ~50GB/s

Versus the ~300GB/s+ possible with a card like this, it's a lot faster for large 'dense' models. Yes, even an NVIDIA 3090 is ~900GB/s of bandwidth, but it's only 24GB, so even a card like this Xe3P is likely to 'win' because of the higher memory available.

Even if it's 1/3rd of the speed of an old NVIDIA card, it's still 6x+ the speed of what you can get in a desktop today.