MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-10-04 14:36:13+00:00
> By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.

The PS3 is the last console to have actual specialized hardware. After the PS3, everything is just regular ol' CPU and regular ol' GPU running in a custom form factor (and a stripped-down OS on top of it); before then, with the exception of the Xbox, everything had customized coprocessors that are different from regular consumer GPUs.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-04 14:36:19+00:00
I can't practically carry around two different phones all day at work, especially given how big they are now. (It's not like I work at a desk, I'm constantly running between different classrooms and other spaces.) The "work" phone would end up being the one I had on my person most of the time.

...but frankly, I am such a geek that it doesn't really matter for me. I have a tiny 11-inch laptop that I usually keep somewhere nearby, or I can VNC into my home desktop computer from my phone.

The thing is that normal people shouldn't have to do this! I say this as someone who does believe that everyone should become more tech-literate and capable with computers. One of the subjects I teach is 5th grade computer science. I don't expect all or even most of my kids to become professional software engineers, but I want them to know enough that they'll be able to make computers work for them instead of the other way around. This is one of the reasons I became a teacher.

I don't expect all of my students to buy and carry around multiple phones in order to protect democracy.
by Zak | 2025-10-04 14:36:33+00:00
I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years. I'm happily running Linux on a tablet (a Microsoft tablet at that). I run a third-party Android build with root on my primary phone. I am the ideal user for a fiddly operating system.

I put PostmarketOS on a spare phone and spent a good bit of time playing with it. It would be painful to try to daily it at this time, and completely unusable for many of the common smartphone use cases.
by achierius | 2025-10-04 14:37:19+00:00
I appreciate your trying to engage in this but I don't think your response is founded in historical fact.

> most peasants did not own their own land,

If you mean most individuals then sure, but on a per household basis actually most peasants did indeed have land to call their own. E.g. reference The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England. The "bottom rung" was predominantly half-virgater villeins, who were unfree leaseholders with barely enough to feed their family -- but they did still 'own' their land insofar as they had perpetual usufruct to it, and by the early 1500s paid essentially nothing in rent due to inflation and hereditary fixed rent levels.

> What peasant life offered wasn't comfort but stability.

Sure, I don't disagree. I never tried to claim that peasant life was great and enjoyable -- but people, especially people with kids to take care of, tend to value a baseline of stability above all else.
by Theodores | 2025-10-04 14:37:28+00:00
This reminds me of SGI at the peak of the dot-com bubble.

SGI (Silicon Graphics) made the 3D hardware that many companies relied on for their own businesses, in the days before Windows NT and Nvidia came of age.

Alias|Wavefront and Discreet were two companies where their product cycles were very tied in the SGI product cycles, with SGI having some ownership, whether it be wholly owned or spun out (as SGI collapsed). I can't find the reporting from the time, but it seemed to me that the SGI share price was propped up by product launches from the likes of Alias|Wavefront or Discreet. Equally, the 3D software houses seemed to have share prices propped up by SGI product launches.

There was also the small matter of insider trading. If you knew the latest SGI boxes were lemons then you could place your bets of the 3D software houses accordingly.

Eventually Autodesk, Computer Associates and others eventually owned all the software, or, at least, the user bases. Once upon a time these companies were on the stock market and worth billions, but then they became just another bullet point in the Autodesk footer.

My prediction is that a lot of AI is like that, a classic bubble, and, when the show moves on, all of these AI products will get shoehorned into the three companies that will survive, with competition law meaning that it will be three rather than two eventual winners.

Equally, much like what happened with SGI, Nvidia will eventually come a cropper due to the evaluations due to today's hype and hubris not delivering.
by delusional | 2025-10-04 14:38:34+00:00
> only mildly informative

I agree, but would like to maybe build out that theory. When we start talking about the mechanisms of the past we end up over-constricting the possibility space. There were a ton of different ways the dotcom bubble COULD have played out, and only one way it did. If we view the way it did as the only way it possibly could have, we'll almost certainly miss the way the next bubble will play out.
by pas | 2025-10-04 14:38:35+00:00
... information theoretically... you can't

it's okay

there's already some fraud, waste, loss, inefficiencies, accidents (packages lost, chargebacks by mistake, package arrives weeks later)

....

that said the chips have some physical protection, it's not trivial to clone them

and the chip has a variable where it stores how much more you can use without online confirmation

of course, these are cheap protective measures, but to crack it you would need more effort probably than the total credit that's assigned for offline spending
by JCM9 | 2025-10-04 14:39:38+00:00
The smartest finance folks I know say that this “irrational exuberance” works until it doesn’t. Meaning nobody really thinks it’s sustainable, but companies and VCs chasing the AI hype bubble have backed themselves into a corner where the only way to stop the bubble from bursting is to keep inflating the bubble.

The fate of the bubble will be decided by Wall Street not tech folks in the valley. Wall Street is already positioning itself for the burst and there’s lots of finance types ready to call party over and trigger the chaos that lets them make bank on the bubble’s implosion.

These finance types (family offices, small secret investment funds) eat clueless VCs throwing cash on the fire for lunch… and they’re salivating at what’s ahead. It’s a “Big Short” once in 20-30 years type opportunity.
by sethammons | 2025-10-04 14:40:15+00:00
Related, a recent study suggests up to 1% of our mantle is water trapped within rock that gets released as subduction increases to higher heat and pressure. This water could account for three times the amount of water on the surface and may represent a whole-Earth water cycle.

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=111648

I wonder how this ties in with the submitted link about Theia. And it will be interesting if we ever get similar trapped water discovered in martian rock.
by madeofpalk | 2025-10-04 14:40:19+00:00
On the other hand, from my experience, large development teams cannot write CSS at scale. "Writing clean CSS code" doesn't seem to be a skill that most (frontend) developers seem to value, so abstractions like CSS Modules (which is barely an abstraction - it's just compile-time BEM) and CSS-in-JS came up to manage complexity of both a large codebase and large team.
by estearum | 2025-10-04 14:40:29+00:00
Is that what they tell you when you’re standing in the gallery with a checkbook? Or in the boardroom with a signature?

No, you almost never see art that wasn’t meant to be sold. Public art pieces are commissioned (sold), art in galleries were created by professional artists (even if commercially unsuccessful) 99.99999% of the time.

Surely if this wasn’t true, you could point to a few specific examples of art — or even broad categories of art — that weren’t made to be sold and that you have personally seen?
by graemep | 2025-10-04 14:40:36+00:00
It seems a lot less political than the codes of conduct that most large FOSS projects have. Its also not specific to any particular culture as those often are. Its not taking a stance on any specific issue such as those you mentioned.

Its just saying "anti-fascist" which is a pretty uncontroversial thing to say. I am pretty sure the vast majority of people are opposed to fascism.
by delusional | 2025-10-04 14:40:46+00:00
> There's no way this won't end up with a lot of idle GPUs.

Nvidia is betting the farm on reinventing GPU compute every 2 years. The GPUs wont end up idle, because they will end up in landfills.

Do I believe that's likely, no, but it is what I believe Nvidia is aiming for.
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-04 14:41:21+00:00
What does he lack of personalized software, and no landslide of AI slop-apps mean? We're all all-in on vibe-coding, I haven't written a line of Java in 6 months, only prompts, but nothing seems to be catching fire. Why? Aren't LLMs as great as we've been influenced?
by bradly | 2025-10-04 14:41:23+00:00
> why would I want an external tool over an integration?

I do not feel comfortable running agents the same computer I have my photos, email, browser cookies, etc. on my personal computer, so giving Jules access to my GitHub project was a nice experience for me. It was able read my Gemfile and run my Rails app's test suite without me having to worry about all my private data on my machine. The code wasn't great, but it did help with coders block to kick off some features.
by ben_w | 2025-10-04 14:42:09+00:00
At the moment, rapid and massive expansion seems likely with tech only just on the horizon.

Enough AI and robotics for an autonomous factory may be a mirage (such mirages have (metaphorically) happened before), but it seems like it's on the horizon.

Even with relatively mundane growth assumptions, that can go from "species inventing writing" to "Dyson sphere completed, is now sending out seeds to every accessible galaxy" on significantly less than the timescale of light crossing a spiral galaxy's disk.
by lazystar | 2025-10-04 14:42:11+00:00
> What external factor makes the models less useful?

Life. A great example can be seen in the AI-generated baseball-related news articles that involve the Athletics organization. AI articles this year have been generating articles that incorrectly state that the Atlanta Braves played in games that were actually played by the Athletics, and the reason is due to the outdated training model. For the last 60 years before 2025, the Athletics played in Oakland, and during that time their acronym was OAK. In 2025, they left Oakland for Sacramento, and changed their acronym to ATH. The problem is that AI models are trained on 60 years of data where 1. team acronyms are always based on the city, rather than the mascot of the team, and 2. acronyms OAK = Athletics, ATL = Atlanta Braves, and ATH = nothing. As a result, an AI model that doesnt have context "OAK == ATH in the 2025 season" will see ATH in the input data, associates ATH with nothing in it's model, and will then erroneously assume ATH is a typo for ATL.
by kentonv | 2025-10-04 14:43:41+00:00
Well, speeding up the gameplay doesn't affect the number of commercial breaks. There are 18 guaranteed commercial breaks per game (two per inning). I suppose the density of ads goes up. Good deal for advertisers.

(Additional commercial breaks may happen due to mid-inning pitching changes, and I suppose it's possible that the pitch clock affects the number of pitching changes, but it's not obvious to me whether they'd become more frequent or less frequent.)

(Though separately, they did make other rules to reduce the frequency of pitching changes. But OTOH pitching changes have been gradually becoming more common for decades, with starters hardly ever completing a game anymore.)
by Herring | 2025-10-04 14:43:55+00:00
It's basically about racism and control. One of the key reasons the US didn't get universal healthcare in the Social Security Act of 1935(!) was because FDR relied on Southern Democrats who thought it was a threat to segregation. That culture is still very much alive.

Conservatives in the US see the world as a power hierarchy and their most important job is to uphold it, like they are princes next in line to be King. See how hard they fight China and cut social services to funnel money up to billionaires. They will literally die for it.
by jevinskie | 2025-10-04 14:44:19+00:00
Vivado, along with expensive adaptors, supports some JTAG dongles that are just FT2232 with an EEPROM that contains USB descriptors that Vivado recognizes and treats as a (some low cost onboard adaptor for Digilent boards, IIRC) supported adapter. https://gist.github.com/rikka0w0/24b58b54473227502fa0334bbe7...

If you like FT2232, you’ll love the Tigard board that takes a FT2232H and adds level shifters and is basically as tricked out as you can make a FTDI adapter. https://github.com/tigard-tools/tigard
by achierius | 2025-10-04 14:44:37+00:00
> Even "medieval peasantry" was a bit of an odd phrase.

It really isn't. This is the accepted term in academia, so long as you don't dispute the user of the term "medieval". While the period did see an outgrowth of cities, the vast majority (80%++) of the population was rural in almost every country throughout the period, including Scandinavian ones: Viking was a profession, not a culture, and the vast majority of Scandinavians, including Vikings, were in fact farmers, which is evidenced by how once the "Great Heathen Army" secured a foothold in Northumberland they proceeded to build a bunch of farms, thus all the places now named "-by" in northern England. Similarly, "Muslim civilization" was not a monolith. Yes, Arabia is not exactly conducive to settled agriculture, but Egypt and the Levant -- the political heartlands of Arab civilization from the 8th century and onwards -- were among the most agriculturally productive lands on earth, and a similarly large proportion of their population was engaged in the hereditary profession of agriculture as a result.

> There were massive social safety nets in the form of guilds, religious orders, and political patronage organizations. Disease was a much bigger threat than starvation.

This is true, and something very commonly overlooked. People think of medieval life as "brutish and short" but in reality these were stable, largely prosperous societies.
by vigilans | 2025-10-04 14:44:39+00:00
Did you get a genuine key? I never had one fail on me.

The immobilizer is the single best piece of technology for preventing car theft. If you create a backdoor for bypassing it, you'll end up like Hyundai/Kia which decided to sell cars without the immobilizer in recent years and which have turned into a joke in the minds of potential customers.

It does not require a battery in most cases and is separate from the keeloq system that controls your car's doors.
by delusional | 2025-10-04 14:44:40+00:00
> have backed themselves into a corner where the only way to stop the bubble from bursting is to keep inflating the bubble.

They are not in any corner. They rightly believe that they won't be allowed to fail. There's zero cost to inflating the bubble. If they tank a loss, it's not their money and they'll go on to somewhere else. If they get lucky (maybe skillful?) they get out of the bubble before anyone else, but get to ride it all the way to the top.

The only way they lose is if they sit by and do nothing. The upside is huge, and the downside is non-existent.
by philipkglass | 2025-10-04 14:45:38+00:00
Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.

McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?

I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.
by jdlshore | 2025-10-04 14:45:39+00:00
> As soon as we can prompt…

This is the fundamental error I see people making. LLMs can’t operate independently today, not on substantive problems. A lot of people are assuming that they will some day be able to, but the fact is that, today, they cannot.

The AI bubble has been driven by people seeing the beginning of an S-curve and combining it with their science-fiction fantasies about what AI is capable of. Maybe they’re right, but I’m skeptical, and I think the capabilities we see today are close to as good as LLMs are going to get. And today, it’s not good enough.
by relaxing | 2025-10-04 14:46:45+00:00
That really is the dream, isn’t it. To find work that is interesting, impactful, that you are uniquely qualified to do, and to be compensated handsomely for it.

It was probably easier to come by in 1987. Nowadays if you have a unique idea in computing, there’s 40 years’ worth of computing professionals around to step in and take the job.
by achierius | 2025-10-04 14:47:22+00:00
I'm familiar with Bret Devereaux, but you're underestimating the state of industrial labor. It did not suddenly get happy-cheery in 1833; if anything I would say almost another century of intense political organization was necessary before people were "secure" in their lives and jobs again. C.f. the Coal Wars in Appalachia.
by ianthehenry | 2025-10-04 14:47:40+00:00
Bonsai is a frontend framework that models data as an explicit graph, separate from any “component hierarchy” or DOM structure. State can live anywhere in the application graph, whether or not it’s associated with DOM nodes, and you eliminate all of the “move this state to the parent to share it” ceremony by just having “components” return their views and “outputs” at the same time (if they want).

It’s pretty great and hard to imagine going back to a React-like component hierarchy.
by apothegm | 2025-10-04 14:47:59+00:00
“Retaliation” is not the word I would use. Retaliation is the wrong reason for any decision in domestic politics. The right’s narrative of retaliation for imagined wrongs is a big part of the reason we’re in this position in the first place. (“The cruelty is the point.”)

On the other hand, re-leveling the playing field will be important — if the playing field even still exists in a few years.
by mcswell | 2025-10-04 14:48:09+00:00
The article says the light elements hydrogen, carbon and sulfur (and oxygen?) were only able to condense on the outer planets (and their moons). And the original article specifically says "the inner Solar System planets Venus and Mercury are largely devoid of volatile elements". If that's the case, why does Venus have so much carbon dioxide?

(I'm not saying the article is wrong, just trying to understand.)
by losvedir | 2025-10-04 14:48:58+00:00
So is the protocol sort of like a big public kafka topic?

If you want to create a new web app, say, you don't actually store the data yourself. You basically set up a listener to "the big topic in the sky" and ask your users to save all their data in their own respective places, which the protocol will propagate out into the world such that your app's listener will hear about and cache it. Do I have that right? It's a very interesting concept for how to build a web app while the users still own their data.

I don't have a great understanding of the process, though. Are their "offsets" or something to make sure you don't miss updates? Partitions for scalability? Maybe I'm pattern matching too hard to Kafka here.
by Amezarak | 2025-10-04 14:49:07+00:00
We've had multiple leaks and reports that the government was directly involved in these censorship cases prior to January 20, 2025. So no, that's not the difference.

On this very forum, people (not you) argued it was perfectly acceptable because the government was only "asking", not requiring.

Unfortunately, the civil libertarians have been drowned out for years by people who believed that it was right to do whatever it took to shut down right-wingers/misinformation/disinformation/hate speech/Russian propaganda/conspiracy theorists/Hunter laptop posters/whatever. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they are shocked and outraged, even as they built the tools, institutions, mechanisms, and political support used to do this.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-04 14:49:14+00:00
Libel for calling it malicious and a tort case for malicious interference in trace/commerce. Although, fighting google's lawyers is another matter. If they blocked it without reason, it would be difficult, but if they said it was malicious and that was a lie, regardless of ToS or contracts you have a libel case as the very least. IANAL.
by adventured | 2025-10-04 14:49:18+00:00
Depends on which companies we're talking about. Nvidia's annualized operating income is so high right now that it'll be capturing more value (op income) in the next four quarters (~$120 billion) than its R&D expenditures have cost over its 32 year history combined. For Nvidia the return has long since been achieved.

As the AI spending bubble gives out, Nvidia's profit growth will slow dramatically (single digits), and slamming into a wall (as Cisco did during the telecom bubble; leading up to the telecom crash, Cisco was producing rather insane quarter over quarter growth rates).
by dahart | 2025-10-04 14:49:29+00:00
Note the PEP does have a FAQ entry that mentions reasons they believe this proposed solution might be preferable to LazyLoader

https://pep-previews--4622.org.readthedocs.build/pep-0810/#f...

Q: Why not use importlib.util.LazyLoader instead?

A: LazyLoader has significant limitations:

Requires verbose setup code for each lazy import.

Has ongoing performance overhead on every attribute access.

Doesn’t work well with from ... import statements.

Less clear and standard than dedicated syntax.
by Cheer2171 | 2025-10-04 14:50:07+00:00
> their expectations are NOT reasonable. They expect ChatGPT to do their entire job for $20/month and hire, plan, budget accordingly.

This is entirely on the AI companies and their boosters. Sam Altman literally says gpt 5 is "like having a team of PhD-level experts in your pocket." All the commercials sell this fantasy.
by esjeon | 2025-10-04 14:50:12+00:00
FYI, build scripts are completely optional. Zig can build and run individual source code files regardless of build scripts (`build.zig`). You may need to decipher the build script to extract flags, but that's pretty much it. You can integrate Zig into any workflow that accepts GCC and Clang. (Note: `zig` is also a drop-in replacement C compiler[1])

[1]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...
by alganet | 2025-10-04 14:51:01+00:00
I can move the goalpost without relying on hallucinations or the ability to make fancy rethoric. Just make it about energy consumption, and the whole thing looks dumb again.

Humans can do these amazing things (like learning multiple languages) on a very tight energy budget. LLMs need millions of hours of training to deliver subpar results. If you consider the amount of resources poured into it, it's not that impressive.

If someone needs a measure and a prediction, let's make it then. LLMs will not surpass humans, given both are provided with the same energy budget, in a century. That means I am confident that, given the same energy budget as a human, it will take more than 100 years of development (I think it's more, but I'm being safe) to come up with something that can be trained to fool someone in a conversation.

Can you understand the energy argument from the intelligence perspective? This thing is big, dumb and wasteful. It just have more time (by cheating) to cover its bases. It can do some tricks and fool some people, but it's a whole different thing, and it is reasonable to not call it intelligent.