MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scottlamb | 2025-10-13 19:15:43+00:00
> You may even be able to get away with passive cooling at the 65W range.

I saw there's a "passive" Dynatron A43, which even claims to handle up to 155W. My understanding is that most/all server motherboards will have the socket oriented so the fins are front-to-back and the RAM is off to the side. And then you have chassis fans blowing air front-to-back, so I think they basically double as the CPU fan. (Which is also what the older motherboard that came in my CSE-813M did.) I air-quoted passive because I think it needs those chassis fans, but there's not one on the CPU anyway. And I'm not sure I completely trust the A43's rating, but with this setup I think it'd be fine for my 65 W TDP CPU at least.

On the other hand, I'm using a cheap gaming motherboard with fins sideways, RAM blocking the front-to-back airflow. My gut says that Dynatron A43 wouldn't do well. I don't understand why this orientation is desirable for desktops; my conspiracy theorist side says they make the consumers ones this way so they won't eat into the rack-mounted server market share. I am kinda tempted to get a server motherboard for this and IPMI (and/or at least serial port-accessible BIOS), but I started by looking at budget NASes and things have already spiraled a bit from there.
by BirAdam | 2025-10-13 19:16:10+00:00
Experimental, radically minimalist, Linux distribution from the ground up.

The target is servers/containers, but I plan to make a gaming/desktop release as well.

No site yet, but I do have a minimal rootfs that mostly works. It could be considered an alternative to Alpine, but more minimalist in the userland while maximalist as regards the kernel and firmware. Also, it's source based and far more opinionated.

This is entirely just for fun, and I do not have any expectation that anyone will want to use it besides myself.
by asveikau | 2025-10-13 19:16:25+00:00
I had the same reaction, why not just use the command line interface?

From there, I guess the value this adds is:

1. There is a UI, i.e. it has some autocomplete of sql syntax and it shows tables in a ... tabular format.

2. As others have mentioned, there are sharing features. Yes you could share a .db file, but with this you can also send a link viewable in a browser, with specific queries, etc.

#1 reminds me of MS Access from back in the day. Those were sql dbs underneath, but they had some interfaces to show you how to build queries. It wasn't a bad way to dip your toes into the basics of sql.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-13 19:16:43+00:00
You might want to try Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler. It's a short book, succinct but extremely clear and approachable. It explains Linear Algebra without using determinants, which are relegated to the end, and emphasises understanding the powerful ideas underpinning the subject rather than learning seemingly arbitrary manipulations of lists and tables of numbers.

Those manipulations are of course extremely useful and worth learning, but the reasons why, and where they come from, will be a lot clearer after reading Axler.

As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the book is available free at https://linear.axler.net/
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-10-13 19:16:48+00:00
What racist and xenophobic BS.

Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.

The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
by trod1234 | 2025-10-13 19:16:51+00:00
A study on this is referenced in the The Great Courses, Everyday Engineering series taught by Dr. Stephen Ressler, a Professor Emeritus from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.

They referenced a study showing Natural gas power plants emit 0.2% Sulfur Dioxide, 7% NOx, 60% of CO2 compared to coal power plants, and the study only compared single cycle plants, where most are combined cycle that further lower pollution per kWH metrics.

The CO2 in most combined cycle plants is captured as a valuable feedstock for other industrial uses, or sale.

> I'm not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is.

Its a generalization for the state of Regulatory in California with regards to air standards.

Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.

Last I checked there were at least 6-10 partially overlapping AB/SBs that have been passed and are awaiting implementation deadlines. The cost to do anything as a direct result of runaway regulatory is part of why California is having so many problems. The legislature's actions show they don't want people to be able to do business for certain things within California.
by ab071c41 | 2025-10-13 19:17:06+00:00
This sounds interesting; how are you guiding the player from one object to the next? E.g. if I'm looking at the fridge, I have to observe the painting shrink or that it's a lot smaller the next time I see it. And if there are a lot of objects in the room, how do I know what's relevant? I'm curious!
by hnfong | 2025-10-13 19:17:18+00:00
Maybe it's because it's not trendy to believe in woowoo such as spirits and non-physical things, it's very common for dualists to accuse others of the same...

It's quite sad that people don't take the idea of consciousness being fundamental more seriously, given that's the only thing people actually deal with 100% of the time.

As for Searle, I think his argument is basically an appeal to common-sensical thinking, instead of anything based on common assumptions and logic. As an outsider, it feels very much that modern day philosophy is follows some kind of social media influencer logic, where you get respect for putting forward arguments that people agree with, instead of arguments that are non-intuitive yet rigorous and make people rethink their priors.

I mean, even today, here, you'd get similar arguments about "AI can never think because {reason that applies to humans as well}"... I suspect it's almost ingrained to the human psyche to feel this way.
by yvdriess | 2025-10-13 19:17:31+00:00
My interpretation, going off on the linked integrated GC research: extensions to the ISA and thus compiler backend, no modifications to 'well formed' applications, some changes to the language runtime dealing with memory management.

Unless the CPU hardware becomes some kind of hybrid monster with both OMA and traditional paged MMU, you will need to make changes to the kernel. You may be able to emulate some of the kernel's page table shenanigans with the object-based system, but I don't think that the kernel's C code is typically 'well-formed'. It's probably a lot of engineering effort to make the necessary kernel changes, but so are all those complex kernel hardening efforts that hardware-level memory security like OMA would render moot.
by PurpleWhiteAnd | 2025-10-13 19:17:44+00:00
The app lets you to find nearby public cycle racks (largest offline dataset in the UK & Ireland), see rack capacity (where available), view in iOS Look Around or Street View, navigate straight to it via Apple Maps or Google Maps.

I’d really like to add an address finder (like in Google Maps), so you could enter your destination, see the bicycle racks nearby, and choose the closest one. Hopefully I’ll get to that soon!

It’s completely free — no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions. Currently iOS only, but Android is planned.

Would love to hear your thoughts or ideas for new features!
by vidarh | 2025-10-13 19:18:00+00:00
> There is no "depends on how you look at it." There's nothing to debate.

None of what you wrote is remotely relevant to what I wrote.

> There's no "magic" because this isn't a thing. You can't transmute syntax into semantics any more than you can transmute the knowledge of Algebra into the sensation of a cool breeze on a hot summer day. This is a category error.

We "transmute" syntax into semantics every time we interpret a given syntax as having semantics.

There is no inherent semantics. Semantics is a function of the meaning we assign to a given syntax.
by Veserv | 2025-10-13 19:18:15+00:00
There is no performance disadvantage at the normal speed of most implementations. With a good QUIC implementation and a good network stack you can drive ~100 Gb/s per core on a regular processor from userspace with 1500-byte MTU with no segmentation offload if you use a unencrypted QUIC configuration. If you use encryption, then you will bottleneck on the encryption/decryption bandwidth of ~20-50 Gb/s depending on your processor.

On the Linux kernel [1], for some benchmark they average ~24 Gb/s for unencrypted TCP from kernel space with 1500-byte MTU using segmentation offload. For encrypted transport, they average ~11 Gb/s. Even using 9000-byte MTU for unencrypted TCP they only average ~39 Gb/s. So there is no inherent disadvantage when considering implementations of this performance level.

And yes, that is a link to a Linux kernel QUIC vs Linux kernel TCP comparison. And yes, the Linux kernel QUIC implementation is only driving ~5 Gb/s which is 20x slower than what I stated is possible for a QUIC implementation above. Every QUIC implementation in the wild is dreadfully slow compared to what you could actually achieve with a proper implementation.

Theoretically, there is a small fundamental advantage to TCP due to not having multiple streams which could allow it maybe a ~2x performance advantage when comparing perfectly optimal implementations. But, you are comparing a per-core control plane throughput using 1500-byte MTU of, by my estimation, ~300 Gb/s on QUIC vs ~600 Gb/s on TCP at which point both are probably bottlenecking on your per-core memory bandwidth anyways.

[1] https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1751743914.git.lucien.xin@gmail...
by elpakal | 2025-10-13 19:18:25+00:00
I build and maintain an iOS app size analysis tool that runs locally on your machine. I'm researching how well Apple Intelligence is for on-device insights into builds—my app currently has the ability to export build metadata as a json file, which you can then paste into your favorite LLM for insights and optimization tips. But I'd like to have a locally running alternative (your own local build agent). It's been super interesting seeing Foundation Models in action, and the context window restriction has been a new kind of challenge.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881
by blibble | 2025-10-13 19:18:39+00:00
> it doesn't look like these Ofcom guys are playing with a full deck

they're a quango, staffed by those who couldn't make it as civil servants (not a high bar)

I'd be surprised if anyone who works there has ever used the internet

similarly useless are ofwat (water) and ofgem (energy), both of which allowed massive scandals to happen on their watch

ofwat: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/21/new-powerfu...

ofgem: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63805028
by sureglymop | 2025-10-13 19:19:09+00:00
Well yeah of course. What you could do though would be to have e.g. --secrets-file and at startup time the application reads that file to get the secret. Then you could use file permissions to make sure only the (application) user running the application can read that file (or even more extreme, the application destroys the file after reading it).

I think that would still be better than env vars, which are more likely to leak somewhere you didn't intend them to.
by JohnTHaller | 2025-10-13 19:19:24+00:00
You can still side-load signed apps. It's a similar limitation to macOS which won't let you run apps that Apple hasn't signed without command line or control panel shenanigans. Compared to iOS, Android still has the advantage of installing your own full browser (like Firefox) with full-fat ad blocking (uBlock Origin, not Lite). iOS is Safari-only right now though, in theory, some alternative engines may be available in Europe later.
by Liquix | 2025-10-13 19:19:28+00:00
because it flips the content consumption model on its head. instead of "i want to watch a video about X" -> search for video about X -> watch, the loop becomes open youtube -> see interesting recommendation -> watch. you are no longer using youtube as a tool to consume videos, it is using you, increasing time spent on the site/app and therefore generating more ad revenue.
by mixologic | 2025-10-13 19:19:38+00:00
Thats a false equivalency. I didnt say that software was safe because its been checked. Just that at the least, one can somewhat figure out where the software came from.

Getting a DUNS number obviously doesn't make it so that you cant publish malware. It just provides a level of traceability/obstacle that slows down the process of distributing malware.
by vidarh | 2025-10-13 19:20:19+00:00
> Do you deny semantics and intentionality are features of the human mind?

I deny they are anything more than computation. And so your original argument was begging the question and so logically unsound.

> The point is that computation as we understand it in computer science is purely syntactic

Then the brain is also purely syntactic unless you can demonstrate that the brain carries out operations that exceeds the Turing computable, because unless that is the case the brain and a digital computer are computationally equivalent.

As long as your argument does not address this fundamental issue, you can talk about "aboutness" or whatever else you want all day long - it will have no relevance.
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-13 19:21:04+00:00
> On the contrary, I was referring to software specifically, in the sense that a computer program is definitionally a sequence of logical propositions. In other words, a speech act.

I think this muddies the water unnecessarily. Computation is not language, even though we typically write software in so called programming languages. But the computation itself is something different from the linguistic-like description of software. The computation is the set of states, and the relationships between them, that a computer goes through.

> > He admits at every step that materialism makes more sense

> Did we read the same paper?

I should have been clearer - I meant that he admits that materialism makes more sense than idealism or property dualism, but I realize that this comes off as suggesting it makes more sense than his own position, which of course he does not.

> > He admits that usually being causally reducible means being ontologically reducible as well,

> Wrong, but irrelevant

Both you and he seem to find a single example of a phenomenon that is causally reducible to some constituent part, but that is not ontological reducible to that constitutent part - consciousness (he would add intentionality, I think, given the introduction, but it's not clear to me this is even a meaningfully separatable concept from consciousness). And you both claim that this is the case because of this special feature of "first person ontology", which is a different thing than "third person ontology" - which seems to me to simply be dualism by another name.

I think it's entirely possible to reject the notion of a meaningful first person ontology completely. It's very possible that the appearance of a first person narrative that we experience is a retroactive illusion we create that uses our models of how other people function on ourselves. That is, we are simple computers that manipulate symbols in our brains, that generate memories of their recent state as being a "conscious experience", which is just what we invented as a model of why other animals and physical phenomena more broadly behave the way they do (since we intuitively assign emotions and intentions to things like clouds and fires and mountains, to explain their behavior).
by jakub_g | 2025-10-13 19:21:40+00:00
Not sure if any other high level languages have it, but Node.js has just added command line flags to trace precisely all env var accesses and modifications:

https://nodejs.org/api/cli.html#--trace-env

Since you can set/unset/modify env vars in so many ways with different APIs, this sounds super useful in complex debugging scenarios.
by teddyh | 2025-10-13 19:21:51+00:00
I always thought that the cover image for Terrorpods was stupid – it’s obvious that the image was made as an illustration of one of the final scenes of The War of the Worlds, and that someone just saw the image and made a game based on the image in order to have a cool image on the packaging; i.e. blatant shovelware tactics. (The game bears no similarity to The War of the Worlds.)
by vidarh | 2025-10-13 19:21:51+00:00
Any Turing complete computational device is computationally equivalent to any other, irrespective of whether it carries out the computation serially or in parallel or on a fixed set of instructions or an infinite set.

Unless you can demonstrate that the human brain can compute a function - any function - that exceeds the Turing computable, there is no evidence to even suggest it is possible for a brain not to be computationally equivalent to a computer.
by m463 | 2025-10-13 19:22:37+00:00
> I'm not seeing how you get from share buybacks to a shift in priorities in corporate research

seems to me investing in your own company:

before: use funds actively for research and development

after: use funds passively to "invest" in your company by buying stock

seems like that old parable where someone buries their investment.

EDIT: parable of the talents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Talents
by nostrademons | 2025-10-13 19:22:51+00:00
Depends how old you are. Up through the 80s, Jeep still had a reputation as a rock-solid, durable brand. (The reality probably changed sometime in the 1970s, but it takes time for word to get out.) A lot of people's mental model is set somewhere in their 20s/30s, and they never really update it. So a lot of baby boomers still think of Jeep as a reliable car.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-13 19:23:01+00:00
> We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).

Maybe not literally everywhere, but almost everywhere would continue to benefit from more solar even if it's lacking storage. Despite the duck curve.

> We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.

It's a bad way to do a renewable subsidy, but we do want some kind of subsidy and flawed is usually better than nothing. I'd prefer replacing the subsidies with a carbox tax but that is not going to happen.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-10-13 19:23:12+00:00
That applies if you use bash. If you use another shell, you'll need to use that shell's methods to set environment variables in the config(s). And probably still need to set them for bash so that bash scripts get the correct env vars.

NixOS & home-manager do have functions that can set environment variables across all shells enabled via either of those systems. So I've got `programs.bash.enable = true;` && `programs.fish.enable = true;` && `home.sessionVariables = { EDITOR = "nvim"; };` in my home-manager config for example. A GUI editor for that would certainly be possible.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-13 19:23:37+00:00
Indeed.

This is what we're up against:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley...

https://archive.fo/Zd1LP

We need to take an organization like EFF and make it 100x more well-funded and 1000x bigger and more aggressive to compete with these corporations in the political arena.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-13 19:24:00+00:00
I've always loved Dean. He was one of my biggest inspirations, in my own artwork[0].

I remember playing a game called ZPC, for Mac, that was illustrated by Brute![1] (A few old thrashers may remember his work).

It's not unusual for artists that are successful in one area, to try expanding to others.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aidan_Hughes
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-10-13 19:24:27+00:00
It feels like in the past 20-ish years, maybe longer, game-changing innovations have become rarer, making science lower ROI.

If that’s true (maybe it’s not? all I have is vibes!), if it is indeed true, and science is becoming less able to convert into invention- it stands to reason that at some point it becomes rational for a country to direct resources elsewhere. Political will becomes strained, and politicians decide it’ll be popular to defund and discourage science.

And maybe that is how the US got here.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-13 19:24:29+00:00
> Any good solutions for passing secrets around that don't involve environment variables or regular plain text files?

Plain text files are fine, it's the permissions on that file that is a problem.

The best way is to be in control of the source to the program you want to run then you can make a change to always protect against leaking secrets by starting the program as a user that can read the secrets field. After startup the program reads the whole file and immediately drops privileges by switching to a user that cannot read the secrets file.

Works for more than just secrets too.
by Spivak | 2025-10-13 19:25:16+00:00
> and they all want to use said power

If I were to hazard a guess every person complaining would happily suffer the 'consequences' of a solar farm not being near their neighborhood.

It really should be a no brainer compromise to zone solar as industrial so they're not near where people live. There's in practice infinite amounts of land you can get zoned like this. Living to electrical noise sucks in a way living need next to a wind farm doesn't.
by missedthecue | 2025-10-13 19:25:44+00:00
Extremely low leverage, diversified portfolios, lots of cash on the balance sheet, and large amounts of stable free cash flow. Citi which is probably the crappiest of the US megacap banks used to be levered 50:1, today it is only 12:1 and prints $10-$15B a year.

This isn't just me the internet rando saying this. Steve Eisman (the character the big short is based on) has been covering the large banks for 30 years and said on his podcast that for the first time in his career he sees no problems in those banks.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-13 19:25:47+00:00
You're overestimating how much thought governments put into things.

Governments are just organizations and organizations are made of people. We see plenty of folly in the private sector; the government can do it too, don't you worry. Arguably they can do folly in ways the private sector only dreams of, what with being funded by the taxpayer.

The org is enforcing the law as written. The law, as written, is fucking stupid. Ergo the enforcement actions that derive from it themselves look fucking stupid.
by jkrejcha | 2025-10-13 19:26:02+00:00
Until when? Secrets in applications in many cases (I would probably wager majority of the cases) are only useful if they're in plaintext at some point, for example if you're constructing a HTTP client or authenticating to some other remote system.

As far as high-level language constructs go, there were similarish things like SecureString (in .NET) or GuardedString (in Java), although as best as I can tell they're relatively unused mostly because the ergonomics around them make them pretty annoying to use.
by yumraj | 2025-10-13 19:26:36+00:00
Not to distract from Python or Tauri, but lately I’ve been using Wails[0] which is similar to Tauri but with Go instead of Rust.

There are pros/cons primarily being Tauri seems to allow creation of mobile apps which Wails doesn’t, but overall it’s been fantastic since I find Go to be an easier language for me.

[0] https://wails.io/