MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pankalog | 2025-10-13 15:38:44+00:00
I recently worked at a big home lighting company, working on the OS of the router device that communicates with the light bulbs themselves and the internet/user.

Our OTAU architecture uses A/B system updates [1]. Core idea is that both the kernel and the rootfs (read-only) partitions had 2 different bootslots in storage, and the OTAU would only write to the bootslot that is unused. Hence, if something went wrong, the system would automatically fallback to the previous version by just switching the bootslot used. Over the numerous years that that architecture was used, I couldn't find a single post-mortem that resulted in devices being bricked. Something to note is that the rootfs partition was overlaid with a writable partition for persisting state data etc.

Now that was a $two-figure USD device, not a $5/6-figure USD electric SUV. Is this a cost-cutting measure? At those price levels, doubling your NAND size is not even half of a percent of the total cost of the vehicle.

Unless there was a serious issue that the used bootslot corrupted the unused bootslot, then I don't see how this could have happened.

It's saddening that car manufacturers are so unserious about the code they're deploying.

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab
by burntsushi | 2025-10-13 15:38:45+00:00
You did ask for it though. Because ripgrep prominently advertises this default behavior. And it also documents that it isn't a POSIX compatible grep. Which is quite intentional. That's not immature. That's just different design decisions. Maybe it isn't the software you're using that's immature, but your vetting process for installing new tools on your machine that is immature.

Because hey guess what: you can still use grep! So I built something different.
by ck2 | 2025-10-13 15:39:03+00:00
$45 BILLION in F-35 orders have been cancelled by European countries because of the (illegal) tariff war

Nothing on the "tariff shelf" is gonna fix that, only bankrupt the country like his casino

And next war is going to be just thousands upon thousands of drones since apparently we have no way to stop them over airports and everything else
by san4d | 2025-10-13 15:39:03+00:00
Hi! I'm the author.

"Actually needing to update the controllers to update CSS for the main app is kind of crazy." The controllers don't return CSS: they return HTML fragments. I chose not to include CSS in the response because of the reasons you're thinking, plus the servers shouldn't really care about how their state looks.

The admin app styles the custom tags. I also figured this would make it easier for them to contract out changes to that app.

"the hard parts are the limited resources of the controllers and a need for high versatility for the rooms." Yep! I didn't cover it in the article because it didn't fit the theme, but another challenge was the single execution thread. When you have a bunch of rooms on the same controller, you want to avoid blocking that loop, which is what the built-in Arduino delay function does. I came up with a timer system for non-blocking time-based triggers.
by chrisco255 | 2025-10-13 15:39:18+00:00
> Most animals take care of their wounded peers

Not really, no. Herd animals will regularly intentionally abandon wounded or elderly peers during an attack.

Sometimes they will even intentionally knock down slow members to make an easy meal for predators, ensuring their own survival:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ_7GtE529M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqyMw7udKtI

Social care is largely a mammalian trait, but only ever extends to in-group members. And if the pack or herd member is sensed to be the weakest link, it is quite frequent that the pack or herd will abandon them or intentionally sacrifice them.

Humans are unique in that they go through extraordinary lengths to rehabilitate members, sometimes investing years or decades or even caring for humans that could literally not survive on their own or without advanced technology.
by mallowfram | 2025-10-13 15:39:22+00:00
As a post-symbolic, post-causal thinker (not a "socialist" which is also political nonsense), economics is purely the translation to settlement coercion for the production of Myth of the State/center-worshipping ("richest citizens in the world" in what sense? cash? real estate? these are arbitrary variables).

Until we move to measurement (ie analog) rather than binary statistics (which is still merely a project based in counting, yes, 1,2,3) then we are totally informationally emasculated.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-13 15:39:46+00:00
There are 2 things that are VERY classified when it comes to US military.

First is missle defense capability

Second is sonar.

I believe something like 10 years ago, the declassified sonar capability was that it could reconstruct a 3d image of a goldfish 10 miles away.

TLDR; US is never going going "win" wargames because its not a good idea to showcase the true capability. Same reason why F22 and F35s "lose" to other jets - US purposefully nerfs them and flies them at decreased envelopes.
by terandle | 2025-10-13 15:39:59+00:00
I'm anti-establishment because the establishment doesn't care about anyone but themselves. What are we doing all this work for? Progress would be getting universal healthcare for all in this country. Getting better work life balance. Being able to afford a home. Now it's just all the "haves" fighting bitterly to keep getting more and more until they have everything and nothing for anyone else.
by samueloph | 2025-10-13 15:40:42+00:00
> edit: even curl itself - which created the original document linked above - has http 3 just in an experimental build.

It's not experimental when built with ngtcp2, which is what you will get on distros like Debian 13-backports (plain Debian 13 uses OpenSSL-QUIC), Debian 14 and onward, Arch Linux and Gentoo.

Reference: https://curl.se/docs/http3.html
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-10-13 15:41:54+00:00
Tenured academia, sure, burn it to the ground, no survivors, mostly a temple of mean girls and enablers of those mean girls. Adjunct and other non-tenure track professors, however, not so much. They do the real work along with the postdocs and grad students. And they get the least recognition. And oh the bellyaching when they leave academia with no hope of a tenured position and 10x their salary by pivoting to industry.
by palmotea | 2025-10-13 15:42:12+00:00
> Sometimes it feels like the rich are all trying to plan their exit by finding any way possible to take money from people.

I think it's just mindless, and not in service of any kind of plan.

But that's really unsatisfying, so there's a strong temptation to think there's a plan and look for one. Sort of like the situations that lead to conspiracy theories.
by efromvt | 2025-10-13 15:42:31+00:00
This is true, but you can get combinatorial complexity explosions, especially with the data modeling patterns for efficiency common at some companies - eg a mix of latest dimensions and historical snapshots, without always having clear delineations about when you're using what. Common example is something like a recursive incremental table that needs to be rebuilt from the first partition seed. Some SQL operations can also be very opaque (syntactically, or in terms of special DB features) as to what partitions are being referenced, especially again when aggregates get involved.

It's absolutely solvable if you're building clean; retrofitting onto existing dataflow is when things get messy, and then managing user/customer expectations of a more strict system. People like to be able to do wild things!
by elzbardico | 2025-10-13 15:42:42+00:00
That's one negative quality that Hacker News always had to me, compared to older hacker spaces such as newsgroups and Slashdot: The Petit bourgeois conformism and materialism. People always drunk the Venture Capital pseudo-libertarian cool-aid with too much enthusiasm here.

Being anti-establishment should not be viewed as a sin, unless in extreme cases.
by whizzter | 2025-10-13 15:42:50+00:00
Actually debugging a PDF parsing issue as we speak and actually started writing a parser (partially to understand the issue, partially as a last resort as the code in the parser I was debugging felt a bit shoddy).

The PDF format is frankly quite horrible, extended over the years by kludges that feels more or less like premature optimizations in some cases and bloated overkill in others.

While theoretically a nice idea, the issue is that there is just so many damn object types with specialized properties inside a PDF that you'd basically end up with all complications of a FFI for each binding you'd do to expose a sane subset.

Theoretically one could perhaps make a canonical PDF<->JSON or similar mapping from an established library that most PDF data consumers/generators could use if memory usage isn't too constrained (because the underlying object model isn't entirely dissimilar).
by jacobr1 | 2025-10-13 15:43:16+00:00
There difference isn't renting or selling a hammer. The difference is providing a hammer (rent/sell) VS providing a handyman that will use the hammer.

In the first case the manufacturer is only liable for defects, for normal use of the tool. So the manufacturer is NOT liable for misuse.

In the second case, the service provider IS liable for misuse of the tool. If they say, break down a whole wall for some odd reasons when making a repair, they would be liable.

In both cases there is a separation between user/manufacturer liability - but the question relevant to AI and SaaS is just that. Are you providing the tool, or delivering the service in question? In many cases, the fact the product provided is SaaS doesn't help - what you are getting is "tool as a service."
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-13 15:43:23+00:00
> So corporations largely stopped funding private research labs like Bell and instead entered into public-private partnerships

They didn't though. Bayh-Dole was 1980. All the big tech firms have invested massively in R&D since then, and I think it's also true for many non-tech industries or tech-adjacent (e.g. chip manufacturing, oil and gas).
by chunxia1990 | 2025-10-13 15:43:43+00:00
5,000+ dog names with categorized filters allow searching by popularity/country/gender/breed/personality, with each name accompanied by its origin and meaning. Users can also set conditions based on their dog's characteristics, and we will recommend the most suitable names according to your settings. Additionally, users can upload photos of their dogs, and the system will automatically identify the breed and features through AI, then match and generate the most appropriate names!
by andrepd | 2025-10-13 15:44:16+00:00
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]

No space in 2025 for any such considerations.

[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-10-13 15:44:24+00:00
Is this out of convenience or necessity? Do you have redundant devices so that if your primary glass slab is unusable for some reason, you're still able to make it home at the end of the day? Are you in some new role and lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, or suffering from a disability for which the cell phone is your only means of achieving independence?

The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.

It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
by thrance | 2025-10-13 15:44:37+00:00
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Do you mean to claim that the Sveriges Riksbank is unbiased in who it chooses to give their price to? Unless you believe that 90% of economists come from the US (and the remaining 10% from the UK), you should take issue with this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Memorial_Prize_l...

> concensus in Economics

That's what I was talking about. This "consensus" is completely made-up and propped up by, among others, the Sveriges Riksbank. To the point that there are people like you who feel they should defend them against the evil "authoritarian Socialist", because of course, as we all know, that's all there is besides Neoliberalism. I sincerly hope you consider broadening your horizons, maybe start by Thomas Piketty's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
by MountDoom | 2025-10-13 15:44:38+00:00
I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.

When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".

But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.

If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-10-13 15:45:04+00:00
I think it’s pretty clear that these shiny super expensive weapons systems will be overwhelmed by cheaper autonomous systems like drones . They are good for bullying less capable adversaries but I think in an all out war they won’t have a good time. As far as I have read the F22 has never been used in combat because it’s too expensive to lose.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-13 15:45:52+00:00
Ok, so as a disclaimer: this obviously leans towards science-fiction, both because that informs my view of the world, and because I think that any prediction of the future must incorporate science fiction.

My own experience, using ChatGPT and Claude for both dev and other business productivity tasks, lends credence to the METR model of exponential improvement in task time-horizon [0]. There are obviously still significant open technical issues, particularly around memory/context management and around online learning, but extensive work is being done on these fronts, propelled amongst other things by the ARC-AGI challenge [1], and I don't see anything that is an actual roadblock to progress. If anything, from my perspective, it seems appears that there are significant low-hanging-fruit opportunities around plain-old software engineering and ergonomics for AI agents, more so than a need for fundamental breakthroughs in neural network architecture (although I believe that these too will come).

So then, with an increasing time horizon and improved task accuracy (much of it assured by improvements in QA mechanisms), we will see ourselves handing off more and more complex tasks to AI agents, until eventually we could have "the factory of the future ... [with] only two employees: a man and a dog", and at that stage I believe that there would be no imperative for humans to work (unless they choose to, or have a deeply ingrained Calvinist work ethic). And then, as you said, we're down to the non-technological roadblocks.

Obviously capitalists would fight to stay in control, and unlike some who expect a fully peaceful and organic transition, I do expect somewhat of a war here (whether kinetic or cold), but I do envision that when push comes to shove, those of us who believe in the free software movement and the foundational principles of democracy will be able to assert shared national/international (rather than corporate) control over the AIs and restructure society into a form where AI (and later robots) perform the work for the benefit of humans who would all share in the bounty. I am not an economist and don't have a clear prediction on the exact form this new society would take, but from my reading of the various pilot implementations of UBI [2], I think that we will see acceptance towards a society where people are essentially in retirement throughout their life. Just as currently, some retired people, choose to only stay home and watch TV, while others study, do art, travel the world, help raise and teach future generations or contribute to social causes close to their hearts, so we'll all be able to do what is in our hearts, without worrying about subsistence.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

[1] https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
by fsflover | 2025-10-13 15:46:28+00:00
> How many are modifying open source software?

This is irrelevant. Few people repair their cars themselves, but its possibility alone creates a free, competitive market, where consumer can choose a reasonable service. With proprietary software, you have an artificial monopoly: Only the original vendor can fix things, and they choose any price they wish. Or they choose to abandon the software complrtely, then you're out of luck.
by credit_guy | 2025-10-13 15:46:54+00:00
AI does not have that potential. Not now, maybe in some distant future, as in decades from now.

Right now, AI has the potential to increase productivity. Work that's done by 10 people without AI, can be done by 5 people with AI. So 5 people can be laid off. But soon, companies will realize that rather than laying off half of their workforce, they can simply produce twice as much as before.

In reality, the AI productivity boost is nothing close to 100%. Maybe 10% per year. That could translate in 5% layoffs, 5% increased output. Nothing extraordinary compared to other times in history.
by pacbard | 2025-10-13 15:47:01+00:00
The hunter-gatherers in the study lived in the "Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP)", meaning between 2000 BCE to 1825 CE. These people are separated from us by less than 150 generations. I don't believe that humans evolve that fast, so the way you think, feel, ache, and so on also applies to them. Would you leave behind your injured and disabled in their situation (which is speculated to be the result of hunting accidents)?
by vanviegen | 2025-10-13 15:47:05+00:00
I believe that most scientists start out being driven by curiosity. Just like most politicians start out being driven by ideology.

Unfortunately, we've created a system that wears them down to being driven largely by self-preservation.

Many people eager to better the world come of age every second. It's just that once they've amassed enough power to make a dent, most of them have been worn down.
by mike_hearn | 2025-10-13 15:47:09+00:00
Because whilst universities claim they do that, there is no evidence to suggest it is true. People genuinely trained in critical thinking would be highly skeptical of this claim. For example,

- What exactly is the definition of critical thinking they are using?

- Which part of a {computer science, art history, etc} course teaches this?

- How is it assessed?

- If it's a teachable skill, why are there no qualifications in it or researchers studying it specifically?

- If it's something universities teach, why are there so many bad papers full of logical fallacies and obvious fraud?

I know some like to argue philosophy is such a course but very few people do philosophy degrees, so even if that were true it could hardly be generalized to all of university teaching.
by Findecanor | 2025-10-13 15:47:38+00:00
Doubtless Computing is apparently the blogger's new startup.

He had previously co-founded the CPU startup VyperCore, which had been based around technology in his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol. The startup folded earlier this year.[1]

VyperCore's main selling point was that having garbage collection in hardware could run managed languages faster, and with less energy. Apparently they came as far as running code in FPGA. Except for the object-addressing hardware, it was based on a RISC-V core.

I wonder which assets (patents and other) that the new company has been able to get from the old.

Both companies were/are apparently targeting the data centre first... which I think is a bit bold, TBH. I follow RISC-V, and have seen maybe a dozen announcements of designs for wide-issue cores that on paper could have been competitive with AMD and Intel ... if only they would have got to be manufactured in a competitive process. But that is something that would require significant investment.

1. https://ednutting.substack.com/p/vypercore-failed
by kijin | 2025-10-13 15:47:48+00:00
I once managed to brick a PC motherboard that advertised "dual BIOS". It didn't fallback to the previous version after a botched BIOS update.

It's totally possible that the update corrupted the other bootslot as well. If those blocks aren't off-limits to the updater program, it's just an off-by-one error waiting to happen. Slot 0 or slot 1?

Another possibility is that the updated version booted up just enough not to trigger the automatic fallback, and then got stuck in a loop.
by jhallenworld | 2025-10-13 15:47:52+00:00
>~75–80% of S&P 500 gains

Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it..

For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value.

Why I think a better algorithm is out there:

Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million
by 1980phipsi | 2025-10-13 15:48:31+00:00
I would distinguish between visual imagination and visuospatial reasoning.

For people like myself with aphantasia, there are often problems solving strategies that can help you when you can’t visualize. Like draw a picture.

And lots of problems don’t really require as much visual imagination as you would think. I’m pretty good at math, programming, and economics. Not top tier, but pretty good.

If there are problems out there that you struggle with compared to others, then that’s the universe telling you that you don’t have a comparative advantage in it. Do something else and hire the people who can more easily solve them if you need it.