MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-07 08:50:47+00:00
Weird article.

Hasn't most code that's been compiled in the last few decades using the x86 frame pointer register (ebp) as a regular register? And C also worked just fine on CPUs that didn't have a dedicated frame pointer.

AFAIK the concepts of the stack and 'subroutine call instructions' existed before C because those concepts are also useful when writing assembly code (subroutines which return to the caller location are about the only way to isolate and share reusable pieces of code, and a stack is useful for deep call hierarchies - for instance some very old CPUs with a dedicated on-chip call-stack or 'return register' only allowed a limited call-depth or even only a single call-depth).

Also it's not like radical approaches in CPU designs are not tried all the time, they just usually fail because hardware and software are not developed in a vacuum, they heavily depend on each other. How much C played a role in that symbiosis can be argued about, but the internal design of modern CPUs doesn't have much in common with their ISA (which is more or less just a thin compatibility wrapper around the actual CPU and really doesn't take up much CPU space).
by oytis | 2025-10-07 08:51:08+00:00
Can someone explain to me how and why consulting works? If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right, he would be considered a loser. Now make it a company, and corporations and governments queue up for their advice. Wouldn't your own employees be in a better position to give you advice than people who know nothing of your business and who's only skills are googling and making presentations?
by simonw | 2025-10-07 08:51:12+00:00
Dedicated image generation models like this one and Midjourney and DALL-E and Nano Banana and Stable Diffusion have all been able to generate really good pelicans riding bicycles for a couple of years now, but only as JPG/PNG/WEBP raster images.

The real pelican test is about if a text producing model can spit out SVG code that renders a good vector illustration, which is a much harder (and sillier) task.
by pndy | 2025-10-07 08:51:41+00:00
Each commercial OS during OOBE phase should come with two choices paths: express settings for majority and experienced for advanced users, professionals where you can tweak everything before system is ready to use, incl. telemetry and any sort of privacy settings, additional software and "recommendations" in whatever form.

Both paths should be industry standardized with UI as much as possible so no cat-and-mouse play with hidden settings would happen, and both should be configurable at any part so even inexperienced user could benefit from disabling "recommendations" or bundled software. Such OOBE configuration should be also persistent - once the choice is done it stays and doesn't require "additional steps" hijacks every other large update. And at any points given user can re-run the OOBE if for whatever reasons changed mind about e.g. sharing data.

This might be relatively simple to implement as a standard but would require actual commitment from consumer protection organizations, regulators that would push on companies. But somehow seems no organization care about these pushes - Microsoft goes each year further in limiting what uses can do on Windows. Perhaps as I said here already, there's some agenda of becoming the identity provider and going ahead with govt's ideas for online identification. Or perhaps it's just a plain greed for data.
by baobun | 2025-10-07 08:51:46+00:00
Going deep on programming for a while will be a big edge and strength when/if you lean back into devops later. Especially if you feel more passion/fun there.

Starting with focus on one language (java) first sounds good but once you feel reasonably fluent I do encourage you to pick up another language or two.

C, Go, Rust, Python, <something functional>, maybe Ruby or .NET (C# or F#) would all be decent picks depending on your path IMO.

Oh, and bash of course. It will serve you well whichever way you go. (Maybe you have that down already from homelabbing?)
by bargainbin | 2025-10-07 08:52:03+00:00
Good for them. This and Copilot are the reasons I use linux full time now, after.. 30 years of being a Windows user?

Seriously you could install a modern distro with KDE on any computer and the average user would get by fine.

And more enterprises are starting to enable macOS and Linux as browser based tooling becomes the norm.

Why would anyone start with Windows at this point? And if I were Microsoft, why would I spend money to make life worse for the incumbent users?
by mort96 | 2025-10-07 08:53:10+00:00
The stated "reason" makes no sense:

> While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.

If they're only worried that their users may end up with an incomplete Windows install, surely the solution is to provide a better way to set up Windows with a local account? It's not like people are digging around in CMD and RegEdit during the install for the fun of it, they could immediately stop everyone from using these workarounds by adding back the "set up with a local account" button
by nullc | 2025-10-07 08:53:17+00:00
That's how it went for Craig Wright, famous Satoshi imposter-- prior to his bitcoin infamy he stole millions via fraudulent GST refunds and fraudulent refundable R&D tax credits then got caught attempting tens of millions more. He fled Australia, repaid part of the fraud and has generally been living it up elsewhere in the world with no further consequences from his tax fraud.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-07 08:53:40+00:00
>Anything that has a kernel level anti check (Valorant) will always be a resounding No.

Please stop repeating this long outdated information. The two most widely used kernel anti cheat provider easyanticheat and battle eye support linux with a user space component which needs to be enabled by the developer and has been in many games.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/breakdown
by zvr | 2025-10-07 08:54:11+00:00
On the "Angels and Demons" ambigrams...

The artist made such an impression to the book author, Dan Brown, that he (Brown) decided to name the protagonist after him.

Here's John Langdon, artist: https://www.johnlangdon.net/

Having met John (I showed him the second largest Escher collection), I can confirm he's a wonderful person.
by berkes | 2025-10-07 08:55:47+00:00
> occasionally wants to make a web frontend

In that case I'd say the problem is exactly what you state

> knows essentially no CSS

The solution is quite obvious then too: learn some. It's not hard. Understanding the basics is a afternoon job. Diving a bit deeper a day, and learning about some often-used more in depth features like "responsive" or flexbox, another day. For a software developer/engineer that builds backends, CSS really isn't that hard.

That's not to say a basic CSS set and some explanation like in TLA, isn't useful.

It's my pet-peeve that in software development, I'm convinced we should understand the stuff that we work with. Not all, and certainly not everything in great detail, but enough to know where to find the info and details when working with it. From sysadmin to the concepts of cryptography and from accessibility to how an OS writes stuff to disk. Even if that means constantly learning.
by gwd | 2025-10-07 08:56:10+00:00
> A) this antibiotic resistance was already found in nature, B) it's a resistance to a very specific antibiotic, not all antibiotics

These are reasonable, but...

> C) you're doing this in a protected lab.

...this one is problematic. It's not taking the concerns of the people you're talking to seriously; namely, that no lab can be protected enough, that there's always a chance of leaking, and that the more GoF research is done the higher chance something is going to leak.

If nothing else, not registering that you even understand someone's concern is a sure-fire way to get them to ignore everything else you say.

And, I'm not sure exactly what your attitude is, but at least the way you put it here does sound overconfident. Sure, protocols should be safe if they're all followed; but the protocols are followed by people, and people make mistakes. Just take a look at all the nuclear accidents that have happened in spite of protocols.

Your best bet, I think, would be to lean on A and B: "There are strict protocols in place around labs to keep things from leaking; but even in the very unlikely event that something like this does leak, it won't really have any impact: as I said, the antibiotic resistance is a mutation that evolved by itself in the wild already; it won't make things worse than they already are."

EDIT: Or, at least, to say: "Look, I know it sounds really scary, but if you'd seen the protocols, you see how basically impossible they are to screw up. <brief descripiton of why it's unlikely to leak even if implemented by lazy or incompetent people.>"

The point is to let people know that you hear and understand their concern, and then to educate them about why their concern is unfounded.

EDIT2: This comment seems to be controversial; it's had at least 3 upvotes and 2 downvotes, which surprises me. Any downvoters care to explain?
by kakacik | 2025-10-07 08:56:18+00:00
AI is a trap too sweet to ignore. Its ruining young folks future by removing the hard effort part of learning, which then builds more resistant character which is more able to wade through daily crap of our adult lives. Some sort of patience with life, its not a skill that comes on its own.

And clearly its (almost) everywhere, including companies who should do and know better. AI will make humanity more lazy seems to be the conclusion.

Well fear not, those few who will not be lured by it will stand tall and far apart, and can achieve a lot more professionally and personally in crowds utterly reliant on their tiny little llm helpers. We all choose daily how our lives will look like from now on.
by zigzag312 | 2025-10-07 08:56:30+00:00
Impeller renderer is about 100 KB [0]. You still need to add things like text layouting library and image codecs to that size. A few MB in total I guess, but much less than a full web engine.

While Flutter could be used to draw UI to texture, Impeller could also be used by other UI frameworks. Recently, Avalonia team experimented with replacing Skia and a Flutter developer asked, if they are interested in using Impeller and even offered some help [1].

This would probably be suitable, as a more lightweight alternative to WebView, for integrating into game engines.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/flutte...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1nv3snm/comment/nh7...
by gnfargbl | 2025-10-07 08:57:27+00:00
> Trying to find a zebra in the hoof beats of horses when the number of patients quickly outstrips your department’s capabilities is a fools errand because if the workup require will overwhelm throughout to the point that the delay in care will put other patients at risk.

This is where that I hope (as a non-physician) that AI, used carefully, should actually be able to help. A well-designed ML system should have a decent chance at distinguishing a zebra from a horse because it has read absolutely everything, has perfect recall of that corpus, and has some ability to contextualize the knowledge it has to the situation at hand. I suspect that a good proportion of ER doctors already have those characteristics, but surely not all of them do, and surely not consistently.

An AI-assisted system will still false-positive, because the computer is still just a tool, tools are never perfect and designers of safety systems tend to err on the side of false positives. However, a thoughtful pop-up that displays when the situation really may warrant it is surely more helpful to a physician that one that cries wolf to you constantly?

My optimism assumes that there's fundamentally enough information available to make the diagnosis, however. If you're actually saying that finding the zebra would require gathering so much more information for each patient that it would lower overall outcomes for all patients, then I guess we're stuck.
by raesene9 | 2025-10-07 08:57:37+00:00
I think that's not quite the way consulting should, and to some extent does, work.

The ideal goal of consultancies like Deloitte's is that they hire a small number of people with experience and combine them with a larger number of young bright people and have them come in to review and advise organizations. The people with experience (so who have worked in that field before) direct the engagement and the leg work is done by the juniors, producing a report for the customer.

As to why companies would choose to use consultancies, there's a variety of reasons, some good, some less than good.

- Outside perspective & experience. The consultancy has done engagements with other companies in your field and can provide that experience.

- Neutral point of view. The consultancy should be neutral to any internal politics within the organization.

- Appeal to authority. Many times organizations use consultancies to provide evidence to external stakeholders that the thing they want to do is the right thing.

Now that's not to say that it always (or even often) works out that way, but in theory at least, there are some not terrible reasons.
by quitit | 2025-10-07 08:58:18+00:00
When you say "true cost" I've interpreted that to mean the down-sides of using an AI ChatBot as a primary information source, so my reply below is in context of that interpretation:

There is a sizeable chunk of people who (perhaps foolishly) trust ChatGPT despite knowing it can produce errors. They use it because it does the "research" for them, and does so quickly. This presents a type of tech-agility that they themselves do not possess. So on balance they may be more tech-empowered by using a flawed AI ChatBot than they are by manually reading news, websites and blogs.

There is also an issue of trust. A novice reading the top 5 search results has no real idea if the information being presented is biased, error free, or even factual. Google's work to blend paid and organic placement also presents the flaw of dollars over quality. ChatGPT on the other hand presents a known level of trust to them.

A similar scenario plays out with the way novices are more trusting of apps that appear on a curated store rather than seeking out software via web searches.

I think that users on HN take for granted that they have outsized experience and skill in developing trust in the tech landscape, and have a mental list of news, websites and software providers that they deem trustworthy. This can lead to not understanding the motivation for relying on an AI ChatBot, or compartmentalising people who use those services as some kind simpleton.
by simonask | 2025-10-07 08:58:22+00:00
I've never quite understood why the idea "everything is a file [descriptor]" is often revered as some particularly great insight. Perhaps it was for its time, but I think we have to be honest and say that it is a really awkward abstraction in 2025.

It can mean a couple of things:

- Kernel objects have an opaque 32 bit ID local to each process.

- Global kernel objects have names that are visible in the file system.

- Kernel objects are streams of bytes (i.e. you can call `read()`, `write()` etc.).

The first is a kind of arbitrary choice that limits modern kernels. (For example, a kernel might want to use all 64 bits to add tag bits to its handles - still possible, but now you are close to the limit.)

The second and third are mostly wrong. Something like a kernel synchronization primitive or an I/O control primitive does not behave anything like a file or a stream of bytes, and indeed you cannot use any normal stream operations on them. What's the point of conflating the concept of a file system path and kernel object namespacing? It makes a kind of sense to consider the latter a superset of the former, but they are clearly fundamentally different.

The end result is that the POSIX world is full of protocols. A lot of things are shoehorned into file-like streams of bytes (see for example: the Wayland protocol), even when a proper RPC/IPC mechanism would be more appropriate. Compare with the much maligned COM system on Windows, which though primitive and outdated does provide a much richer - and safer - channel of communication.
by noduerme | 2025-10-07 09:00:41+00:00
If you want to make a personal website, you have two routes: Use a template thing like wordpress, with a GUI, or learn at least a bare minimum of HTML, CSS and probably some Javascript, as well as how to set up a server. What's offered in this article is not very useful to making a personal website... it's like if you wanted to bake a cake, and you read an article saying that frosting is made from sugar and butter. This isn't news and it's it's not particularly useful to baking your cake either.

Just to like, follow up: 99% of the point of making your personal website is, like, making it fucking personal which is to say that you put your own time and energy into learning something in the process. Copy/pasting random CSS from the web is not learning. Also, copy/pasting this particular CSS is not even showing the slightest bit of interest.

So consider: Why would anyone care about your personal website if you don't care enough to learn how to make it, you know, personal by actually learning a tiny bit about the art you're trying to put into practice?

And none of this even starts to explain why this junk would be popular here. There are some brilliant CSS hacks in the wild that deserve attention, but this is sub-par even for child's play that might teach you how to do something useful. It's not even a lesson. It's just some crap you don't understand that you might copy and paste, with almost no explanation.
by fabian2k | 2025-10-07 09:01:38+00:00
Because the antibiotic automatically selects the successful clones. The others that didn't incorporate the plasmid don't grow into colonies. Without antibiotics your plate will be entirely full of bacteria, you can't pick individual clones from that.

And you want clones, so all identical bacteria derived from a single successful integration of your plasmid into a bacterium. You don't want a mixture of bacteria with different DNA. This process isn't perfect and you need to screen out cases where your DNA sequence is not correct. And by far the easiest way to do that is to grow on plates with antibiotics, and an amount of bacteria that results in a few individual colonies, with each clone being full of genetically identical bacteria.

You generally want antibiotics in your media anyway, working without antibiotics makes it much more difficult. You don't have 100% perfectly sterile conditions, with antibiotics you have a much larger margin here.
by hk__2 | 2025-10-07 09:01:46+00:00
> I can't really understand that. I am programming Python for 14 years now, and any real codebase I have ever seen documents variables above their declaration. Even if there is some technical reason for it, if I saw a python developer comment what a variable declaration means below that declaration I would at least question their taste.

It’s standard to write docstrings below the declaration they refer to. What you are refering to are comments, not docstrings. I’ve been programming in Python for 15 years and I learnt this quite recently. This gives you in-editor documentation for class attributes and other non-functions.
by bargainbin | 2025-10-07 09:03:38+00:00
I’m using Bazzite now for about 8 months, and I have a dual boot Windows drive. I haven’t used the Windows drive once. Windows was my daily driver for 3 decades.

Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.

Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.
by throawayonthe | 2025-10-07 09:04:15+00:00
android emulator (i think bluestacks still works), web snapchat client + BetterSnap extension (you can even save the original media file!), on graphene it seems to detect screenshots but not video recording (likely not intentional, there was an open issue to block screenshot detection but no devs were interested iirc)

it's a lost cause except maaaybe provisioning drm keys but even then, as you say, analog hole

re: screen security isn't the same thing - that's what i mean, signal does use those very APIs but not for a half-assed snitching feature
by ivolimmen | 2025-10-07 09:04:24+00:00
I personally migrated to seniors (70+) to Linux. They both enjoyed it for years. One even found and installed a new driver for their printer when he switched. Plus most ChromeOS users can easily migrate to Linux. For Office I recommend ONLYOFFICE as that looks and behaves mostly the same as Microsoft Office. I haven't experience any issues with drivers but then again I never use NVIDEA, I used AMD and currently an Intel ARC.
by ta12653421 | 2025-10-07 09:04:28+00:00
Question out of curiosity:

On todays hardware, it should be possible to run Windows in a VirtualBox on a Linux System, or am I wrong?

Thinking about this to be my next setup for the next machine (in 1 or 2 years)

Im mainly using corp & office software and MS dev tools - those should be useable in a virtualized Windows?

Any experience?
by KingMob | 2025-10-07 09:05:56+00:00
> After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling

Ahh, but I tried that too. I originally decided to play with nix-darwin because I was on a contract that used nix in their repos to ease onboarding of academic collaborators.

In practice, it was complicated enough that most of us ended up relying on the 2 nix experts to make any real changes, and when they left, the nix configs stagnated.

It might be the case that nix-darwin, and our particular python/ML repos, were "hard mode" for nix, but I truly think I gave it a fair shake.

If nix requires a lot of effort to do anything off the beaten path, it's just not the tool for me.
by happymellon | 2025-10-07 09:06:07+00:00
> not being able to mount things wherever

Just to clarify, this was actually like most of Windows. You could (in XP at least via Disk Manager), but they made it harder than it needed to be.

Multiple workspaces was a thing as well that came with XP Power Toys and was a feature in later versions, but not simple to access, and mostly broken because they never test it.

I made my final transition during Vista. Touching 7, 10 and 11 for work purposes means I can see that I don't miss any of it.
by raesene9 | 2025-10-07 09:06:22+00:00
Well they get some experience doing the consultancy work of course, and yep lots go off to industry after 2-3 years.

IME (Worked for E&Y some years back) about 80% of people who started as juniors would have left after 3-4 years with the other 20% staying to try and make partner.
by vaylian | 2025-10-07 09:07:47+00:00
It's probably a learning process for sounds that are typical in a language. Later in life we can also distinguish different languages even though we don't speak them. Many non-English-speakers will still identify a song like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol as being English, even though it only uses sounds that are typical for English.
by mhils | 2025-10-07 09:08:46+00:00
Let me try to explain why it is that way: First, it's consistent with Python functions. The docstring for functions is below the signature as well. Second, consider a file with only a docstring and then a variable declaration. Here it would be ambiguous if that's the module or the variable docstring. Finally, this behavior is consistent with other tools (and failed standardization efforts) in the space. So yeah - I share your sentiment, but I think it's the most pragmatic approach for pdoc. :)