MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bastawhiz | 2025-10-19 19:12:26+00:00
Trinary is an efficient way of storing lots of -1/0/1 machine learning model weights. But as soon as you load it into memory, you need RAM that can store the same thing (or you're effectively losing the benefits: storage is cheap). So now you need trinary RAM, which as it turns out, isn't great for doing normal general purpose computation with. Integers and floats and boolean values don't get stored efficiently in trinary unless you toss out power of two sized values. CPU circuitry becomes more complicated to add/subtract/multiply those values. Bitwise operators in trinary become essentially impossible for the average IQ engineer to reason about. We need all new IAs, assembly languages, compilers, languages that can run efficiently without the operations that trinary machines can't perform well, etc.

So do we have special memory and CPU instructions for trinary data that lives in a special trinary address space, separate from traditional data that lives in binary address space? No, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. There's no compelling evidence this would make anything better overall: faster, smaller, more energy efficient. Every improvement that trinary potentially offers results in having to throw babies out with the bathwater. It's fun to think about I guess, but I'd bet real money that in 50 years we're still having the same conversation about trinary.
by notacoward | 2025-10-19 19:12:35+00:00
> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.

How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?

I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.
by jibal | 2025-10-19 19:15:06+00:00
Also see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2441

"One can also read that Jon was the editor of the RFC, and may think that Jon checked only the grammar or the format of the RFCs. Nothing could be further from the truth, not that he did not check it, but in addition, being the corporate memory, Jon had indicated many times to authors that earlier work had treated the same subject, and that their work would be improved by learning about that earlier work."

...

" Our foundation and infrastructure of standards was the secret weapon that won the war. Jon created it, using the RFC mechanism initiated by Steve Crocker. It was Jon who immediately realized their importance, and the need for someone to act as the curator, and volunteered.

The lightning speed with which Microsoft joined the Internet was not possible without the quality of the existing standards that were so well documented. During the transition from ARPA, through the NSF, to the commercial world there was a point in which the trivial funding required for the smooth operation of editing and distributing the RFCs was in doubt. At that time the prospect of not having funds to run this operation was very real. Finally the problem was solved and the process suffered no interruption. What most of the involved agencies and managers did not know is that there was never a danger of any interruption. Jon would have done it even with no external funding. If they did not pay him to do it, he would have paid them to let him do it. For him it was not a job, it was labor of love."

" When fancy formatting creeped into the Internet community, Jon resisted the temptation to allow fancy formats for RFCs. Instead, he insisted on them being in ASCII, easy to e-mail, guaranteed to be readable anywhere in the world. The instant availability and usability of RFCs was much more important to him than how fancy they looked."
by mlyle | 2025-10-19 19:15:35+00:00
> Just to be clear, are you saying the only life work that you can find fulfillment in is work that can be perfectly automated and handled by AI?

No. I'm not saying that applies to me, but it may be getting dangerously close to many people. During my career, I've done CS, EE, controls, optics, and now I teach high school.

I do worry about CS in particular, though. If one's happy place is doing computer science, that's getting pretty hard.

LLMs feel to me like a 60th percentile new college grad now (but with some advantages: very cheap, very fast, no social cost to ask to try again or do possibly empty/speculative work). Sure, you can't turn them loose on a really big code base or fail to supervise it, but you can't do that with new graduates, either.

I worry about how 2026's graduates are going to climb the beginning of the skill ladder. And to the extent that tools get better, this problem gets worse.

I also worry about a lot of work that is "easy to automate" but the human in the loop is very valuable. Some faculty use LLMs to write recommendation letters. Many admissions committees now use LLMs to evaluate recommendation letters. There's this interchange that looks like human language replacing a process where a human would at least spend a few minutes thinking about another human's story. The true purpose of the mechanism has been lost, and it's been replaced with something harsh, unfeeling, and arbitrary.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-19 19:16:18+00:00
Exactly this. The article (and most of the discussion) is about choices in a marketplace. Consumption of goods and services. Freedom to me is much more about the ability to pursue one's own life goals, what to study, what things to devote one's life to, where to live, how to practice religion or other systems of values, etc.

Talking about freedom in terms of a selection of products in a marketplace seems very shallow.
by pcurve | 2025-10-19 19:16:21+00:00
What I find fascinating is, everyone is making the same exact points:

1. Yes, there is a bubble, but it's not the same. Companies are profitable.

2. It may burst, but this may go on for another 2+ years. No one knows.

3. Even after the burst, we would have valuable AI infrastructure, just like all the excess internet capacities after the Dotcom.

Base on this, I think the bubble will burst sooner. Sentiment can shift real quick.
by axiolite | 2025-10-19 19:16:46+00:00
I've found cheap after-market thermostats to have short lifetimes... Original lasted 20 years... Replacement started misbehaving in just 2 years.

So now my policy is to retrofit all old refrigerators with digital STC-1000 thermostats. A bit more work to cut out some plastic, split the hot wire and tap into a neutral wire (easy enough to follow the bulb) but cheaper, super reliable, and gives very consistent and highly controllable results.

Two such upgraded refrigerators are still working without an issue several years later. Though both required replacing the relay (with a solid state relay/capacitor unit) at about the same time, and one after replacement of the evaporator fan motor due to noise issues.
by iamlintaoz | 2025-10-19 19:18:18+00:00
That is right. We leverage some of the AGPL MongoDB code for the parser, as indicated by the License. Our own code can be licensed differently, see a previous discussion on Hacker News [1]. The Mongo API are reasonably stable over the last few years, only seeing very minor changes. Most of the later versions improved upon performance and transactions, which we support natively with our underlying technologies. Still, if you have any specific API that you feel is needed, we'd be happy to implement and we welcome community contributions.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937978
by onraglanroad | 2025-10-19 19:18:20+00:00
I don't think they're that niche. If you want to know what an email address can contain or what a cname should be, just read the RFC.

They're surprisingly easy to read and I'd encourage any younger readers to have a look at ones that are appropriate to your field. You'll almost certainly learn something new and it's good to have a grasp of these fundamentals.
by wffurr | 2025-10-19 19:18:38+00:00
>> that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning

This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.
by dataflow | 2025-10-19 19:18:52+00:00
> it was absolutely wild to me how many people were just there for the Mona Lisa

> It seems like such a waste for people to fawn over that one painting and pretty much ignore all the other masterpieces you can see there

I think you're making the rather large assumption that everyone is into art in the first place, and thus find it surprising that they would fail to appreciate everything other than the Mona Lisa.

In reality, I suspect a lot of folks just weren't going to go to the museum at all otherwise. They only go to see the Mona Lisa, not because they think it's a particularly magnificent piece of art, but simply because:

(a) they don't want to look silly saying they visited Paris but didn't see the most famous painting in the world there, and/or

(b) the whole world talks about it, and they naturally want to experience whatever it is, to maybe see what all the fuss is about.

Such reasons are pretty natural, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the intrinsic merits of -- or appreciation of -- the Mona Lisa relative to whatever else is there. It could've just been a hole in the wall, and if it had been the most famous thing in the world, it would've prompted a similar reaction.
by kif | 2025-10-19 19:18:53+00:00
In my opinion there is a problem when said robot relies on piracy to learn how to do stuff.

If you are going to use my work without permission to build such a robot, then said robot shouldn’t exist.

On the other hand a jack of all trades robot is very different from all the advancements we have had so far. If the robot can do anything, in the best case scenario we have billions of people with lots of free time. And that doesn’t seem like a great thing to me. Doubt that’s ever gonna happen, but still.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-19 19:18:56+00:00
If retweets aren’t endorsements, artistic/literary depictions aren’t meant to promote the person or personages being so portrayed.

The map is not the territory anymore than the mapmaker is God. Holding a mirror up to society does not make one Narcissus.

For what it’s worth, Socrates wasn’t very popular in polite society of his time and place either, but rather reviled and given an ultimatum: repudiate your interrogatory work of our society, or die in exile. He chose the latter on his own terms via quaffing hemlock, and he went down in infamy.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-19 19:18:58+00:00
> which is why the whole distro zoo and "stick it to the man" theatre has always been a nightmare.

The real obnoxiousness is that Ubuntu doesn't keep these desktop and otherwise specialized variants partially in-house like they once did. It isn't like they don't have the money or the staff. It's just not part of their world takeover plan anymore; no deviation allowed.

Just get away from Ubuntu, install Debian, and choose XFCE when installing. Please.
by basilikum | 2025-10-19 19:20:37+00:00
It can fail mid-way of course, but it really shouldn't corrupt in any other way. HTTPS is authenticated after all and malicious manipulation is harder to defend against than accidental corruption. But this is reality and you can have bugs and errors outside the transport of course. Your file system could corrupt data, your drive could be bad etc.

For security you want signatures with a known, trusted key.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-19 19:20:40+00:00
Go and actually look at the outcomes of the people that lived through the great depression or the many many bank runs that preceded it.

(or anything to do with the displacement of peasant to the towns)

How many of those works displaced survived the winter? You know they lost their homes as well right? Those dustbowlers, how were their life chances?

Sure new jobs were created, and the mechanisation boom that stared in the 40s and lasted through to the 70s was _brilliant_

But thats not going to happen again with AI, where are the jobs going to come from, much less decent paying ones.
by bastawhiz | 2025-10-19 19:20:46+00:00
We'd need a real breakthrough in physics to have such a technology that works at a scale even remotely comparable to what a low end digital CPU can do today. The thing is, there's not even any real evidence (at least to my knowledge) that there are useful threads that researchers know to pull on that could yield such a technology. Emulating analog hardware with digital hardware in anticipation of some kind of breakthrough isn't going to have any material benefits in the short to medium term.
by cjensen | 2025-10-19 19:21:27+00:00
This is asking too much. The management of trim, reallocation, wear leveling, and so much more is very complex. It's a full software stack hiding behind the abstraction of NVMe. Every manufacturer is running a different stack with different features and tradeoffs. The "stats" the author is asking for would be entirely different between manufacturers, and I doubt there is that much to be gained from peering behind the curtain.
by simoncion | 2025-10-19 19:21:35+00:00
> I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.

You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.

> What's a business day?

From the FAQ on the page linked to by guerby:

What are the business days/hours for support? Ticket support provided by the Proxmox Enterprise support team is available on Austrian business days (CET/CEST timezone) for all Basic, Standard, or Premium subscribers, please see all details in the Subscription Agreement. For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language.

Check out the actual FAQ entry to chase down the links embedded in those words that I'm too lazy to try to reproduce.
by swat535 | 2025-10-19 19:22:44+00:00
> Jobs aren't just business. Humans derive a lot of meaning from being useful and valued.

No one is feeling useful or valued working a double shift at Walmart in order to put food on the table.

Feeling useful and valued can come from other means such as caring for the elderly and doing volunteer work.

Majority of people work to simply survive because without it, they would end up homeless and hungry.
by great_wubwub | 2025-10-19 19:23:31+00:00
> It's bog standard for employees...in the UK and for multinationals including American companies

^^^ that's the thing. Contracts are by country, not by company ownership.

I worked for an F100 multinational US-based company for many years. My coworkers in the EU (including the UK at the time) got contracts. A buddy who was a bona fide rock star in the US got one. I know VPs got them.

I got nothing, as did the vast, vast majority of my US-based friends. And while I'm not a rock star, I'm pretty well known within my niche and am not a bottom-feeder. It really is as bleak as you might fear.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-19 19:24:02+00:00
> Phase, this is the biggest missing piece in the video imho.

It's why I like full-range speakers—no crossover. At most you might throw a cap on a super-tweeter (yes, even so-called full range need help on the top and bottom ends of the spectrum—so super-tweeters + sub-woofers). Complicated crossovers destroy the phase.

Without crossovers/EQ the more stripped-down full-range setup preserves what the Hi-Fi nerds call "soundstage". (A good full-range setup: imagine the "soundstage" you get from wearing headphones—but without wearing headphones.)

Those seeking a full-range setup (especially with a tube amplifier) are kind of adjusting for EQ simply by the type of speakers/drivers and placement. (And to be sure they're not going for a flat, studio-monitor response but what sounds good).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-19 19:24:18+00:00
O_DIRECT is separate from synchronization. There is no guarantee that O_DIRECT writes are durable, though a subset of hardware may work this way in fact.

The practical purpose of O_DIRECT is to have precise visibility and control over what is in memory, what is on disk, and any inflight I/O operations. This opens up an entire category of workload-aware execution scheduling optimizations that become crucial for performance as storage sizes increase.
by araes | 2025-10-19 19:24:28+00:00
Was curious, so I tried it in several different AI detectors to see what they returned.

Most seemed to believe it was approximately 2/3 AI generated text. Primarily the first several paragraphs. Last, and second to last scored the best as "human". ZeroGPT said it was only 5% likely AI written. Couple sentences.

CopyLeaks, 61.9%. https://app.copyleaks.com/dashboard/v1

GPTZero, 80%, 64/80 sentences. https://gptzero.me/

ZeroGPT, 5%. https://www.zerogpt.com/

Not sure if that means its actually AI written, cause there's lots of argument about false positives. Also, it's software. In many ways it seems like a lot of that field / genre produces articles and writers that then have a very "structured" writing style. Read a lot of HN. Write articles that place on HN. Tailor your writing style so it gets upvotes on HN.

It's very similar to the Youtube issues, and people making their intro, thumbnail, and splash screen before even considering article content much. Mr. Beast had a leaked article on the subject. Lots of SEO, Click-Thru-Rate, Average-View-Duration, ect... [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mrbeast-how-production-team-...
by vrighter | 2025-10-19 19:24:46+00:00
why do they keep saying "IF it fails to live up to the hype"?

It's been over a decade, it's years past the point it was supposed to put all of us out of a job. And the same problems they had on day 1 are still there, mathematically proven to be impossible to eliminate. Meanwhile ai companies are planning literally over $1 trillion to build datacenters that would require multiple nuclear reactors each. And they plan to do it in only a couple of years. Meanwhile none of them have even a concept of a plan towards profitability.

How anyone can be hyped by this situation is beyond me. Hoping really hard and having religious faith in the prophecies of the only people who stand to gain anything from any of this, doesn't change the fact that every single promise they've made has been a dud. And then they double down with another promise.

How is it even possible to be hyped?
by philistine | 2025-10-19 19:26:08+00:00
They're already working on doing exactly that. The construction work that the thieves hid with is to restore all the previous doors of the museum so they can start being used as entrances again to reduce the strain on the I.M. Pei pyramid, the modern entrance of the Louvre. Coupled with that, they're building the first temporary exhibit space of the museum, with an adjacent permanent exhibit space. That permanent exhibit's subject? Da Vinci and the Mona Lisa, with a special ticket to visit only that already in the plans.

In 10 years, bus full of tourists will go straight to the pyramid, then straight to the Da Vinci exhibit, take their goddamn selfie, and leave. The rest of the visitors will mostly enter through the historical entrances and never interact with those throngs of Mona Lisa lookie loos.

The Louvre is doing exactly what makes the most sense; they're not stupid, they're just not very fast, as is usual for a museum.
by ben_w | 2025-10-19 19:26:50+00:00
I've thought of the same analogy, but you know, I've never actually seen someone go "It's wrong about the stuff I understand, but I'll trust it anyway on everything I know nothing about". It's either:

(1) people getting caught using it to do their own jobs for them (i.e. they don't even realise it's wrong about the stuff they do understand);

(2) people who see the problems and therefore don't trust them anywhere at all (i.e. no amnesia, quite sensible reaction);

(3) people who see the problems and therefore limit their use to domains where the answers can be verified (I do this).

--

As an aside, I'm a little worried that I keep spotting turns of phrase that I associate with LLMs, for example where you write "you're absolutely right": I have no idea if that's all just us monkeys copying what we see around us (something we absolutely do), or if you're using that phrase deliberately because of the associations.

The only thing I'm confident of is that you're not doing is karma-farming with an LLM, but that's based on your other comments not sounding at all like LLMs so why would you (oh how surprising it was when I was first accused of being an LLM), but eh, dead internet theory feels more and more real…
by axiolite | 2025-10-19 19:26:51+00:00
> Some also add incredibly annoying high pitch whines. That seemingly nobody seems to notice but me.

That drove me crazy for about a week trying to figure out what the noise was coming from... Pinhole water pipe leak? Cat stuck in the flue? Once I realized what it was, I didn't mind it much. It is better than loud old compressors suddenly kicking on and burrr'ing away then stopping.
by gretch | 2025-10-19 19:27:23+00:00
Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:

Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.

I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".

On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.
by ellenhp | 2025-10-19 19:28:38+00:00
You're off base here for what may be a rather subtle reason. While I am not a marxist, I do think that the purchasing behavior of the wealthy makes much more sense when you think about things in terms of the labor theory of value.

The evidence for this is all around us. As automation of manufacturing has brought former luxuries into reach for middle-class families, those with means move on to consuming items that require more and more labor to produce. "Handmade" scented soaps. "Artisanal" cheeses. Nobody with money wants their wedding invitation to arrive at a destination with machine-canceled postage. It's tacky. Too automated, too efficient. In fact, I bet the ultra-wealthy don't even use postal mail for delivering their invitations, because it's not labor-intensive enough to be tasteful. Private couriers are probably the move. You can see this pattern over and over again once you know what to look for.

There will always be a demand for human labor, because value is a human construction. That said, the rate at which the economy will change because of AI (if the True Believers are to be believed) is probably too fast for most workers to adapt, so you may not be entirely wrong in your conclusion depending on how thing shake out, but the way you got there is bogus imo.
by moomoo11 | 2025-10-19 19:28:49+00:00
Right, that's why I always suggest anyone doing "actual" product work to use something like node-TS and Go.

node-TS for insane developer productivity (hella libraries, who really gives a fuck about NPM issues? just patch and move on) and ability to scale easily (95% of CRUD IO workloads for most companies). Need computational horsepower? Use Go for that thing, compile binary, call binary from node..

Honestly, just that alone is able to scale to millions of users and is super easy to maintain (granted the code is architected well). 95% of companies aren't really doing anything crazy, and 99% of companies are not unicorns.