MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by okanat | 2025-10-19 19:29:17+00:00
Benchmarks are alright but as an embedded engineer I first select a performance segment and then actually prioritize the hardware abilities and engineering support from the SoC manufacturer.

Before getting into benchmarks I would actually look which hardware capabilities a specific SoC supports first (eDP, HDMI or LVDS, USB ports, i2c, GPIO pins etc). Then I would check whether the manufacturer actually maintains mainline Linux kernel drivers or keeps an up-to-date downstream kernel. I look at their frequency for updates. For media systems having HW acceleration is crucial. Most ARM vendors do a crappy job of providing good open source drivers for this.

Similarly I go and check their Yocto BSPs. If I don't like their organization, that's going to affect my final decision. If it is a power-sensitive project, then the special modes and extra driver support for various sleeping modes come into play.

(Most of the time Intel just wins with those criteria because ARM ecosystem is a mess of proprietary blobs. However there are manufacturers like NXP and MediaTek who do release passable drivers and when power consumption is important they get selected or if the product is very price-sensitvie)

This website looks alright maybe for hobbyists for pure CPU loads with very well cooled systems. I don't find it very useful without the actual engineering details, adding those would massively benefit the website.
by zahlman | 2025-10-19 19:29:33+00:00
> (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)

> I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.

To be fair, it does seem to be pretty bad out there if your only definition of success is monetary.

But your general point about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control absolutely is well taken.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-19 19:29:42+00:00
Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities.

The more career-minded might call it "networking".
by Scubabear68 | 2025-10-19 19:29:48+00:00
Trying to be as kind as possible in my interpretation of the article, my take was that the author got stock on the "spherical cow" analogy early on and couldn't let it go. I think there are nuggets of good ideas here which generally tries to talk to leaky abstractions and impedance mis-matches in general between hardware and software, but the author was stuck in spherical cow mode and the words all warped toward that flawed analogy.

This is a great example of why rewrites are often important, in both English essays and blogs as well as in software development. Don't get wedded to an idea too early, and if evidence starts piling up that you're going down a bad path, be fearless and don't be afraid of a partial or even total rewrite from the ground up.
by goda90 | 2025-10-19 19:32:17+00:00
A similar tirade can be made about rain, wind, sunshine, heat and cold. Entropy happens. I think the nature of what you're saying isn't universal. Different style foundations, different kinds of ground and different kinds of trees will mean different things. Some issues can be avoided with minimal foresight. Some won't happen for decades at which point the balance of benefit vs cost comes into question. Some issues are really just expectations that many would consider unnecessary, like having a flat lawn.

Where I live in the Midwest, trees around houses is incredibly common. I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood without them.
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-10-19 19:33:17+00:00
No, they can't, EU courts would strike that in a heartbeat.

Some time ago Germans tried to tax foreign drivers on their roads, so they introduced toll, nominally for all, but also lowered the same amount another car-related tax that was paid only by Germans. EU bodies saw through the scheme just fine and now they're on hook for returning the toll money to anyone still keeping the invoice/receipt.
by spit2wind | 2025-10-19 19:33:22+00:00
This is a good starter. Technically, it's Lisp and not Scheme, but once you understand one, you get the other. The benefit of Emacs Lisp is you can immediately play with it by modifying Emacs to meet your needs.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/eintr.html
by jibal | 2025-10-19 19:33:26+00:00
Too much empty space. I spent six weeks doing a solo ride in France -- Versailles, Chartres, Loire Valley rivers and castles, eastern Brittany, St. Malo, Cherbourg, St. Mont Michel, Honfleur, D-Day beaches, Bayoux, Chantilly, Paris (where I caught the Tour de France finishing at the Champs-Elysées) ... amazing experience.
by ks2048 | 2025-10-19 19:34:17+00:00
Careful what you say, I'm guessing Barron is a lurker here - based on comments by his dad about his aptitude for technology:

> “I turn off his laptop, I said, 'Oh good,' and I go back five minutes later, he's got his laptop. I said, 'How'd you do that?' " he recalled. "'None of your business, Dad.' "He’s got an unbelievable aptitude in technology," the president added.
by sthlmb | 2025-10-19 19:34:38+00:00
Hey! So I was quite surprised to see my site posted on here so soon after hitting the "go live" button, and thanks for your comment.

I wrote a blog post about why I made the site at https://bret.dk/introducing-sbc-compare/ if anyone's interested, but to TL;DR it, I didn't set out to create a site like this, it was a side quest after creating the automation and database to support my reviews, which do indeed focus on the hobbyist trying to explore Raspberry Pi SBCs and their many alternatives.

I have full specifications and hardware capabilities hidden behind a feature flag at the moment as I'm working my way through adding all of that data (currently at 80 SBCs in the database, and I'm only adding those I own and have run tests on) so there should be something similar to what you're asking for soon. Thanks again!
by tobias3 | 2025-10-19 19:35:02+00:00
On the contrary. Btrfs had a long standing issue where you could make the filesystem checksums not match with non-stable O_DIRECT writes (so even with a single disk).

This has only recently been fixed by disabling O_DIRECT for files with checksums (so the default): https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/54c7002136a047b7140c3647...

ZFS has O_DIRECT do nothing as well, as far as I know.
by mrconter11 | 2025-10-19 19:35:20+00:00
I created a calculator that scores your life on objective factors across 12 categories (career, health, relationships, sleep, exercise, mental health, finances, etc.).

The premise is that if you score high on most areas, you have few barriers to wanting to exist. More importantly, maintaining these behaviors demonstrates functional capacity. You can't score high if you're genuinely not functioning.

Each question is rated 0-10 where 5 is average. Z-score transformation converts ratings to population percentiles, so a 7/10 becomes 84th percentile. Final score is the arithmetic mean. All data stays local.

Would love feedback on whether anything is missing. I am also curious if you agree on the premise. :)
by tw04 | 2025-10-19 19:35:37+00:00
> You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.

Any serious enterprise software or hardware company absolutely has a 24/7 support option. They all have a base option that is not 24/7 for a significantly lower price.

There’s no way you’re replacing VMware in any company of any size without 24/7 support.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-19 19:36:28+00:00
> but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.

But this is usually deceptively explained as being because they are far more expensive to make, when it is really 1) because of economies of scale when they are made in smaller runs often by smaller companies, or 2) intentionally segmented at that price by the same companies that sell the disposable stuff as a high-margin luxury option.

If large companies were forced into a traditional quality standard, the cost increase wouldn't be 5x, it would be more like 1.5x. It might creep up after a while, as the runs became shorter because the products weren't built to fail anymore.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-19 19:36:33+00:00
I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing.

I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences.

I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
by ijk | 2025-10-19 19:36:42+00:00
There is an awful lot of "looking for my keys under the street light" going around these days. I've seen a bunch of projects proposed that are either based on existing data (but have no useful application of that data) or have a specific application (but lack the data and evaluation required to perform that task). It doesn't matter how good your data is if no one has any use for things like it, and it doesn't matter how neat your application would be if the data doesn't match.

I'm including things like RL metrics as data here, for lack of a better umbrella term, though the number of proposed projects that I've seen that decided that ongoing evaluation of actual effectiveness was a distraction from the more important task of having expensive engineers make expensive servers into expensive heatsinks is maddening.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-19 19:36:53+00:00
Ternary is indeed an enticing, yet ultimately flawed dream.

Quaternary allows for:

True, “Yes” False, “No” Undetermined, “Maybe”, “Either”, True or False

And:

Contradiction, “Invalid”, “Both”, True and False

For logical arithmetic, I.e. reducing tree expressions, True and False are enough.

But in algebraic logic, where more general constraint topologies are possible, the other two values are required.

What is the logical value of the isolated expression “(x)”? I.e. “x” unconstrained?

Or the value of the expression “(x = not x)”?

None of 4-valued logic’s values are optional or spurious for logical algebra.

—-

Many people don’t know this, but all modern computers are quaternary, with 4 quaternit bytes. We don’t just let anyone in on that. Too much power, too much footgun jeopardy, for the unwashed masses and Python “programmers”.

The tricky thicket of web standards can’t be upgraded without introducing mayhem. But Apple’s internal-only docs reveal macOS and Swift have been fully quaternary compliant on their ARM since the M1.

On other systems you can replicate this functionality, at your own risk and effort, by accessing each quaternit with their two bit legacy isomorphic abstraction. Until Rust ships safe direct support.

—-

It will revolutionize computing, from the foundations up, when widely supported.

Russell’s paradox in math is resolved. Given a set S = “The set of all sets that don’t contain themselves”, the truth value of “Is S in S” in quaternary logic, reduces to Contradiction, which indeed it is. I.e. True and False. Making S a well formed, consistent entity, and achieving full set and logical completeness with total closure. So consistency is returned to Set theory and Russell’s quest for a unification of mathematics with just sets and logic becomes possible again. He would have been ecstatic. Gödel be damned! [0]

Turing’s Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that 2-valued bit machines are inherently inconsistent or incomplete.

Given a machine M, applied to the statement S = “M will say this statement is False”, or “M(S) = False”, it has to fail.

If M(S) returns True, we can see that S is actually False. If M(S) returns False, we can see that actually S is True.

But for a quaternary Machine M4 evaluating S4 = “M4(S4) = False”, M4(S4) returns Contradiction. True and False. Which indeed we can see S4 is. If it is either True or False, we know it is the other as well.

Due to the equivalence of Undecidability and the Turing Halting Problem, resolving one resolves the other. And so quaternary machines are profoundly more powerful and well characterized than binary machines. Far better suited for the hardest and deepest problems in computing.

It’s easy to see why the developers of Rust and Haskell are so adamant about getting this right.

[0] https://tinyurl.com/godelbedamned
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-10-19 19:36:53+00:00
I’m more DevOps but we have issues wear we discuss the spherical cow of build pipelines like we have a handful of static environments in the same cloud account with the same permissions and database requirements that does not stand up to encountering the actual requirements where we have destructible and static environments, an environment in a different cloud account for our customer to review per contract requirements, and a prod environment with heavy security and data protection requirements hosted by a entirely different cloud vendor with bad infrastructure support resources.
by srean | 2025-10-19 19:37:48+00:00
I may be very easy to amuse but but Spilhaus projection for compact Hausdorff space (the surface of the Earth) tickled my drying bones.

Seems the landmasses are indeed housing off all that spilled water.

Humor aside, the first thing it reminded me of is the Quincunx projection. There all the landmass is at the centre and is housed off by the oceans. And you can tile Euclidean space with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection
by pdimitar | 2025-10-19 19:38:29+00:00
That argument is compelling only at a first glance IMO. If you take a look at it another way then:

1. The self-hosting sweat and nerves are spent only once, 80% of them anyway (you still have to maintain every now and then e.g. upgrade).

2. The cloud setup will require babysitting as well and as such the argument that you only pay someone salary when self-hosting does not hold water.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff between (a) the short- or long-term thinking of leadership, (b) in-house expertise and (c) how much money are you willing to throw at the problem for the promised shorter timelines -- and that one is assuming you'll find high-quality cloud hosting engineers which, believe me, is far from a given.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-19 19:38:58+00:00
In my earliest days of using the Web, I used lynx. The text was light grey, and the background was black, for that was what my system defaulted to and I liked it well-enough.

Later, I used Netscape. Some of the more prominent settings[1] were for default colors: For text, links, visited links, and background. I very quickly made it white on black (but kept the blue/purple links unchanged).

But that was just me attempting to stick to my own familiarities.

For most others, the default background in those days was also not white; it was instead grey (#c0c0c0, [2], [3]).

Backgrounds defaulted to grey with Netscape all the way to the end, with Netscape Communicator 4.8 still defaulting to grey [4] at its 2002 release. Mosaic was also consistently grey [except for on the Macintosh], and so was IBM's WebExplorer (the forgotten independently-developed web browser that shipped with their forgotten desktop operating system).

Even Internet Explorer remained grey by default until the release of version 4, in the last half of 1997. [5]

But you're right, of course: There's no need for dark (or grey) mode here on HN. It's a simple-enough affair for a person of sufficient wit to change it to whatever they want, in-browser, here in 2025.

---

[1]: https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_Link_Appearance.h...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302205

[3]: https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/reports/soasis-slides/colors.html

[4]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_Communicato...

[5]: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20110330_ie_history/
by lwhi | 2025-10-19 19:39:49+00:00
I think it's more productive to think in terms of 'owners of public enterprise', rather than elites

There's a theatrical push-pull negotiation narrative that's replayed to us, but do you honestly feel that government could push back strongly on _any issue_ it deemed necessary to?

Public enterprise is so firmly embedded in every corner of Government.

Everything in life involves compromise.

Authority requires the possibility of edict above compromise; which in my mind is no longer possible.
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-10-19 19:41:08+00:00
Mostly bitching to corporate IT to make it possible to use alternative tools and workflows.

Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”.

This is not my experience at one company but multiple good, name brand companies that generally do good engineering and software work.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-19 19:41:16+00:00
"One feature that sets certain rice cookers above the rest is “fuzzy logic,” or the ability of an onboard computer to detect how quickly the rice is cooking or to what level doneness it has reached, then make real time adjustments to time and temperature accordingly. " ... From: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/zojirushi-rice-cooker

It is a term that is still quite a fair bit for marketing. I think in this case (zojirushi) it isn't trinary, rather some probalistic/baysian system to derive a boolean from a number of factors (time, temp, and so on).
by axiolite | 2025-10-19 19:41:43+00:00
Neither the article nor the linked sources even attempt to prove that modern appliances are less durable or having more issues than old appliances.

It seems to be just complaining about "computer circuit boards" in appliances, much the way people did about electronic ignition in cars, despite actually resulting in a huge increase in engine reliability because solid state has so very little to fail.

I mean, maybe people throw out a perfectly working toaster when it can't connect to Wi-Fi anymore, (or take their car to the dealer when their entertainment system acts-up) but that's not an actual reliability issue, IMHO.
by gdiamos | 2025-10-19 19:41:59+00:00
I agree this is the main case where it makes sense.

But a recent trend that cut into the cost savings is that foundation model companies have started releasing small models. So you can build a use case with qwen 235B, then shrink down to 30B, or even all the way down to 0.6B if you really want to.

The smaller models lose some accuracy, but some use cases are solvable even by these smaller and much more efficient models.
by alecsm | 2025-10-19 19:42:15+00:00
This uptime monitor must be streaming illegal football (soccer) because it's blocked in Spain.

IP Provider Status 188.114.97.5 AS13335 (CLOUDFLARENET, US) Blocked 188.114.96.5 AS13335 (CLOUDFLARENET, US) Blocked

And the funny thing is free football is working as always. I know because a friend is watching a game right now while he comments on HN.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-19 19:43:16+00:00
This is a disingenuous request. We can point to any sentence we think illustrates it and you will simply say “no that is not what it means” and we’re right back where we started.

The other person (and I) believe what you wrote whitewashes the issue. You obviously think it does not. There is nothing we can point to that would make you go “oh damn you’re right.“
by DiggyJohnson | 2025-10-19 19:43:21+00:00
We keep the happiest pet cows in the old field in front of the family farmhouse after the farm downsized and sold most of the land so the city and state wouldn’t try to include it in the house plot sorts front yard acreage.

Different state but I think a similar conundrum. They’re old dairy cows living their best life.
by addaon | 2025-10-19 19:43:52+00:00
> If there was a study suggesting that static types don't add enough safety to justify tradeoffs, you might consider phasing them out.

Perhaps. Speaking personally now (instead of trying to generalize for the industry), I feel like almost all of the success stories about increasing code quality per unit time have been stories about putting defect detection and/or elimination left in the development process -- that is, towards more and deeper static analysis of both requirements and code. (The standout exception to this in my mind is the adoption of automatic HIL testing, which one can twist as moving testing activity left a bit, but really stands alone as adding an activity that massively reduced manual testing effort.) The only thing that I can see removing static types is formal proofs over value sets (which, of course, can be construed as types) giving more confidence up front, at the cost of more developer effort to provide the proofs (and write the code in a way amenable to proving) than simple type proofs do.
by bdangubic | 2025-10-19 19:44:45+00:00
this is too funny. you can leak just about anything you want and there will never be any consequences. you probably don’t want to deal with COPPA stuff but outside of that you can leak just about anything you want without any legal consequences (personal ones, the business may close but that is also unlikely, see experian for good example of incident that should have absolutely shut the whole business down but of course we know how that plays out…)
by ben_w | 2025-10-19 19:45:02+00:00
Small quibble, doesn't challenge your overall point, but as I understand it their revenue is somewhat higher than you say.

The Open AI revenue was ~$4 billion for the first half of the year; Anthropic recently reported a rate (which isn't total revenue, I know) equivalent to about $10 billion/year; NVIDIA's sales are supposed to be up 78% this quarter due to AI sales, reaching $39.33 billion, so plausibly ($39.33/1.78)*0.78 ~= $17 billion from AI in that quarter (rate, again yes I know, of $68 billion/year). So I can believe AI is order-of $100 billion/year economically… to US businesses with customers almost everywhere important except possibly China.

But just to re-iterate, this doesn't change your point. Even 100 B / 30 T is only one third of a percent.
by dang | 2025-10-19 19:45:30+00:00
(Very) little bits of past discussion. Others?

The Spilhaus World Ocean Map in a Square (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36498614 - June 2023 (2 comments)

A far-sighted Minnesota scientist pointed America toward the future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35756976 - April 2023 (2 comments)

A world map that’s all about oceans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816910 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
by ivape | 2025-10-19 19:45:37+00:00
There's obviously someone involved on the inside, at least at the most basic "paid off" level. This is probably the number one security lapse in any and all organizations. Someone can be corrupted. I still hold that some guard was paid off in the Epstein situation as well. It's the simplest answer and unless it's irrefutably proven false, then that should be the main line of investigation (in this case and many others).
by leeoniya | 2025-10-19 19:45:57+00:00
if LattePanda for $178 is on the list might as well throw in the Quieter 4C:

https://www.amazon.com/MeLE-Mini-Quieter-4C-Astrophotography...

very impressive N100 device. i run EndeavourOS with KDE/plasma on mine. i swapped out to a faster and more efficient single sided 4TB nvme.

it's fanless and idles at ~4.5W according to the USB-C cable's lcd power readout.