MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lproven | 2025-10-29 12:10:23+00:00
I think I see where you are coming from now.

You are not saying "there was no uncontended RAM in the Amiga", which is what I understood you to mean. You are saying "the Amiga did have uncontended RAM but it did not ship with any as stock."

Is that right?

If so, yes, true, but the key things here IMHO are:

1. The Amiga was designed and built as a games console, one which happened to be able to do other things. It was primarily marketed and sold as a games machine.

I wrote about an Amiga-compatible OS recently:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/aros_live/

And the comments are from slightly baffled readers asking if this is any good for running their old Amiga games, or how this makes gaming any easier.

(It is not and it does not, but that is what people perceive the Amiga as being for in the 21st century.)

2. In the real 1980s market, the Amiga's glory was to a large extent stolen by the Atari ST. The ST was a much more limited machine but it was vastly better than any 8-bit machine, and an entry-level ST was more usable than an entry-level Amiga.

ST games were pretty good for the mid-1980s when a lot of people still had ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 level kit.

Many games companies targeted the lower-end machine and ported to the higher-end one.

The Amiga was competing with the cheaper, simpler ST in the market, and keeping the costs down became imperative. That's why Commodore didn't add more hardware or more RAM to the base-level Amiga. In fact for the Amiga 600 took the spec of the A500 and cut it down.

I am not arguing that some Fast RAM as stock wouldn't have been good. It would. But probably irrelevant to most gamers, and probably would have hurt the machine's sales.
by tinfoilhatter | 2025-10-29 12:10:50+00:00
Fair point and thank you for sharing it! It definitely does feel far off in that aspect. I suppose though, that if we are all trapped in a false reality it is impossible to know (without escaping the false reality) how advanced base reality actually is. I always interpreted the whole jacking into the Matrix thing, metaphorically, but with a literal interpretation the OP's comment makes much more sense to me. Thanks again!
by happymellon | 2025-10-29 12:10:55+00:00
> If you're a finance professional then there's no alternative to Excel

Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".

Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.

The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-29 12:10:59+00:00
Right, but dogs are nevertheless somewhat discriminating. When a kid, I fed my dog on butcher's off-cuts which I'd get for free. Usually they'd be meaty and fresh enough for us humans to eat (but we never had need and ate better).

Occasionally, the butcher gave me meat that whilst not 'off' was a little stale and had a trace of smell about it and my dogs noticed the fact. They'd eat it with reluctance and or only when very hungry. A quick and almost miraculous solution was to pour boiling water over the meat which would turn its outside grey or brownish (it being still raw in the middle). The dogs would then instantly eat it, in fact I had to be careful to let it cool down so they wouldn't scold themselves.
by BirAdam | 2025-10-29 12:12:17+00:00
If only this were true.

Stuff in Linux changes. Not quite as frequently, but it does change and in major ways that require significant amounts of relearning.

Example 1: audio

OSS -> Alsa -> Random Layers on top of Alsa -> Pulse -> Pipewire

Example 2: init

SysV -> OpenRC || runit || s6 || upstart -> systemd

Examples 3: desktops

KDE 1/2/3 -> KDE 4/Plasma

GNOME 1 -> GNOME 2 -> GNOME3+

Example 4: networking

ifconfig -> ip

Example 5:

Xfree86 -> Xorg -> Wayland

Now, it's important to note that people were attempting to resolve issues. The transitions weren't always clean, but the results are usually great. For example, moving to pipewire is possible the greatest advancement of audio ever. Linux audio finally doesn't suck. Xfree86 to Xorg was likewise great. For the last few years of X11, I usually didn't have to modify the config. I kind of don't care about init systems most of the time. The only major complaint for systemd is that disk I/O on embedded systems is kind of an issue, but things like Alpine are better there and Alpine doesn't use systemd.

With that said, I think the real issue is that people dislike advancements that break things. Early in Pulse's life, people absolutely hated it. Early in Wayland's life, people absolutely hated it, but it wasn't default so no one complained. With Windows and macOS, stuff changes seemingly constantly and randomly and breaks things, so people hate it. Saying, however, that Linux doesn't change seems a little daft to me. It changes faster than anything else on small levels, and different distributions have breaking changes at different rates.
by anymouse123456 | 2025-10-29 12:12:56+00:00
I can't speak to the particular browser application. I haven't installed it and probably never will, but the language around text interfaces makes the OP sound... uninformed.

Graphical applications can be more beautiful and discoverable, but they limit the user to only actions the authors have implemented and deployed.

Text applications are far more composable and expressive, but they can be extremely difficult to discover and learn.

We didn't abandon the shell or text interfaces. Many of us happily live in text all day every day.

There are many tasks that suffer little by being limited and benefit enormously by being discoverable. These are mostly graphical now.

There are many tasks that do not benefit much by spatial orientation and are a nightmare when needlessly constrained. These tasks benefit enormously by being more expressive and composable. These are still often implemented in text.

The dream is to find a new balance between these two modes and our recent advances open up new territory for exploring where they converge and diverge.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 12:13:37+00:00
I'm not very well versed in macOS internals, but I was a tech lead of a Debian derivative. I also write HPC software and manage relevant infrastructure from metal to user , so I believe I know some details about processor architectures, general hardware, Linux and *NIX systems in general.

The user-visible layer of an operating system is generally one of the simpler layers when it comes to code and maintain since it's build upon abstractions. However, the libraries powering these layers, esp. math-heavy and hardware-interacting ones are much more complex due to the innate complexity of the hardware in general.

Keeping multiple copies of a library, in two different architectures (even if it only changes in bit-length), where this simple bit-change needs different implementation strategies to work correctly is a pain by itself (for more information, ask Linux Kernel devs since they're also phasing out x86).

Moreover, x86 and x86_64 is a completely different mode on the processor. On top of that, x86 only mode is called "protected mode" and x86_64 is called "long mode", and running x86 under x86_64 is a sub-mode of "long mode", and is already complex enough at silicon level.

Same complexities apply to ARM and other processor architectures. Silicon doesn't care about the ISA much.

We have seen the effort of increasing performance on superscalar, out of order processors opened a new, untapped family of side-channel/speculative attacks already. So processors are complex, software is complex, and multiple architectures on the same hardware is exponentially complex. If you want to see how the sausages made, you can also research how Windows handles backwards compatibility problem (hint: by keeping complete Windows copies under a single Windows installation in ELI5 terms).

So, the impressive thing was making these multi-arch installations running for quite some time. We need to be able let things go and open some software and hardware budget for new innovations and improvements.

Addenda: Funnily, games are one of the harder targets for multi-arch systems since they are both math-heavy and somewhat closer to the hardware than most applications and are very sensitive to architecture changes. Scientific/computational software is also another family, and this interestingly contains databases and office software. Excel also had a nasty floating point bug back in time, and 32/64 bit installations of Microsoft Office has some feature differences since the beginning.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-10-29 12:13:55+00:00
I have nothing to do with tech bros.

Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.

Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
by JKCalhoun | 2025-10-29 12:14:38+00:00
I was surprised too. Some soon-to-be-laid-off-engineers and I worked for days on a 5000 piece puzzle and I thought that was huge. And I found out that 50,000 piece puzzles exist.

(In fact I didn't get laid off — wrote about it here: https://engineersneedart.com/blog/puzzle/puzzle.html)
by Filligree | 2025-10-29 12:14:56+00:00
Safety isn’t really optional. Up until now, we’ve had no choice but to run C and accept the bugs; now we’re allowed to also run it safely.

Yes, this means that C is one of the slower languages around. That’s fine; computers are fast. If you want to write high-performance code, there are plenty of faster languages to do it with.
by yoz-y | 2025-10-29 12:15:06+00:00
As the siblings said.

I think we are close to Wally or Fifteen Million Credits, maybe even almost at the Oasis (as seen by IOI). But we have made little progress in direct brain stimulation of senses. We are also extremely far from robots that can do unsupervised complex work (work that requires a modicum of improvisation).

Of course we might already be in matrix or a simulation, but if that’s the case it doesn’t really change much.
by troupo | 2025-10-29 12:16:28+00:00
> Why have the LLMs „learned“ to write PRs (and other stuff) this way?

They didn't learn how to write PRs. They "learned" how to write text.

Just like generic images coming out of OpenAI have the same style and yellow tint, so does text. It averages down to a basic tiktok/threads/whatever comment.

Plus whatever bias training sets and methodology introduced
by rayiner | 2025-10-29 12:16:52+00:00
These studies are misleading, because they try to create race signals by using names that are also class signals: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-suggests-resea....

Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
by nicce | 2025-10-29 12:16:56+00:00
> A large part of the different views on this topic are due to the way people estimate the amount of saved effort and money because you're pushing some admin duties to the cloud provider instead of doing this yourself. And people come to vastly different conclusions on this aspect

This applies only if you had an extra customer that pays the difference. Basically argument only holds if you can’t take more customers because upkeeping the infrastructure takes too much time or you need to hire extra person which takes more money than AWS bill difference.
by nmcfarl | 2025-10-29 12:17:14+00:00
Interestingly, I have yet to find I have the horrible feedback problem people are talking about in this thread with my APP3, but I do in my Honeywell syncs, about 1 day in 3.

And as I wear glasses all hearing protection in the earmuff style block less noise than the APP3 - though I normally wear both.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 12:17:42+00:00
Answer: bank/financial apps, enterprise apps, government apps and copyrighted media (music, video, games, books, ...).

Those are the players that demand excessive control over end-user devices, and thus the ultimate driver behind the problem we're discussing.

It's not that a new mobile platform couldn't possibly succeed. It's an open platform that cannot, because aforementioned players don't want it, and without them, mobile devices lose 90%+ of their usefulness, dooming them to become mere gadgets instead of (crappy, toylike) tools for everyday use.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-29 12:17:45+00:00
I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say. I think it probably _is_ fair to say that women now produce more culture than men, in aggregate, but I'm not sure that that is evidence for your thing. Like, I'm not seeing cause and effect here.

(Granted, I don't totally buy into their claims that society is more conformist than it used to be in the first place; it's clear that _crime_ has fallen, but there's no particular reason that that should be joined at the hip to non-conformism and their evidence for cultural stagnation is far weaker than their evidence on crime).
by micvicfaust9 | 2025-10-29 12:17:51+00:00
AI systems learn patterns. They don’t learn principle.

The Faust Baseline™ is an experiment in moral infrastructure — a correction layer that applies constitutional principles to AI dialogue. It doesn’t filter content or rewrite outputs; instead, it structures responses through the same lens that governs human conduct: truth, accountability, and rule of law.

The idea came from frustration with how quickly AI models drift into bias or flattery when pushed. We wanted to see what would happen if an AI had to reason like a citizen, not a mirror.

We used large language models (ChatGPT + Copilot) and layered a rule-based architecture over them — something between a linguistic arbitration engine and a constitutional interpreter. The result is a conversational model that can justify its tone, cite its reasoning, and correct itself when it drifts.

It’s still experimental, but it’s been running daily for months in production settings. Everything is documented openly here: https://www.intelligent-people.org

We’d appreciate technical or philosophical feedback — especially from those working in ethics, law, or human-AI alignment.
by agile-gift0262 | 2025-10-29 12:17:51+00:00
The OS on desktop situation isn't comparable to the OS on mobile situation. You can buy any PC and expect being able to replace its OS. On phones, you have to look for the ones where it's possible, and depending on the phone, it's possible despite the efforts from the manufacturers for not allowing it.

Also in PC OSs, there isn't a corporation dictating what programs you are allowed to install. In iOS there is, and soon in Android too.

IMO, these corporations have managed to amass an amount of power where there's no longer consumer freedom. Therefore, there's no free market. We have reached a point where the law must intervene to restore capitalism.
by vintermann | 2025-10-29 12:19:45+00:00
The publishers almost certainly prefer that you play these "AAA" titles on console, but if you insist, they'll settle for making your Windows as console-like as possible.

I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-29 12:20:33+00:00
Notice the breakthrough was accomplished in a lab which is utilizing more square-footage of "bench" space (/"shelf" space) compared to floor space than most other labs you will find.

Almost like a storage room, except with as much operational, calibrated equipment at the fingertips as the working room would possibly fit.

Regardless of the essential auxiliary storage space having at least 5x the square footage of the working lab itself. Where hopefully at least 20% of the equipment there is operational, if not currently calibrated or in use. Which would then equal the amount in operation in the lab.

If the storage area is down the hall, or maybe in the basement, or a convenient nearby building, the same breakthroughs will be possible by the same researchers.

It will just take more time the further the storage area is, and the more pieces of equipment for which there is no backup in storage.

And way more time if at all, when the storage area is too small to get the job done.

Anything less and you're shooting yourself in the "footage" :)

>Cleaning up messy light

Or cleaning up your messy lab, you can have both, you just have to prioritize what you want to accomplish more of in your lifetime.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-29 12:20:35+00:00
> > LibreOffice is an okay office suite

> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close

For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.

For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
by kakacik | 2025-10-29 12:20:53+00:00
Absolute control over what people think and know, which is sort of absolute control overall with power to normalize anything, including what we consider evil now.

Look at really powerful people of this world - literally every single one of them is badly broken piece of shit (to be extremely polite), control freaks, fucked up childhood and thus overcompensating missing/broken father figure, often malicious, petty, vengeful, feeling above rest of us.

Whole reason for democracy since ancient times to limit how much power such people have. The competent sociopathic part of above will always rise in society to the top regardless of type of system, so we need good mechanism to prevent them from becoming absolute lifelong dictators (and we need to prevent them from attaining immortality since that would be our doom on another level).

People didn't change over past few thousands of years, and any society that failed above eventually collapsed in very bad ways. We shall not want the same for current global civilization and for a change learn from past mistakes, unless you like the idea of few decades of warfare globally and few billions of death. I certainly don't.
by hobs | 2025-10-29 12:20:55+00:00
I have spent about 1 day waiting for every 5 days doing stuff at my last 3 jobs all of which were growing companies thinking that they needed the power of the cloud, but they sure as hell were not paying to make it fast or easy to use.

Pay some "devops" folks and then underfund them and give them a mandate of all ops but with less people and also you need to manage the constant churn of aws services and then deal with normal outages and dumb dev things.
by Citizen8396 | 2025-10-29 12:21:06+00:00
They are not mutually exclusive. You can cooperate with police at a lawyer's recommendation. If someone tries to pressure you from talking to a lawyer, they're doing it to manipulate you to their advantage. In your scenario, first time youth offenders almost always will have diversion as an option. If the situation can be remediated so easily, then the cost would not be too great. It seems far more likely to result in a better (or at least neutral) outcome with a lawyer.
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-29 12:21:52+00:00
> The one catch is that it can be difficult to trick certain picky apps into running on an "unsecured" device.

Imho, this is where we should fight for regulation.

"All mobile apps must allow the user to acknowledge the risks of running on an unsecured platform, but then launch normally"

Couple it with a liability shield for user security issues, if the user acknowledges risk.

The real Android lock-in is the universe of essential apps that, through developer laziness, refuse to launch on alternative platforms.
by KingOfMyRoom | 2025-10-29 12:22:17+00:00
Sorry you’re going through this, that sounds brutal. You mentioned an abusive childhood making things worse; if you’re open to sharing, has anything in therapy (trauma-informed work, CBT, EMDR, etc.) actually helped?

Do you have any take on non-med things like mindfulness/yoga nidra or gentle ambient sound at night? I’m on the fence about starting meditation myself and curious what’s been useful, or not, for you.

And if meds are what’s giving you relief right now, I’m glad you’ve found something that helps.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-29 12:22:31+00:00
As in to OP's experience with chocolate, some of this may be down to people being more sensitive to flavors and textures associated with the less expensive manufacturing processes.

I, for one, don't like the bite of low quality alcohol. Whisky taken neat starts to be drinkable to me somewhere around $150-$200 a bottle. With ice or water, you can go cheaper than that because you're cutting the harshness of the impurities.

There used to be a theory that passing cheap rail alcohol through an activated charcoal filter several times would improve the taste. In my experience with rail vodka, it removes the worst part of the bite from impurities. But it obviously doesn't make it taste like high quality alcohol. I've only tried this with vodka. It may remove some desirable favors from other alcohols.
by originalvichy | 2025-10-29 12:22:41+00:00
>How is Sweden worse than Finland?

As a Finn, rather than bore you with a 2846 bullet point list, I'd say that technologically not a lot, but we do have a lot more to lose, so it is easier to bargain with our industry compared to Sweden's. Our population is not always big enough to compete head-to-head with some sectors Sweden is also a part of.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 12:22:49+00:00
I understand where you are coming from and commend you for trying to support your users (I'd do the same!), but I don't think Apple marketed Rosetta 2 as a permanent solution after the transition.

Another aspect is, a Mac stops getting software updates after ~7 years, and then the API level starts to drift between the latest macOS releases.

So, after 10 year mark, you can't get the latest versions of the applications already since the features developers use aren't available in the older macOS versions and you can't run the software anyway.
by OJFord | 2025-10-29 12:22:55+00:00
The UK was not a founding member of the EEC which preceded it, I don't know and haven't easily been able to find out, but it wouldn't be that surprising if the European Parliament already used English as a common language for policy etc.

(In fact to strengthen that probability, if it had been say French, when and why would it have switched go English? Just because the UK joined?)
by dev2roofer | 2025-10-29 12:22:57+00:00
Kinda funny how Grokipedia looks like an encyclopedia but clearly talks like an LLM. Lots of confidence, not so much evidence.

It’s not that it’s trying to lie — it’s just how these models work. They’re great at making language sound right, not necessarily be right. Feels more like a mirror of what the internet “thinks” than an actual source of truth.

If they framed it that way — more experiment, less Wikipedia — I think people would take it a lot better.