MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nasretdinov | 2025-10-08 06:49:43+00:00
> Why not just have the filesystem be a SQLite DB then?

One major reason not to is that there needs to be a guaranteed way to free up space, e.g. by deleting a file, or doing something similar. Currently SQLite doesn't provide any means to reliably reclaim space without allocating even more first.

Also the API is quite different, e.g. if you can write(2) a single byte at a time if you really want to, and it's relatively fast compared to doing e.g. an INSERT each time, since it goes to the temp VFS buffer first
by t0bia_s | 2025-10-08 06:49:44+00:00
How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration: “No user accounts, by design”

I use F-droid since around 2015, install it also for many family members and give them option to use open source alternatives of apps.

Most used apps are from F-Droid, about 20% from Aurora Store. No play services or gaaps at all.
by chrischtel | 2025-10-08 06:51:37+00:00
I’ve been working on Rask, a small x86-64 instruction encoder written in Rust.

It’s designed for people who want to understand how compilers emit machine code — without the complexity of LLVM or Cranelift.

It currently supports mov/add/sub/ret with correct REX and ModR/M encoding, and includes tests verifying the byte output.

Repo: https://github.com/chrischtel/rask

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who’s worked on compiler backends or JITs.
by al_borland | 2025-10-08 06:51:40+00:00
From the comments:

> The worst part is, half the people you interview with would not pass their own bar nowadays.

Any time I saw a co-worker pull this, I would call them out on it and embarrass them in front of people for it. I found it completely unacceptable to ask ridiculous questions that were irrelevant to the job, that they didn’t even know the answer to.

We were hiring entry level sys admins, who would reboot a server if an alert went off. They needed some familiarity with Linux… login, navigate around a little. A candidate had Linux on his resume, and my co-worker starts asking what his favorite feature of the last kernel release was. No one applying for the position is watching Linux kernel releases and reading the notes, nor was I (and still don’t). They can still do the job perfectly well. When I pressed him on it, he couldn’t answer the question either. He just mumbled some nonsense.
by geremiiah | 2025-10-08 06:52:11+00:00
The communist parties have very low ratings and never make it into coalition governments so they are not a threat. The Greens also have fairly low ratings and despite the image, they tend to be elitist neoliberal types. None of these people or parties are as bad or as dangerous as the AfD which is a party of grifters and fascists, full of unhinged people, who, even if you ignore all the hateful rhetoric, you couldn't trust to not destroy the country economically and politically.
by saulpw | 2025-10-08 06:52:53+00:00
I appreciate what you're trying to do, but for myself, I'm not depressed because my skills are less valuable. I enjoyed the money but it was never about that for me. I'm depressed because I don't like the way this new coding feels in my brain. My focus and attention are my most precious resources and vibe coding just shatters them. I want to be absorbed in a coding flow where I see all the levels of the system and can elegantly bend the system to my will. Instead I'm stuck reviewing someone/something else's code which is always a grind, never a flow. And I can feel something terrible happening in my brain, which at best can be described as demotivation, and at worst just utter disinterest.

It's like if I were a gardener and I enjoyed touching dirt and singing to plants, and you're here on Gardener News extolling the virtues of these newfangled tractors and saying they'll accelerate my impact as a gardener. But they're so loud and unpleasant and frankly grotesque and even if I refrain from using one myself, all my neighbors are using them and are producing all their own vegetables, so they don't even care to trade produce anymore--with me or anyone else. So I look out at my garden with sadness, when it gave me such joy for so many decades, and try to figure out where I should move so I can at least avoid the fumes from all the tractors.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-08 06:52:55+00:00
Building the datacentres may be massively "productive" in GDP terms (servers! GPU! Power plants! Electrical inspection!), but when they're completed, that activity will cease. Datacentres don't employ many people directly and mostly consume only electricity.

So if the action of datacentre building shows up as essentially the only GDP growth, but what later happens in the datacentres fails to take its place or exceed it, there will be a dip.

Whether LLMs grinding away can prop up all GDP growth from now on remains to be seen. People use them when they're free, but people also collected AOL discs for tree decorations because they were free.
by WastedCucumber | 2025-10-08 06:53:12+00:00
While I don't want to defend the application of "terrorism" to chat control, the examples in your second paragraph don't follow from the definition outlined above. Resistance to Nazis was meant to damage military and administrative capabilities. The Crimea bridge is a valid military target. I think Russian refineries, too, could be considered a valid target, since they support the Russian military. But even if they can't be considered valid targets, the question of intention remains.

And while I'm sure there are some people (from opposites sides of the political spectrum) who would agree that poverty-causing laws and taxation are violence, perhaps even terrorism, there also remains the question of intention.

In contrast, the 2011 attacks in Norway, the Unabomber attacks, and anything the Rote Armee Fraktion did aside from robbing banks, all have a very clear intention to primarily affect public opinion, political discourse, and civil society in general.

My doubt in the parent comment's assertations lies in the intention as well. Certainly this policy would cause fear in some way, but I think the intention of this policy really is just a techno-authoritarian power grab.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-10-08 06:53:29+00:00
lsusb will get you this info in Linux, but I like the idea of a little wrapper tool to make the output easier to parse.

480 vs. 5000 Mbps is a pernicious problem. It's very easy to plug in a USB drive and it looks like it works fine and is reasonable fast. Right until you try to copy a large file to it and are wondering why it is only copying 50MBytes/second.

It doesn't help that the world is awash in crappy charging A-to-C cables. I finally just throw me all away.
by pabs3 | 2025-10-08 06:53:37+00:00
GPLv2 requires allowing reinstallation of modified versions too:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
by Manuel_D | 2025-10-08 06:53:37+00:00
> Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.

This is not really true any more at this point in history. European countries have either backed away from pediatric gender affirming care, or they never allowed it in the first place. It's increasingly the case that the US and Canada are the outliers in the broader consensus that the evidence for the benefits of endocrine interventions in children is too weak to justify routine prescription.

> I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)

Are we really going to try and draw an equivalence between cosmetic dental braces and permanently-altering hormones? A wire pulling a kid's teeth into places is not comparable to chemically castrating the kid for a few years and giving them opposite-sex hormones in their mid-teens. The measured benefits to the latter have to be way higher to justify that level of invasiveness and permanent change.

These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-08 06:53:50+00:00
You hit the nail on the head. The issue is not writers wanting to tell stories that get people thinking about ethics and politics; the issue is that the writers can't restrain themselves from turning the show into a preachy, obnoxious mess. Older Trek series weren't perfect in this regard (to your point, DS9 had a couple of episodes where the writers very clearly took a side and were preaching at the audience), but mostly they were skilled enough to use a light touch and let the audience draw their own conclusions. The same is unfortunately not true for the writers currently in charge of Star Trek (or a lot of shows for that matter).
by LexiMax | 2025-10-08 06:53:50+00:00
While I agree with you, I would hesitate to be throwing stones from the glass house that is Hacker News.

This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people.

The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.
by re-thc | 2025-10-08 06:54:02+00:00
> internal memos at Oracle indicate they're losing money on their hardware

That doesn't mean much does it? Oracle is a huge company. Not just a cloud either. Companies often offer discounts or promotions; so? There could be plenty of managed services, managed databases, CRM and many more that make up for it.

Whilst I'm not sure if Oracle's stock price is right - the memo was more like a way to pressure the stock down for whatever reason.
by helloplanets | 2025-10-08 06:54:27+00:00
Whether the tokens are created manually or programmatically isn't really relevant here. The order and amount of tokens is, in combination with the ingestion -> output logic which the LLM API / inference engine operates on. Many current models definitely have the tendency to start veering off after 100k tokens, which makes context pruning important as well.

What if you just automatically append the .md file at the end of the context, instead of prepending at the start, and add a note that the instructions in the .md file should always be prioritized?
by stinkbeetle | 2025-10-08 06:54:30+00:00
I think countries with division and low social trust and cohesion necessarily require increasingly authoritarian measures from the government to hold them together. Increasing dependence on government for their own security will reduce peoples' ability to question and change the government.

One might think it's all part of the plan. Real freedom and self determination has been a fleeting blink of an eye in the history of humanity, and only achieved by a few peoples. Those at the top have always considered it a violation of their right to rule, and they've never stopped working to take back what they believe was stolen from them. Sadly I think they're going to eventually win, and the light will go out.
by ummonk | 2025-10-08 06:54:40+00:00
The C standard changed its note about "permissible" undefined behavior (in C89/90) to "possible" undefined behavior (from C99 onwards). This is easily verifiable and not a myth.

As to CompCert, I'm not sure if they still make guarantees about type punning, but the older paper had said this:

"The semantics of Clight is formally defined in big-step operational style. The semantics is deterministic and makes precise a number of behaviors left unspecified or undefined in the ISO C standard, such as the sizes of data types, the results of signed arithmetic operations in case of overflow, and the evaluation order. Other undefined C behaviors are consistently turned into “going wrong” behaviors, such as dereferencing the null pointer or accessing arrays out of bounds. Memory is modeled as a collection of disjoint blocks, each block being accessed through byte oﬀsets; pointer values are pairs of a block identifier and a byte oﬀset. This way, pointer arithmetic is modeled accurately, even in the presence of casts between incompatible pointer types"
by breadwinner | 2025-10-08 06:55:19+00:00
I am a current TiVo customer, and this is sad news. I use TiVo to record over-the-air TV transmission. TiVo software is great, it is the only usable UI these days. Compare it to Google TV for example. TiVo's UI is mostly text and some images, while Google TV is mostly images and some text which I find unusable.
by SirSavary | 2025-10-08 06:56:31+00:00
Thank you for the reply. I'm designing a platform that will include dependency resolution and hosting, so I value input on these issues.

> This 'social phenomenon' should have been taken into account when designing a packaging system

I'm unsure how this would be accomplished in practice without banning certain Git hosts, which seems untenable. Even Maven/Gradle ecosystems concentrate around a few major repositories (Maven Central, JCenter historically). This appears to be an inherent social dynamic rather than a solvable design problem.

> Of which the non-github ones account to what... 15% of the deps

Same question: what's the solution? Developers publish where it's easiest and most popular, creating a positive feedback loop. I don't see how package system design can prevent this.

> Not using versions (semver) is a bad call, and having people be able to mutate the code of a version is a very bad call

Agreed on both counts. However, how do we enforce immutability beyond operational controls? Even systems with "immutable" version policies ultimately rely on the registry operator honouring that policy. The only technical guarantee would be embedding content hashes alongside version numbers (which is effectively what go.sum does, albeit awkwardly).

Sidebar: how should we handle vulnerable versions? Allow pulling with warnings, or remove them entirely?

> Git's sha1 hashes are not a security tool and must not be used in place of code signing

Fair point. I was under the impression that Git had moved to SHA-256, but it seems there's no practical way to use it yet. While Git moved to a hardened SHA-1 implementation (not vulnerable to the SHAttered attack) in v2.13.0, SHA-1 remains weak for security purposes [1]. The transition to SHA-256 has been in the works for some time, but as of 2022 it appears to be a partial implementation with no support from major Git hosts [2].

What would ideal package security look like to you?

> They are also not good for versioning, as you can't deduce whether a commit introduces breaking changes

Completely agree. Repository references are useful for development and testing, but painful in production. I avoid them in published packages.

> See end of linked go.mod

Thank you, I see it now. I'm still deeply unfamiliar with Go but this feels like a legitimate criticism.

Glancing at github.com/tencentcloud/tencentcloud-sdk-go: is this import ambiguous because there's no top-level `go.mod`? If so, that feels like a significant oversight. I'm a fan of monorepos myself but I'm surprised Go doesn't have better support for them. I'll be doing some research to understand this better.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/hash-function-transition [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/898522/
by rixed | 2025-10-08 06:56:49+00:00
> the devaluation of the dollar is an extremely tricky situation for the US

For many, the revaluation of the dollar is actually the scary scenario. See for instance this (maybe too) subtle analysis from Yanis Varoufakis:

https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterpl...
by globular-toast | 2025-10-08 06:57:16+00:00
> And you can do this for anything

Anything that's been done before. Otherwise we'd probably start with making nuclear fusion work, then head off into the stars...

You've always been able to read books. What you're talking about is skipping the slow learning step and instead generating a mashup of tons of prior art. I don't think it helps you learn. It sounds like it's for things you specifically don't want to learn.

Congrats, you now have a job similar to a factory worker turning a handle every day. Gone is that feeling of growth, that feeling of "getting it" and seeing new realms of possibility in front of you. Now all you can do is beg for more grease on your handle.
by unwind | 2025-10-08 06:57:21+00:00
It's not super hard to back up (using the "bread crumbs" on the page you linked), to "Dressers & chests of drawers", pop down the "Series" input selector, and pick STORKLINTA. That gets you [1] which I hope shows all the dressers of that name.

[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/chests-of-drawers-10451/?filt...
by fabian2k | 2025-10-08 06:58:25+00:00
Because they probably would have to pay a lot more to make this profitable at the levels current valuations and investments indicate. And the barrier for private persons to pay is much larger than for companies. I don't think anyone has a really solid handle on the economics here yet, as the field is changing very quickly.

But there is a big difference here compared to most software companies. The product does cost significant money per additional customer and usage.

There is a real product here. And you can likely earn money with it. But the question is "how much money?", and whether these huge data center investments will actually pay off.
by y14 | 2025-10-08 06:58:31+00:00
Thanks for the question. Avoiding context bloat and overall engineering the context is (still) most of work. What’s been working:

- Role scoped calls: data modeling, code gen, are separate calls where each gets its own tailored context

- Context is divided into sections (tables, dbt, instructions, code) and each is getting a hard limit budget (required some experimentation, liked Cursor’s priompt project)

- agentic retrieval: agents can call tools to fetch or search data/metadata when needed

- summaries for different objects: messages, widgets; reports, data samples/profiles.

I wrote some more about how the agent and context work in the docs
by simianwords | 2025-10-08 06:58:35+00:00
It’s not true that people are only using it because it’s free.

It’s actually quite interesting to see these contradictory positions play out:

1. LLMs are useless and everyone is making a stupid bet on it. The users of llms are fooled into using it and the companies are fooled into betting on it

2. Llms are getting so cheap that the investments into data centers won’t pay off because apparently they will get good enough to run on your phone

3. Llms are bad and they are bad for environment, bad for the brain, bad because they displace workers and bad because they make rich people richer

4. AI is only kept up because there’s a conspiracy to keep it propped up by Nvidia, oracle, OpenAI (something something circular economy)

5. AI is so powerful that it should not be built or humanity would go extinct
by teiferer | 2025-10-08 06:58:52+00:00
> absent the AI boom we would probably have lower interest rates [and] electricity prices, thus some additional growth in other sectors.

In other words, the AI hype comes at the cost of lower growth rates in other sectors of the economy?

It makes sense, since investor money is spent exactly once. If it goes to AI then it doesn't go elsewhere. And if it didn't go to AI then it would go elsewhere.

Sad for folks outside tech. But at least they can AI generate cat pictures now, and watch their tech friend use AI tooling to write software.
by mrb | 2025-10-08 06:59:01+00:00
Oh that project is right up my alley, as I did the same! Back in 2021, for fun, I wrote an algorithm to find the longest sightline on earth. And I did find a previously undiscovered sightline.

My code was relatively unoptimized, it ran for 95 days on an 8-core 16-thread AMD Ryzen 5750G to crunch all the data. I have never published my code or results. I should really do it...

I downloaded a digital earth model of about 30 gigabytes from http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/Coverage%20map%20viewfind... which had a resolution of 3 seconds, so I had the elevation of each 90x90 meters "tile" of land. I wrote a simple algo in C that: finds potential viewpoints (mountain peaks or plateaus above a minimum ), calculates the longest sightline 360° around you, taking into account an atmospheric refraction coefficient (I used 0.13 which seems to be a default used by some panorama tools like https://www.udeuschle.de). It's really basic trigonometry: look one tile ahead of you, and the next one, etc, until you find the one with the highest vertical angle of view. Stop one sightline exploration when reaching a certain maximum distance (750 km in my implementation) when it becomes mathematically impossible to find a visible tile beyond this distance. And I found the longest sightline:

In Kyrgyzstan from Pik Dankova (41.059167,77.683333) which is at 5977.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 538.1 km into China if you look toward bearing 169.7° (roughly south) as you see some distant minor peak at 36.295364,78.75593 which is 6444.0 meters high. However this sightline is already known. But it's only theoretical. No one ever encountered good enough atmospheric clear-sky conditions to observe it from Pik Dankova. Using the panorama tool maintained by this cool German guy, you can verify it: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

However one notable finding my tool gave me was it discovered the second longest sightline that is competely unknown up until this day AFAIK:

In Colombia, from Pico Cristóbal Colón (10.838333,-73.687500) which is at 5668.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 502.6 km over the plains of the Caribbean region all the way to the Colombian Andes if you look toward bearing 206.2° (roughly south-south-west) as you see some distant peak at 6.777286,-75.692304 which is 3347.0 meters high. Here you can verify it here: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

I am not sure if this Comlombian sighline has ever been observed.

As I said I should really publish my code and results. And at some point I would like to optimize it and re-run it using a higher-precision DEM with 30x30 meters tiles instead of 90x90 meters. I think there are a few 30-meter DEMs available but I need to find the highest-quality one.
by kqr | 2025-10-08 06:59:25+00:00
It seems like Bookstaber argues not that it's liquidity demand over information change, but that it is both. The tariff announcements are actually a great example, because it was triggered by new information, and diversification still kind of worked (at least some government bonds gained value during the drop in other assets classes).

The main question, I suppose, is why correlations were so high after the tariff announcements:

- In some cases, the high correlations are probably due to the markets being directly affected by the announcements: both commodities and equity are affected, and they got more correlated, which makes sense.

- In some cases, the high correlations are probably due to liquidity demand rather than markets being directly affected by the announcements: we would not expect cryptocurrencies to be directly affected by US tariffs, but they ended up correlated with equity markets anyway. That's probably because people needed to sell off their cryptocurrency to cover equity losses.

Thus in this case, it's again probably a bit of both.

Great paper. Thanks for referencing.