MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 6SixTy | 2025-10-26 16:45:14+00:00
The rundown on this is that CodeThink added Big Endian RISC-V because of a half-baked optimized networking scenario where somehow the harts (RISC-V speak for a cpu core) don't have Zbb byte manipulation instructions. Linus shuts down efforts made in mainline Kernel (!!) because these issues are extremely flimsy at best and don't have technical merit for complicating the kernel's RISC-V code and already extreme RISC-V fragmentation.

I've looked at more reasons that CodeThink came up with for Big Endian RISC-V, and trust me, that's the best that they have to present.
by fathermarz | 2025-10-26 16:45:15+00:00
It’s interesting that Valve can be ridiculed for both fostering the gambling market AND dismantling it. By no means am I picking a side of this fight, but I think Valve wants to stay off the radar of the gov and keep printing money. The reason they were called to Congress in the first place was a misnomer IMO, but maybe Gabe said “I don’t want to get called there again y’all”
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-26 16:45:30+00:00
Use of the word "mechanical" to describe formal reasoning predates computers.

Here's the first sentence of Godel's 1931 On formally undecidable propositions...

"The development of mathematics in the direction of greater exactness has—as is well known—led to large tracts of it becoming formalized, so that proofs can be carried out according to a few mechanical rules."

Leibniz had discussed calculating machines (and even thought about binary arithmetic being the most appropriate implementation), so the general idea probably goes back quite far

Edit: Oh, I guess by "late 1930s" you're referring to Turing's 1936 paper where he defines Turing machines, rather than actual electronic computers. Still, understanding "formal" as "mechanical" predates it.
by timmg | 2025-10-26 16:46:16+00:00
> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.

I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.

And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)
by hectdev | 2025-10-26 16:46:25+00:00
It's a tool like anything else. I learn SO MUCH from Youtube. Watching someone DIY something where they show all the steps, makes it so accessible. I then learn from them and create some really intricate things from different domains without any formal training. I'm talking car repairs, electrical engineering, woodworking, metal work, gardening, 3d printing. The list goes on and on.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-26 16:47:54+00:00
They already do allocate that fraction. They have tons of software that is 100% free on their devices, and without ads.

But Maps is orders of magnitude more expensive than other apps because of the data. Maps isn't just a feature, it's an ongoing service. It's not unreasonable that they recoup some of the money with more prominence given to paid search results.

I don't hear people complaining much about the advertising that has been on Google Maps since forever. So I don't understand what's working people up here. These aren't banner ads. Apple is a business. And you can use Apple Maps over the web, without paying Apple a cent. You really think Apple should be a charity and do this stuff entirely for free?
by simonkagedal | 2025-10-26 16:48:26+00:00
Regarding documentation, I’d love to hear you take on creating the CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md type of files using the tools themselves, typically via some /init command. I think Claude Code, Codex and Copilot CLI all have a similar thing.

Those often seem to generate a snapshot of the current state of the codebase that to me seem to be just begging to get out of date, often with references to specific files. I sometimes start out with them and remove a bunch of stuff, or I just start empty and add things as they appear to be needed.

What’s your strategy on these?
by D-Machine | 2025-10-26 16:48:47+00:00
Yup, reasonable enough. In areas where you are a true expert (i.e. where there are only handfuls at most of people like you, or where all expert knowledge is not online and accessible by LLMs), you essentially already know where to look, and how to most effectively phrase searches, so a generic LLM that automatically crawls common databases and sites is going to be useless, almost by definition / necessity. Training is just fitting a manifold to training data (interpolating and extrapolating), but truly expert domains (as defined earlier) don't generally have enough data for these things to learn helpful semantics.

Perhaps a model fine-tuned or specifically built for the niche domains might help non-experts and people learning to better do semantic / common-language searches, and this might accelerate learning. But, it might not. Not all domains have their core knowledge encoded in documents and/or language, and summarization is sometimes only harmful (especially for highly technical writing).

It also seems to me almost definitional though that LLMs aren't going to beat true expertise, because LLMs aren't true intelligence or GAI, they really do just estimate token path densities / curve-fit. And real understanding is clearly more than that.
by benbristow | 2025-10-26 16:48:55+00:00
Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.

Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.

Time for change.
by mrweasel | 2025-10-26 16:49:43+00:00
That old computer running NetBSD probably also isn't running 24/7, making the environmental impact that much lower.

The comparison probably needs to be: Running that old NetBSD machine for a few hours a day, worst case about 40 while I work vs. producing an running a brand new laptop.

If we're talking desktops, then many older machines have 2-300W PSUs, not even enough to power a modern graphics card (I know, an Nvidia card isn't running 600W all the time).
by yorwba | 2025-10-26 16:49:45+00:00
Undecidable languages are formal languages, too, even though there's no Turing machine that can accurately determine for any string whether it is part of the language or not.

A formal language is a set of finite-length sequences (called "words") of symbols from another set (called the "alphabet"). It's essentially a very crude approximation of some strings of letters in an alphabetic writing system forming words in a natural language, while other combinations are just nonsense.

For a given formal language, there don't necessarily have to be any rules governing the words of the language, though the languages used for writing formal proofs are typically more well-behaved.
by rootnod3 | 2025-10-26 16:50:47+00:00
Manufacturing probably way outshines the usage. And, the side-benefit of using old machines with say NetBSD or OpenBSD etc is that it makes people realize that they don't NEED new modern shiny hardware. I am still daily-driving a x220 on the road (it gets 99% of my stuff done) and at home I am using mostly a slightly upgraded T480. So a 15 year old and a 8 year old laptop. And power consumption wise, my T480 lasts about 17 hours on a charge. That is about same time I'd get out of a modern M3 MacBook Air.

With a bit less performance? Sure. But for my use-case it works. And more people realizing that might actually be a good thing.
by softwaredoug | 2025-10-26 16:50:47+00:00
My personal theory on this is prestige TV is in a recession.

After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off. Even for a good show it can feel like work. That plus the high cost for studios and over abundance of supply, meant studios pulled back.

Instead we’re seeing a reemergence of low effort TV. And YouTube plays nicely into that.

At some point this pendulum may swing back (remember in 2000s when everything was low effort reality TV).
by hajile | 2025-10-26 16:50:48+00:00
Linus' rant was WAY off the mark.

Did he make the same rant about ARMv8 which can (if implemented) even switch endianness on the fly? What about POWER, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, etc which all support big-endian?

Once you leave x86-land, the ISA including optional big-endian is the rule rather than the exception.
by Izkata | 2025-10-26 16:51:05+00:00
It's a HN convention for all posts: If it wasn't from within the past year or so, the year it was posted gets added to the title.

Having to think about it per-topic is just making it more complicated for no good reason. Especially since SQL does get new additions.

People posts comments like that as a reminder because the title originally didn't have it in there, someone edited it in after the comment.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 16:51:15+00:00
> The cost of creating new computers has got to be pretty high to the environment

But aren't those made regardless if the people with old computers upgrade to them or not? I guess over time, they'll make less if people buy less, but the ones we'd purchase today has already been made, and might as well replace less energy efficient devices than just being added to the global count.
by speak_plainly | 2025-10-26 16:51:38+00:00
There was a time when the algorithm was truly amazing and the recommendations were smart, spot-on, and mostly high quality. I don't know what happened but you have to search now for decent content.

The recommendations part of YouTube just seems to give me old content or will show me things I've already watched. Despite it feeling almost user-hostile, I still use Youtube,
by rglullis | 2025-10-26 16:51:45+00:00
> You could refuse to use an e-bike just like you could refuse to use an expensive bicycle.

I don't know if we are talking about the same thing. I am taking the argument from OP about "people recovering from surgery might need electric assist to keep up with the A-group", and I'm questioning this need.

If someone wants to have some assistance, then by all means go ahead and use it. I'm just not seeing why someone would need to have this sort of assistance, unless they are just doing some poor post-hoc rationalization for their wants.
by Raptor75 | 2025-10-26 16:52:29+00:00
that's where you're wrong "mate", we absolutely have every right to speak out against abuse. and abuse is a regular occurrence where this software is involved. Just look at the controversy a mere posting here has brought up. This happens almost every time the software is mentioned. Just another example is here - https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1ngn3jy/comm...

Also "mate", there is no harassment here. By his own words, the dev does not want people to use his software. So the more people we warn, the less people he has to interact with, which is a net gain for him. We're doing him the biggest favour.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-26 16:52:38+00:00
No, you are just confused about the technical jargon being used. That text is written for people who have had this jargon hammered into them and is very confusing to people who haven't. This is why people are told to not try to do the calculations themselves.

"Dose absorbed" is a physical measure of ionizing radiation that is directed at something. That's measured in rems or sieverts (or Grays, notice the spelling). "Dose equivalent" is a medical measure of the risk caused by that "Dose absorbed". That's measured in Greys (with an E, not an A). Both those measures combine the count rates for the 4 different types of radiation into 1 amount. "Dose equivalent" goes farther and is meant to calculate medical risk to a living person. Even more confusing there is a Gray (dose absorbed) and a Grey (biological impact of a dose absorbed, or dose equivalent); they are different.

The part about beta and gamma radiation is about establishing a baseline for converting between the two units but should never be used for calculating "dose equivalent" in practice. Its how we determine the value of 1 Grey. It isn't a way to convert from "dose equivalent" to "dose absorbed".

I'm trying to simplify this stuff for an audience without the necessary background information. Doing that requires me cutting out a bunch of details. The NRC text on the other hand is technically precise but also is mentioning a lot of things that are true but confusing or only useful for calibrating instruments. They are also explaining one tiny part of this and you left out the parts where they talk about how to combine the different counts for each type of radiation into one measurement. That's something else I'm also trying to explain at the same time. So I'm covering more ground and trying to do so with simpler terms. That's going to mean you can cherry pick stuff but doing that will to give you the wrong impression.

Natural background radiation varies by location on earth by a factor of 300. That 4 mSv per year is for natural background radiation at the low end of the scale which happens at sea level in places without Uranium or Thorium deposits. However, there are places where people live (and have lived for 1000s of years) where the natural background radiation is 300x that amount or about 1.2Sv/year. There is no observed increase in cancer rates in those locations despite decades of study. I'm also assuming that the "normal person" will take a flight or two and potentially be near other sources of radiation without knowing it (like your smoke detector).

PS The 50 mSv/year number is absurdly low. Its one of the main complaints about how the NRC handles nuclear radiation. Its literally lower than the natural background radiation at sites in India and Brazil.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-26 16:52:46+00:00
> You can only do that, when you compile for a specific machine.

You always compile for a specific machine. There is always a target instruction set architecture. It decides the calling convention used for Linux system calls. Compiler can even produce an error in case the target is not supported by Linux.

> In general you are compiling for some abstract notion of an OS.

This "abstract notion of an OS" boils down to the libc. Freestanding C gets rid of most of it. Making system calls is also perfectly valid in hosted C. Modern languages like Rust also have freestanding modes.

> In my experience there are often detailed explanation in the notes section.

That's the problem. Why is the Linux stuff just a bunch of footnotes in the Linux manual? It should be in the main section. The glibc specifics should be footnotes.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-26 16:53:58+00:00
Doesn’t it depend on how far they sink? I’m pretty sure xkcd did a comic on this. Oh, it’s a video, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFRUL7vKdU8

Edit: ok, I’m probably the fiftieth person to point this out. It’s still a good video.
by jcgl | 2025-10-26 16:54:04+00:00
Assuming that your comment is in good faith, that comparison doesn't work in the way I think you're trying to make it work.

systemd operates (when used normally) at a higher level of abstraction than a bucket-of-scripts/sysvinit. Especially because systemd units are declarative, this higher level of abstraction affords you (the sysadmin) the ability to more precisely specify the behavior you want. However, you can of course run scripts from systemd, so you've got whatever escape hatches you like. My question was asking if there was anything in sysvinit that those escape hatches didn't cover adequately.

Assembly, on the other hand, operates at a far lower level of abstraction. Inappropriately low, in fact. Because of this, you actually have less practical ability to specify the precise behaviors you want. For example, you'd be hard-pressed to use assembly to start a webserver after the network is up but before some other piece of software that depends on the webserver.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-26 16:54:12+00:00
> the "second cancellation", where people brought legitimate (and often long-standing) criticisms against Richard Stallman.

No, the reason why this "second cancellation" is vague is because it was the typical feeding frenzy that happens after a successful cancellation, where people hop on to paint previously uninteresting slanders in a new light. Stallman, before saying something goofy about Epstein, was constantly slandered by people who hated what he stood for and by people that were jealous of him. After he said the goofy thing, they all piled in to say "you should have listened to me." The "second cancellation" is when "he asked me out once at a conference" becomes redolent of sexual assault.

None of them seem to like the politics of Free Software, either. They attempt to taint the entire philosophy with the false taint of Stallman saying that sleeping with older teenagers that seemed to be consenting isn't the worst crime in the world. The people who attacked him for that would defend any number of intimately Epstein-related people to the death; the goal imo was to break (or to take over and steer into a perversion of itself) Free Software. Every one of them was the "it's not fair to say that about Apple" type.
by benbristow | 2025-10-26 16:54:15+00:00
Yes, no ads from Google's side and ads by creators themselves (e.g. Raid Shadow Legends, SquareSpace, Manscaped, NordVPN etc. etc.) get skipped via a community-sourced database called Sponsorblock.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

(Sponsorblock is also available as a browser extension for most browsers but has an open API for other developers to use)
by tptacek | 2025-10-26 16:54:25+00:00
Think about what it says, in a larger team staffed with competent technical talent, to have a single person across all of it reconciling decisions with their own personal mental model. I think it's an attractive idea for a lot of aspirants! Who wouldn't want to be President of Code? But ambiguity is resolved by practitioners at the sharp end of the system.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-26 16:54:50+00:00
> there are multiple ways to achieve goals and therefore there is no standard practice

This is ultimately where, and why, github succeeded. It's not that it was free for open source. It's that it ironed out lots of kinks in a common group flow.

Git is a cultural miracle, and maybe it wouldn't have got its early traction if it had been overly prescriptive or proscriptive, but more focus on those workflows earlier on would have changed history.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-26 16:55:18+00:00
While I get your point, the right in 2025 has largely also abandoned the past, for a crypto-AI post-institutional future.

I hardly see anyone looking to the past for ways to Make America Great Again.

I truly don’t think Reagan could get elected today. I think he would be considered too Naive, and not enough of a fighter. Too woke perhaps even — just look at the need to rewrite is views on free trade.
by Anton19890604 | 2025-10-26 16:55:21+00:00
The 2025 AWS outage exposed how dependent we are on centralized cloud giants that profit from our data and control our digital lives through surveillance and censorship. Building your own cloud restores autonomy: connect devices with Tailscale, orchestrate apps using k3s, route traffic securely via cloudflared tunnels, and ensure reproducibility with NixOS. Like assembling Legos, you can mix local machines and cloud VMs to form a self-hosted, hybrid cloud. It’s not just a technical project—it’s a political act of reclaiming privacy, resilience, and digital sovereignty from Big Tech’s monopolized infrastructure.
by _0xdd | 2025-10-26 16:55:23+00:00
Just donated. I run a NetBSD instance on a VPS and on an old Lenovo mini PC that I use as a gateway/file server between my regular network and network of vintage PCs. I have two XT clones, two ATs, some 486s, a Pentium MMX, and an iMac G3 and G4. Fun hobby! I need to get NetBSD running on one of these old machines one of these days.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-10-26 16:55:40+00:00
Set aside a few thousand bucks in an IRA.

You don't pay taxes on that money -- but also, since you're young, you can let it sit there earning interest. It'll double in value roughly every 10 years, so if you start with, say, $8,000, it'll be $128,000 by the time you're 65. (And you can also tap the money for medical emergencies or college expenses.)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-26 16:55:54+00:00
> it was the typical feeding frenzy that happens after a successful cancellation

It was actually a few years later, prompted by Richard Stallman's reinstatement by the board. I don't know what you mean by "feeding frenzy", but I habitually ignore the unreasonable voices in such cases: it's safe to assume I'm not talking about those.

> "he asked me out once at a conference"

That wasn't the main focus of the criticism I saw. However, there is an important difference between an attendee asking someone out at a conference, and an invited speaker (or organiser) asking someone out at a conference. If you're going to be in a leadership position, you need to be aware of power dynamics.

That's a running theme throughout all of the criticism of Richard Stallman, if you choose to abstract it that way: for all he's written on the subject, he doesn't understand power dynamics in social interactions. He's fully capable of understanding it, but I think he prefers the simpler idea of (right-)libertarian freedom. (And by assuming he expects others to believe he'll behave according to his respect of the (right-)libertarian freedom of others, you can paint a very sympathetic picture of the man. That doesn't mean he should be in a leadership position for an organisation as important as the FSF, behaving as he does.)

> None of them seem to like the politics of Free Software, either.

Several of them are involved in other Free Software projects. To the extent those people have criticisms of the politics of Free Software, it's that it doesn't go far enough to protect user freedoms. (I suspect I shouldn't have got involved in this argument, since I'm clearly missing context you take for granted.)
Show HN: Jensen-TDP – Interactive Cooling Performance Estimation of Outfit
by npc0 | 2025-10-26 16:56:16+00:00
We've all seen the iconic leather jacket and jeans combination at tech keynotes, but is this legendary outfit actually thermally optimized? Or is it a fashion choice that ignores fundamental heat transfer principles?

Why it requires 19°C Environment?

Built a calculator to proof the needs.

Calculation result besides of the interactive Demo: https://newjerseystyle.github.io/Jensen-TDP/
by simonw | 2025-10-26 16:56:21+00:00
> It’s also backed up by default: If the server breaks, I’ve still got the copy on my laptop, and if my laptop breaks, I can download everything from the server.

This is true, but I do also like having backups that are entirely decoupled from my own infrastructure. GitHub personal private accounts are free and I believe they store your data redundantly in more than one region.

I imagine there's a way to setup a hook on your own server such that any pushes are then pushed to a GitHub copy without you having to do anything else yourself.
by spauldo | 2025-10-26 16:56:28+00:00
Yeah I don't buy that argument either. The amount of e-waste being saved by NetBSD is so tiny as to be insignificant.

NetBSD is great for retrocomputing, since it's a modern OS that can run on very limited hardware. It's also a very nice traditional UNIX. It's well documented, has a nice codebase, and is a pleasure to use. But for saving e-waste, Linux has it beat.