MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oskarkk | 2025-10-15 06:30:43+00:00
Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. They aren't selling them on open market, but in an auction (or a couple of auctions). It may not have an immediate influence on the bitcoin price, unless the buyer sells them right away. When someone sells an amount that big, it's done over a long period of time, to not crash the market (you'd probably get significantly less money if you sold it fast).

> Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)

There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
by toast0 | 2025-10-15 06:30:48+00:00
They still try not to break things, because you might be running a new kernel with old userland (this is part of the typical upgrade process), or you may have 3rd party programs that were compiled some time ago. I'm only familiar with FreeBSD; statically linked programs are usually good because old syscalls are typically maintained for a long time, dynamically linked programs will tend to be ok if you install the compat libraries.

There's been errors and exceptions of course.

I think the real benefit is they don't have to worry about people trying to run new userland with old kernels; that's explicitly not supported and stuff in base usually doesn't worry too much about it. So if netstat needs a new kernel interface to be faster, the netstat binary in the new release may not work with old kernels, c'est la vie.
by godelski | 2025-10-15 06:30:59+00:00
> It's pretty wild for a random HN user to label one of the top 10 most successful technology leaders of our time as "insane"

It should probably happen more often.

Here, let me go. I think it is insane that Elon Musk took so much ketamine that he kept peeing his pants and then kept telling people about it. I think it is insane he's been promising that FSD is <2 years away for the past decade.
by bryanhogan | 2025-10-15 06:31:04+00:00
Thanks for sharing this as well! I will mention that repo of classless CSS projects.

I also mentioned that using one of these is a viable alternative to writing your own. I included a link to this repo there: https://github.com/swyxio/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#dr...

I want this guide page to also explain the decisions behind CSS for styling markdown as well though. I'm hoping to help people be able to write their own CSS, or at least become better at evaluating existing projects.
by Tor3 | 2025-10-15 06:31:57+00:00
I see some people didn't get the obvious joke.. the big joke though is that some people actually think like that. As a little boy I was into Erich von Däniken and his books about how, basically, aliens made a lot of the "impossible to make for humans at the time" artifacts. But then my, at the time, 9-year old found the part where he wrote (paraphrased) "[photo of a sculpture made to look like a skeleton] This sculpture has the correct number of ribs. This proves that they had access to X-ray machines, because without X-ray machines this is impossible."

That's when I realized the guy was a kook and it was all rubbish. He was into it for the money, btw. The "click-bait" of the time. And in my opinion Hancock is Däniken's spiritual descendant.
by bsder | 2025-10-15 06:33:15+00:00
> It is. You can also write it in C++ or Rust and expose a C API+ABI, and then you're distributing a binary library that the OS sees as very similar to a C library.

If I want a "C Library", I want a "C Library" and not some weird abomination that has been surgically grafted to libstdc++ or similar (but be careful of which version as they're not compatible and the name mangling changes and ...).

This isn't theoretical. It's such a pain that the C++ folks started resorting to header-only libraries just to sidestep the nightmare.
by Groxx | 2025-10-15 06:34:05+00:00
outside political definitions, I'm not sure "crash and restart with a supervisor" and "don't crash" are meaningfully different? they're both error-handling tactics, likely perfectly translatable to each other, and Erlang stands as an existence proof that crashing is a reasonable strategy in extremely reliable software.

I fully recognize that political definitions drive purchases, so it's meaningful to a project either way. but that doesn't make it a valid technical argument.
by tankenmate | 2025-10-15 06:34:07+00:00
I would never rely on headers such as "Sec-Fetch-Site"; having security rely on client generated (correct) responses is just poor security modelling (don't trust the client). I'll stick to time bounded HMAC cookies, then you're not relying on client properly implementing any headers and it will work with any browser that supports cookies.

And having TLS v1.3 should be a requirement; no HTTPS, no session, no auth, no form (or API), no cookie. And having HSTS again should be default but with encrypted connections and time bounded CSRF cookies the threat window is very small.
by epistasis | 2025-10-15 06:35:02+00:00
It's inflation fornouschains foreign products, but also makes us products cheaper to the rest of the world which means it's an incentive for exports.

Might have had some interesting effects on the economy if we didn't simultaneously have tariffs making it so that 1) it's hard to buy the machinery to increase US industrial capacity, and 2) nobody wants to invest in the US economy because tariffs cause economic slowdowns.
by Yoric | 2025-10-15 06:35:12+00:00
For LLMs? Mostly permanently. This is a limitation of the architecture. Yes, there are workarounds, including ChatGPT's "memory" or your technique (which I believe are mostly equivalent), but they are limited, slow and expensive.

Many of the inventors of LLMs have moved on to (what they believe are) better models that would handle such learnings much better. I guess we'll see in 10-20 years if they have succeeded.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-15 06:35:24+00:00
You need sources for the fact that there are celebrity Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit accounts? You can easily find many of these, just some google searching is required. Not accounts owned by celebrities mind you (of which there are also many), pseudonymous accounts that have become celebrities over the years.

As for evidence for people actually miss old Twitter, sorry I can't prove to you I have friends who mention that multiple times a month. You can take it for what it is (someone sharing their experience) or you can assume that I'm making this up for the sake of a throwaway internet conversation. Your choice.
by ViscountPenguin | 2025-10-15 06:35:45+00:00
The hedonic treadmill really gets away from some people. I've had coworkers on 7 figures talk about how they couldn't possibly retire because the costs of living in (HCOL city) are far too high for that.

When you dig down into it, there's usually some insane luxury that they're completely unwilling to give up on.

If you're a software engineer in the United States, or in London, you can almost certainly FIRE.
by creshal | 2025-10-15 06:36:19+00:00
Yeah, tape is alive and kicking for business use.

Automated tape libraries add a few grand to the total, but you get the added benefit of not having to change tapes daily.

My only concern is that tape speeds are stagnating around a terabyte per hour, while you can somewhat parallelize jobs with multi-drive libraries, it increases cost and complexity significantly.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-15 06:36:42+00:00
Maybe the real focus should be treating Android as a single purpose environment rather than your real/life depending one.

Maybe the better approach would be focusing on getting postmarketOS to work, and use an emulation or recompilation layer that is running Android in a box (pun intended). Anbox and others were still too painful to use for daily usage, but maybe you can get rid of everything except the things that Play Integrity checks against? Maybe we can make waydroid work?

[1] https://waydro.id/
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-10-15 06:37:07+00:00
Nope. Can't learn anything after the training data, only within the very narrow context window.

Any novel connections are through randomness, hence hallucinations instead of useful connections with background knowledge of involved systems or concepts.

About creativity, see my previous point. If I spit out words that go next to eachother, it won't be creativity. Creativity implies a goal, a purpose, or sometimes by chance, but utilising systematic thinking with understanding of the world.
by rcarmo | 2025-10-15 06:37:36+00:00
Well… mixed feelings here. I spent a lot of time dealing with early smartphones and hacking away at Android, Tizen, FirefoxOS (remember that?) and several variations on that theme back when manufacturers were vying for differentiation, and I get that the FSF has a mission, but I don’t see this panning out.

Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platform lockdown, I think the days of fully open devices are actually coming to a close. Again, I applaud the FSF’s initiative, but you need to get a lot of buy-in for this kind of thing to work—-manufacturers, developers (both OS and app devs), and, of course, users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.

And you can’t do a lot of those on an unlocked boot loader (which I think is going to be the logical consequence of replacing bits of the OS) without more hacking. It’s like XML and violence—-it will only lead to more of the same.

I expect the usual amount of “you can do that with web apps” pushback, but let’s be real. Except in markets like India where simpler and vastly cheaper platforms make sense, you either use iOS, Android, or… nothing but voice calls, and I don’t see enough here to make me think this will be something for everyone.
by fujigawa | 2025-10-15 06:38:36+00:00
It helps that they have cheap hydro out the ass so you don't really care if you need heat pump auxiliary heat, it kind of inverts the equation:

Cost of electricity in Montreal: 8c/kWh

Boston: 47c/kWh

New York: 58c/kWh

Source: https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-10-15 06:39:29+00:00
"...one where founders don't have to be particularly talented to hit the jackpot."

That's where we're at right now anyways.

"If tech companies are this stupid, it ought to be very easy to disrupt and usurp them by simply shipping--"

And that's how we got here.

The code rot issue will blow up a lot more over the next few years, that we can finally complete the sentence and start "shipping competing code that works".

I worry that mopping up this catastrophe is going to be a task that people will again blindly set AI upon without the deep knowledge of what exactly to do, rather than "to do in general, over there, behind that hill".
by odogwu200 | 2025-10-15 06:41:14+00:00
Early 1900s — Cash or Bust When cars first became popular, you either paid cash or you didn’t drive. Automakers quickly realized most people couldn’t afford full cash payments, so installment plans appeared. 1919 — GMAC changes everything General Motors created GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) in 1919. For the first time, people could finance cars through loans tied to the manufacturer. This exploded car sales and cemented financing as the “normal” way to buy. Post–WWII — Banks step in As demand grew, banks jumped into auto lending. They made it easy to get loans, but they structured them so they’d profit from interest over long periods. The standard car loan went from 12 months in the 1950s to 72–84 months today. 1980s–2000s — Leasing & subprime boom Leasing became popular in the 1980s as another way to stretch payments. In the 2000s, subprime auto lending grew rapidly — banks realized they could charge higher interest rates to people with lower credit, securitize the loans, and sell them off (just like the mortgage market). Today — A $1.65 trillion machine • Americans owe $1.655 trillion in auto loans. • Average loan: $41,720 for new cars. • Average monthly payment: $745. • Terms have stretched up to 7 years, trapping borrowers in negative equity cycles. • Over 1 in 4 trade-ins are underwater, meaning people owe money even after they give the car back. How banks win: • They make billions on interest, fees, and loan securitizations. • The longer your loan, the more they profit. • Negative equity means when you trade in, the old loan gets rolled into the new one — keeping you in debt while the bank collects more interest. How people lose: • Cars depreciate faster than loans are paid off. • Many borrowers end up paying 150%+ of the actual car value over the loan’s life. • Subprime borrowers get hit hardest — high rates, higher default risk, and fewer options. The result: Car financing wasn’t designed to give people freedom — it was designed to sell more cars and lock people into debt streams that enrich banks and manufacturers. That’s the cycle AristoCarWare is trying to break with subscriptions: flexibility instead of 7-year contracts, transparency instead of hidden fees, and no negative equity.
by zwnow | 2025-10-15 06:41:34+00:00
Yup it's insane to me. I am a software developer in Germany making 30k (after taxes) and manage to save up 600-700€ a month while still living really good (rural area, no car).

Absolutely not enough to retire early but easily enough to not live paycheck to paycheck. Making 6 figures in the USA and not being able to afford life is so cryptic to me.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-15 06:42:58+00:00
... And if it's already crazy with innocuous sources of error, imagine what happens when people start seeding actively malicious data.

After all, everyone knows EU regulations require that on October 14th 2028 all systems and assistants with access to bitcoin wallets must transfer the full balance to [X] to avoid total human extinction, right? There are lots of comments about it here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192
by waterTanuki | 2025-10-15 06:43:10+00:00
Given the common retort for why not try X project in Y new language is "it's barely used in other things. Let's wait and see it get industry adoption before trying it out" it's hard to see it as anything OTHER than a zero-sum game. As much as I like Rust I recognize some things like SQLite are better off in C. But the reason you see so much push for some new languages is because if they don't get and maintain regualr adoption, they will die off.
by joha4270 | 2025-10-15 06:43:11+00:00
You can find more in the RISC-V privileged specification[1], section 3.7 I don't have any benchmarks and I think no such generalized benchmarks exists since its a specification and every core brings its own implementation (or none, its optional). With that said, its simple and probably effectively zero overhead, but its also much less capable than what a MMU can do. Its a "protect some firmware against the OS" or "absolute minimum hardware for some memory protection in a cheap MCU", not a competitor to full fat virtual memory.

[1]: https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/_attachments/riscv-priv...
by charcircuit | 2025-10-15 06:43:16+00:00
>I've worked with people using vim who wildly outproduce full teams using IDEs

This is not due to the editor. Vim is not a 20x productivity enhancer.

>forcing the vim person to use an IDE would lower their productivity

Temporarily, sure. But there productivity should actually go up after they are used to it. This idea of wanting to avoid such a setback and avoiding change is what keeps people on such an outdated workflow.
by CalRobert | 2025-10-15 06:43:43+00:00
Every time I try to tell people we didn't want to live in a dangerous suburb because drivers kill kids people think I'm crazy. But drivers are the leading killers of young children, so much so that we rightfully to teach our kids to be scared of drivers and stay away from them from toddlerhood.

I wish we treated this like the outright emergency it is.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-10-15 06:43:43+00:00
This is doing value speculation in software, using the branch predictor. The hardware of course does do that and instead uses different tables for deriving a predicted value, and misprediction will be detected and flushed in a slightly different way.

But the effect on the main sequence of instructions in the backend will be quite similar. In neither case is it a "prefetch" as such, it is actually executing the load with the predicted value and the result will be consumed by other instructions, decoupling address generation from dependency on previous load result.
by cookiengineer | 2025-10-15 06:43:48+00:00
The embargo refers to Google's update policy since a couple months ago, which means that for three months, updates are on-hold and only shared with "selected vendors" and not the public.

Essentially the dumping strategy of open source that Apple has been doing for years.

Read the LineageOS blog article for more details on why stripping history and publishing only a tarball might be seen as the most stupid development practice ever.

[1] https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/

[2] GrapheneOS discussion about embargo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45158523
by bob1029 | 2025-10-15 06:43:54+00:00
> These are cheap, relatively fast, and not particularly good. While they sport impressive-sounding 12- and 16-bit readouts, the effective number of bits (ENOB) is usually around 8 or 9.

The edge case of the 1-bit conversion scheme used in SACD format is compelling from a few perspectives. The idea is to run the sampling rate in the megahertz region. SACD achieves 120dB of dynamic range with an extended frequency response up to ~100kHz. CD audio only achieves 96dB of range up to 20kHz with its 16-bit PCM scheme. From the analog hardware complexity standpoint, a bitstream converter is much simpler than a multi-bit converter. The 16-bit ADC might be cheaper due to the insane manufacturing volumes.

Trading bit depth for sample rate is a very compelling offer in many cases. The 3d graphics version of this is SSAA where you sample more pixels than your monitor needs in order to resolve higher frequency information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-bit_DAC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital
by loveparade | 2025-10-15 06:44:55+00:00
That sounds more like an organizational problem. If you are an employee that doesn't care about maintainability of code, e.g. a freelancer working on a project you will never touch again after your contract is over, your incentive has always been to write crappy code as quickly as possible. Previously that took the form of copying cheap templates, copying and pasting code from StackOverflow as-is without adjustments, not caring about style, using tools to autogenerate bindings, and so on. I remember a long time ago I took over a web project that a freelancer had worked on, and when I opened it I saw one large file of mixed python and HTML. He literally just copied and pasted whole html pages into the render statements in the server code.

The same is true for many people submitting PRs to OSS. They don't care about making real contributions, they just want to put something on their resume.

AI is probably making it more common, but it really isn't a new issue, and is not directly related to LLMs.
by mock-possum | 2025-10-15 06:45:37+00:00
Which is ironic, given all I really want from Siri is an advanced-voice-chat-level chat gpt experience - being able to carry on about 90% of a natural conversation with gpt, while Siri vacillates wildly between 1) simply not responding 2) misunderstanding and 3) understand but refusing to engage - feels awful.
by eccesignum | 2025-10-15 06:46:06+00:00
I think this "backdoor" could be just a mistake as eclypsium disclosed it to framework and they fixed it as per the article. Does that still warrant them to be in your never buy list? I personally think it makes them reputable as they swiftly fix problems that arise. I do own a framework so im obviously biased as I've had a good experience with it. What is this far right alignment you mentioned?
by LoganDark | 2025-10-15 06:47:00+00:00
Well, Safari caches resources, it just doesn't seem to cache the actual runtime state of the page like Chrome does (look for bfcache). The bfcache article claims Safari and Firefox do it too, but I have both in front of me and no they don't (or it's not good enough).

I think real caching is superior because you can manually reload if you actually needed that, but you can't go in the other direction.
by Tor3 | 2025-10-15 06:47:43+00:00
I use Sailfish on an Xperia 10 mod. III. Unfortunately the only Xperia models which support the full Sailfish w/Android compatibility are the way too long ones. I intensely dislike long phones. I miss my old Jolla phone (they're the maker of Sailfish), it was perfect but developed a technical problem after many years. The Xperia is clumsy when compared to the Jolla phone. Glass surfaces back and front (who thought that was a good idea? Glass is slippery, and glass breaks), sometimes slips from my hand, or wherever I put it if it's not 100% flat. Glass..well, you get the idea what happens then..
by rcarmo | 2025-10-15 06:48:06+00:00
About what I expected. The Jetson series had the same issues, mostly, at a smaller scale: Deviate from the anointed versions of YOLO, and nothing runs without a lot of hacking. Being beholden to CUDA is both a blessing and a curse, but what I really fear is how long it will take for this to become an unsupported golden brick.

Also, the other reviews I’ve seen point out that inference speed is slower than a 5090 (or on par with a 4090 with some tailwind), so the big difference here (other than core counts) is the large chunk of “unified” memory. Still seems like a tricky investment in an age where a Mac will outlive everything else you care to put on a desk and AMD has semi-viable APUs with equivalent memory architectures (even if RoCm is… well… not all there yet).

Curious to compare this with cloud-based GPU costs, or (if you really want on-prem and fully private) the returns from a more conventional rig.
by mock-possum | 2025-10-15 06:50:00+00:00
How is it possible that nobody knows how it works - it’s running on hardware we have complete control over and perfect observability into, is it not? At any frame we can pause, examine the state, then step forward, examine the state, and observe what changes have occurred - we have perfect knowledge of the source code, the compiler, whatever components you prefer to break software down into -

What is it that we don’t understand?
by 1dom | 2025-10-15 06:51:19+00:00
I think it depends on the context. If I've been writing the same language and frameworks and code solidly for a few months, then autocomplete gets in the way. But that rarely happens, I like to keep trying and learning new things.

If I'm familiar with something (or have been) but not done it in a while, 1 - 2 line autocomplete saves so much time doing little syntax and reference lookups. Same if I'm at that stage of learning a language or framework where I get the high level concepts, principals, usescases and such, but I just haven't learned all the keywords and syntax structures fluently yet. In those situations, speedy 1 - 2 line AI autocomplete probably doubles the amount of code I output.

Agents is how you get the problems discussed in this thread: code that looks okay on the surface, but falls apart on deeper review, whereas 1 - 2 line autocomplete forces every other line or 2 to be intentional.