MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trollbridge | 2025-11-20 18:49:37+00:00
Slight nitpick: you could run fire up V86 mode without any LDT entries.

It's also possible to run Virtual 8086 mode without paging enabled, and when in Virtual 8086 mode, the 386 doesn't care about what's in the LDT/GDT (unless an interrupt happens). In practice this is never done because the Virtual 8086 task would only be able to use the bottom 1MB of physical memory.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-20 18:49:47+00:00
It's been many years since I wrote any Go for a living, but does Go seriously lack a way to say "foo is probably 32 bytes, give me the 32 byte array, and if I'm wrong about how big foo is, let me handle that" ?

If the caller was expected to provide a duration and your language has a duration type, you presumably wouldn't take a string, parse that and if it isn't a duration return some not-a-duration error, you'd just make the parameter a duration. It seems like this ought to be a similar situation.
by rayiner | 2025-11-20 18:49:48+00:00
You're correct that the direction of the causality is the key question. I'd argue that your view, however, suffers from results-oriented thinking. You assume cultural equality as axiomatic. That forces you to assume that Bangladesh's culture is caused by poverty and not the cause of its poverty.

I think most of the evidence points in the other direction. Bangladesh today has a per-capita GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, of over $12,000 (in 2024 U.S. dollars): https://www.worldeconomics.com/Processors/Economics-Countrie.... That's about where the U.S. was at the time of World War I, adjusted for inflation. Despite having economic productivity comparable to WWI-era U.S., Bangladesh is a vastly inferior society in terms of governance, political stability, cleanliness, law and order, etc. It excels in a few areas (low homicide rate and surprisingly good health indicators) but otherwise lags far behind.

You can also compare across countries that were similarly poor until recently. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, China was poorer than Pakistan. Today, China is much richer, more stable, cleaner, and more advanced. And Bangladesh, as bad as it is, is pulling away from Pakistan.
by simonw | 2025-11-20 18:49:56+00:00
I just tried asking Gemini about a photo I took of my screen showing an image I edited with Nano Banana Pro... and it said "All or part of the content was generated with Google AI. SynthID detected in less than 25% of the image".

Photo-of-a-screen: https://gemini.google.com/share/ab587bdcd03e

It reported 25-50% for the image without having been through that analog hole: https://gemini.google.com/share/022e486fd6bf
by poly2it | 2025-11-20 18:49:58+00:00
You should listen to Hilary Hahn's renditions of Bach's partitas and sonatas. She brings out the subtleties of Bach's composing beautifully, and the purity of his music is easy to appreciate in these solo pieces.

https://inv.nadeko.net/playlist?list=PLor_18TcpRrxQmne5_SKRy... (YouTube proxy)
by jaredklewis | 2025-11-20 18:50:05+00:00
This is true. As long as only one person interacts with the code, all languages can be simple. C++ can be simple.

But once multiple people are involved and I have to read someone else's code, then I really start to appreciate languages with less features. There are some language I love to write code in, like Ruby or Haskell, where I feel like a damn genius when I write it, but want to pull my hair out when I have to read someone else's code.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-11-20 18:50:06+00:00
I think this discounts the fact that many of the most visible homeless are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, and would struggle to regularly pay a rent bill even if it were $100 a month. There is a fundamental lack of social services but also a fundamental lack of an ability to compel these people to make use of social services should they be available.
by ceroxylon | 2025-11-20 18:50:26+00:00
It wasn't there when I first went to Gemini after the announcement, but upon revisiting it gave me the prompt to try Nano Banana Pro. It failed at my niche (rare palm trees).

Incredible technology, don't get me wrong, but still shocked at the cumbersome payment interface and annoyed that enabling Drive is the only way to save.
by stouset | 2025-11-20 18:50:35+00:00
Those aren’t arguments for having []byte instead of [32]byte like you think they are. They’re arguments for having an unambiguous IV type that can be constructed from a []byte or [32]byte, or responsibly generated on your behalf. The error-handling logic can be expressed once in the conversion process, and the rest of your crypto APIs can assume the happy path.

Of course, this isn’t really reasonable given golang’s brain-dead approach to zero values (making it functionally impossible to structurally prevent using zero IVs). But it just serves as yet another reminder that golang’s long history of questionable design choices actively impede the ability to design safe, hard-to-misuse APIs.
by Anon_troll | 2025-11-20 18:51:36+00:00
It's a shame the campaign of RA3 was boring. They got the theme and cutscenes right, but the campaign missions were rather slow, generic and forgettable.

It's the opposite of C&C3, which had a good campaign but the theme was a step back from the scifi of Tiberian Sun. Especially the GDI/NOD units were way less futuristic, and the alien ones were a bit too similar to each other in style. The cutscenes were also mostly boring compared to earlier games.

If I recall correctly, the expansion pack for C&C3 was much more interesting in these aspects, but the gameplay suffered.
by lordleft | 2025-11-20 18:52:06+00:00
Sure! When I think of why I love Bach, I often think of works where he demonstrates an ability to express often conflicting emotions at the same time. For example, in St. Mathew’s Passion, there’s a famous piece entitled “Mache Dich, Mein Herze” — it’s sung at a part where the followers of Christ are laying his body to rest, and somehow merges genuine despair with hope, representing the promise of resurrection. I think his ability to represent despair and hope at the same time is pretty extraordinary.

Other pieces I love are the 3rd and 5th Brandenburg concertos, as well as “Wachet Auf”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgXL_wrSPF0

No shade if he still doesn’t click with you. I’m just particularly ardent on the subject of Bach and baroque music!
by aabhay | 2025-11-20 18:52:11+00:00
Agree. One thing that we see our users doing more of is "NotebookLM style tasks" where they just drop in a bunch of files or ask the agent to download stuff and then start using the agent to do things. Summarize, create notes, answer questions, etc. We believe that an increasing amount of work with "files" will be stuff like this, and having a file system that can search all your files to do these things seemed useful enough for us to build!
by WalterBright | 2025-11-20 18:52:20+00:00
Being regularly confronted with wretched special screws, there are all kinds of ways to get them out. The usual go-to tool is one designed to unscrew stripped screw heads.

Just the other day, I was confronted with a security screw that instead of having 4 flutes on it (Phillips head), it had 3. I just drilled it out.
by ryandrake | 2025-11-20 18:52:59+00:00
Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful.

I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
by trollbridge | 2025-11-20 18:52:59+00:00
Slight nitpick: OS/2 2.x+ did not have a way to disable paging, although you could disable virtual memory in any version of OS/2 by simply setting MEMMAN=NOSWAP.

On Windows 3.x, paging and swapping was optional - if you started it in 286 ("standard") mode. On Windows 95, paging is not optional, and it's not optional in Windows 3.11 for Workgroups either.
by philip1209 | 2025-11-20 18:53:02+00:00
Originally explained on the blancolirio channel on YouTube -

The timing and manner of the break make a lot more intuitive sense when you consider that the engine is essentially a massive gyroscope. As the plane starts to rotate, the spinning engine resists changes to the direction of its spin axis, putting load on the cowling. When the cowling and mount fail, that angular momentum helps fling the engine toward the fuselage.
by jamiek88 | 2025-11-20 18:53:42+00:00
Oh no. This makes me sad and brings up all kind of lost youth feelings.

The stone roses eponymous first album changed my life man. It was wonderful. I’d only really listened to hip hop, rap and Michael Jackson before that and it ushered in the whole UK wave of the early 2000’s.

It’s funny though for Ian Browns voice is a huge part of that album but he was so so bad live and now he’s even worse, and phones it in big time.

Very disappointing.
by Aman_Kalwar | 2025-11-20 18:53:56+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Aman, a 20-year-old builder from Nepal, and for the last few months my co-founder (Alok) and I have been working on a small but meaningful experiment: Can AI generate clean, usable mobile app UI screens instantly from a text prompt? Today, we’re releasing the beta of Elaric, a tool that does exactly that. What it does (current version) Right now, Elaric generates UI screens only — but across almost all major categories: Food delivery E-commerce Booking apps Finance Fitness Education Social Hospitality Ride-hailing Marketplaces You type: “Generate a home page for a food delivery app with categories, a search bar, and a featured section.” Elaric outputs a complete UI screen in seconds. You can generate unlimited screens and explore them visually. Why we built this In Nepal, building an app UI takes days or weeks. Figma is powerful, but for non-designers, it’s still overwhelming. We wanted something simple: “Describe the screen you want → get a usable mockup immediately.” We know this is not new at a global level, but it is new in our context — and we wanted to see how far two young builders with almost no resources can push this idea. How we built it We bootstrapped the entire thing with ₹51,125. No investors, no team, no external help. We trained and fine-tuned models on a lot of manually prepared UI structures and category patterns, and then built a rendering engine that constructs the final screen layout. It’s definitely not perfect — but it works surprisingly well for many categories. Why we’re posting on HN Because this community is where we’ve learned everything. We respect the honesty here more than any other platform. We want feedback on: What would make this actually useful for developers/designers? Should we prioritize code export or screen linking next? Should the editor come before flow generation? Any obvious limitations you see from the demo? Any categories we should add next? Live Beta: https://www.elaric.ai/ (If it crashes, we’ll scale quickly — our servers are tiny.) What’s next Based on early user requests, our next steps are: Add Figma export Add screen-to-screen linking Create a small built-in UI editor Generate React Native code Build full app flows Release an API for bulk UI generation Why this matters to us We grew up in a place where people genuinely believe “big tech can’t be built in Nepal.” Posting this here is a small step toward challenging that. If anyone here finds this useful — even for 10 seconds — it will mean everything to us. I’ll be here in the comments all day. Thank you for your time, and happy to answer anything. Aman Co-founder, Elaric https://www.elaric.ai/
by Bjorkbat | 2025-11-20 18:54:36+00:00
Funny enough that had crossed my mind with the woodchuck example, because at a glance I can't see any weird artifacts, but I felt confident I could tell it was AI generated immediately if I saw it in the wild, and I couldn't really explain why. My immediate guess was "well, who the hell would actually bother to make something like this?"
by jsnell | 2025-11-20 18:55:22+00:00
Zork was originally written at MIT for PDP-10s in an obscure Lisp dialect (MDL). The authors then later formed a company to sell the game on micro-computers. To do it, they built a virtual machine optimized for this purpose, a new Lisp dialect (ZIL) that could compile to the virtual machine, and the ported the game over to that new dialect. Even so, they had to split the game into three parts to fit.

The source you're linking to is the original MDL source. This is about the ZIL source for the three games that the original Zork was split into.
by wbshaw | 2025-11-20 18:55:29+00:00
That is why some local governments create Community Development Districts (CDDs). The master developer installs the infrastructure and it becomes part of the tax burden for homeowners. The what developers play the fee until they've attained critical mass and then the taxes become the homeowner's responsibility. Sucks if you're living on the edge and the escrow portion of your mortgage goes up by hundreds of dollars per month.
by jldugger | 2025-11-20 18:56:16+00:00
Well, there's kind of two answers here:

1. To the extent that creativity is randomness, LLM inference samples from the token distribution at each step. It's possible (but unlikely!) for an LLM to complete "pig with" with the token sequence "a dragon head" just by random chance. The temperature settings commonly exposed control how often the system takes the most likely candidate tokens.

2. A markov chain model will literally have a matrix entry for every possible combination of inputs. So a 2 degree chain will have n^2 weights, where N is the number of possible tokens. In that situation "pig with" can never be completed with a brand new sentence, because those have literal 0's in the probability. In contrast, transformers consider huge context windows, and start with random weights in huge neural network matrices. What people hope happens is that the NN begins to represent ideas, and connections between them. This gives them a shot at passing "out of distribution" tests, which is a cornerstone of modern AI evaluation.
by bpt3 | 2025-11-20 18:56:39+00:00
And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.

$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.
by Agraillo | 2025-11-20 18:56:45+00:00
I'd choose "smart people achieve too little." The reason is that, looking at the world around me (more or less) sustaining the lives of more than 8 billion people, I'm sure it's because of the scientific and inventive revelations of a few, not just the hard work of millions. (Sorry, millions, your work is important, but without those few, 99% of us would still spend much of our time just seeking and growing food). If the problem is fixed, maybe those 8 billion (or more) people would have much better, healthier lives without the risk of the upcoming climate fiasco. Just my two cents.
by tuetuopay | 2025-11-20 18:56:49+00:00
Despite others thinking you’re crazy, I think you are right. I remember the start of the smartphone era where many of my relatives switched to iPhone because "you know where the pictures are going and where to find them". The worst offender was my dad that had a Samsung phone running windows phone 6 (with an actual start menu) where you had to dig through folders to find jpeg files.
by minimaxir | 2025-11-20 18:57:00+00:00
I just pushed gemimg 0.3.2 which adds image_size support for Nano Banana Pro, and I ran a few tests on some of the images in the blog. In my testing, Nano Banana Pro correctly handled most of the image generation errors noted in my blog post: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1991580127587921971

- Fibonacci magnets: code is correctly indented and the syntax highlighting atleast tries giving variables, numbers, and keywords different colors.

- Make me a Studio Ghibli: actually does style transfer correctly, and does it better than ChatGPT ever did.

- Rendering a webpage from HTML: near-perfect recreation of the HTML, including text layout and element sizing.

That said, there may be regressions where even with prompt engineering, the generated images which are more photorealistic look too good and land back into the uncanny valley. I haven't decided if I'm going to write a follow up blog post yet.

The system prompt hacking trick doesn't work with Nano Banana Pro unfortunately.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-11-20 18:57:16+00:00
> If UBI in the United States were $10k a year per head (roughly what SSDI pays out, which I find it hard to believe even an individual can get by on), and we have 300 million people,

It's impressive you managed to be this wrong right out of the gate. Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income. So if we set UBI to be $35k a year, and you make $30k a year, you get $5k a year in UBI payments. The vast majority of employed adults wouldn't get anything, because they don't need it, so saying we're paying out $3 trillion in benefits is flatly ridiculous.

> and there's nothing stopping people from blowing their UBI money on drugs or alcohol or whatever

And there shouldn't be. It's a Universal Basic Income. You can spend it on food, housing, a car, a model train set, hard Nicaraguan cocaine, prostitutes, or whatever else tickles your fancy. Poor people do not need to be shepherded: study[0] after study[1] after study[2] has proven that when you give people who are broke money that actually has the ability to change their circumstances, shock of shocks, they use it to change their circumstances. If somebody wants to take their UBI and then live on the street, weird choice, but that's also completely their choice and it is not your or anyone else's place to judge them for it.

And under the current system: You ARE paying for their ER visits. You're paying for their ER visits, you're paying to house them in prisons, you're paying for men with guns to beat the shit out of them and then drive them around, you're paying a justice system to move them about place to place and have hearings with judges, stenographers and guards, public defenders, and then when they do get out of jail, you're paying for the bus stop they're living in to boot.

The only thing UBI changes is it gives THEM the money instead of police departments, courts, healthcare companies so they can actually DO SOMETHING about their problems, rather than being shuffled from one awful system to another on an eternal loop because being homeless is just illegal in practice in America.

And better still, UBI strips a LOT of the administrative overhead involved, because it's very easy to calculate what everyone gets, it's literally back-of-napkin tier math. No means testing, no investigations. Just money to people who don't have enough so they have enough. I'm sure it won't solve EVERY social ill, of course. But it'll do a damn sight better job than the current system.

[0] - https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/2025/11/08/universal-ba...

[1] - https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/

[2] - https://basicincome.stanford.edu/uploads/Umbrella%20Review%2...
by koliber | 2025-11-20 18:57:30+00:00
Here's how I see it, but I'm not sure how valid my mental model is.

Imagine a source corpus that consists of:

Cows are big. Big animals are happy. Some other big animals include pigs, horses, and whales.

A Markov chain can only return verbatim combinations. So it might return "Cows are big animals" or "Are big animals happy".

An LLM can get a sense of meaning in these words and can return ideas expressed in the input corpus. So in this case it might say "Pigs and horses are happy". It's not limited to responding with verbatim sequences. It can be seen as a bit more creative.

However, LLMs will not be able to represent ideas that it has not encountered before. It won't be able to come up with truly novel concepts, or even ask questions about them. Humans (some at least) have that unbounded creativity that LLMs do not.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-20 18:58:14+00:00
> You use `unwrap()` when you know the failure cannot happen.

That’s an invariant meant to be expressed by your type system — and it is.

You’ve failed to model your invariants in your API — and thus the type system — if you ever reach a point where an engineer has to manually assess and assert whether “cannot” applies.

You will get it wrong. That is bad code.
by simonw | 2025-11-20 18:58:54+00:00
That result for rendering HTML to an image (the Counter Info one) is pretty impressive.

https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/blob/main/docs/files/cou... to this: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1991580127587921971 - see also https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/#image-pro...
by jchw | 2025-11-20 18:59:02+00:00
While that is true, I feel like it is irrelevant here since it seems like Okta definitely wants (and perhaps needs) the fixes. God only knows why GitHub still forces it on though. Early on it might've been some mechanism to encourage people to accept contributions to push the social coding aspect, but at this point I have no idea who this benefits, it mostly confuses people when a project doesn't accept PRs.
by pjmlp | 2025-11-20 18:59:22+00:00
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"

Guess what 1980's language he is referring to.

Then in 1988,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
by arghwhat | 2025-11-20 19:00:09+00:00
That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration available but even without it would work fine with plenty of performance headroom.

Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
by alphazard | 2025-11-20 19:00:26+00:00
> If you do a ([32]byte)(foo) cast, you risk a panic if the file/packet/whatever is not the size you expected (e.g. because it's actually attacker controlled)

Can you give an example of a situation where that is actually a concern? It doesn't really seem like a realistic threat model to me. Knowledge of the key is pretty much how these algorithms define attackers vs. defenders. If the attacker has the key that's gg.

There are lots of things in Go that can panic. Even in syntax, the conversion is very similar to an interface conversion, and those haven't been a problem for me in practice, partly because of good lint rules to force checking the "okay" boolean.
by nickpp | 2025-11-20 19:00:43+00:00
> Tell me you didn't even read a line of GDPR in the past 9 years or know anything about European regulations

As a matter of fact, I am the founder&owner of a small ISV (nothing ad, privacy, crypto or AI-related) in the Eastern EU. Everything I am telling about European regulations comes from dozens of years of direct, painful, personal experience.

How about you?