MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yoloshii | 2025-11-27 23:54:01+00:00
You're right that iptables rules execute in kernel space, not dedicated hardware. "Hardware kill switch" in VPN contexts typically means the protection is implemented at the network appliance level (router) rather than a software client on each device. The distinction matters because a) client-side kill switch: App crashes → traffic leaks until you notice, and b) router-level kill switch :Default DROP policy persists regardless of client state. Also, the project is for non-techies and vibe coders, so simple explanations help. For their agents, there's the juice in other docs.
by tbrockman | 2025-11-27 23:55:01+00:00
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).

Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-11-27 23:55:24+00:00
1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.

2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.

3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.

4. Likewise.

5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.

The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.
by elzbardico | 2025-11-27 23:56:56+00:00
Not true.

The largest battery systems in operation are primarily designed for short-duration grid support rather than long-term, multi-day backup. They can even bridge a single windless night.

And this is talking about short term mismatch between supply and demand in a 24 hour cycle. If you consider the need to account for the yearly seasonal generation variation (which is far more dramatic as most of the developed world is situated on high latitudes) battery storage becomes even more problematic due to the absurd capital expenditures for a resource that you'd have to charge with a dramatic production supply during the summer months to slowly discharge during the winter.

People have been misled with the convenient lie of LCOE for too long, when what really matters are the true system costs. We don't even have in place the supply chain to sustain this, and I am not even talking about Lithium or Cobalt, I am talking about plain old Copper.

Then, there are the capital requirements for recycling and decommissioning, as the useful life of such systems is unfortunately not something to write home about.

Think about it. We have spent too much time and money on solar and wind, money that could have been spent on nuclear power. The clock is ticking, replacing our grid with solar may be the wet dream of big finance, but it is not a reasonable solution, it is about time we stop wasting our time with it.
by floatboth | 2025-11-27 23:57:09+00:00
EL2 is coming by default on Glymur (X2E) (yaaaay), can be enabled in config on some IoT platforms, and can be booted into via Secure Launch on previous compute platforms (Hamoa/Purwa aka X1E/X1P, SC8280XP), search for slbounce.

On phone platforms.. probably not? Or Android might want it for pKVM..
by gunnarmorling | 2025-11-27 23:57:50+00:00
The comment at [1] hints at a solution: in the response of the write request return the id of the transaction or its commit position in the TX log (LSN). When routing a subsequent read request to a replica, the system can either wait until the transaction is present on the replica, or it redirect to to the primary node. Discussed a similar solution a while ago in a talk [2], in the context of serving denormalized data views from a cache.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46073630 [2] https://speakerdeck.com/gunnarmorling/keep-your-cache-always...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-27 23:58:14+00:00
Qualcomm did this in 2024. They pushed some patches to LKML, and issued a press release to brag about it. (https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...)

Yet 2 days ago, Tuxedo Computers announced they were abandoning Qualcomm due to crap support. (https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/tuxedo_axes_arm_lapto...).

In particular, the long battery runtimes – usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices – were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.

There is nothing in this press release to suggest they've changed.
by jahnu | 2025-11-28 00:00:05+00:00
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.

Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.

[1] https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom
by dzaima | 2025-11-28 00:00:18+00:00
In said hypothetical world, though, the whatever-driver would also have been written by LLMs; and, if the printer or whatever is non-trivial and made by a typical large company, many LLM instances with a sizable amount of token spending over a long period of time.

So getting your own LLM rewrite to an equivalent point (or, rather, less buggy as that's the whole point!) would be rather expensive; at the absolute very least, certainly more expensive than if you still had the original source code to reference or modify (even if an LLM is the thing doing those). Having the original source code is still just strictly unconditionally better.

Never mind the question of how you even get your LLM to reverse-engineer & interact with & observe the physical hardware of your printer, and whatever wasted ink during debugging of the reinvention of what the original driver already did correctly.
by Tostino | 2025-11-28 00:00:55+00:00
I absolutely conceded that it is not legally required.

I just don't want to do business with people who think that's an ethical way to do things. The hosting excuse is pathetic. Learn to do your job and it isn't something you need to think about more than once every half decade.

I had to maintain a full build artifact history of my old app. It "just worked" for years and years without thinking twice, and cost a handful of dollars a month for a few TB of build artifacts.

For most apps that aren't continual delivery, it's way fewer artifacts to handle so way less data...a couple dollars a month at most.

Really, what excuse do you have for that other than screwing people who previously trusted you enough to do business with you?
by lmm | 2025-11-28 00:00:57+00:00
> Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.

That doesn't work when they're a monopoly. Did the whole robber baron era just not happen in your world?

I'd flip it around: Apple should make better devices so that they can retain customers on their merits, rather than because their friends' phones are going to "accidentally" lose their text messages if they dare try a non-Apple phone.
by t-writescode | 2025-11-28 00:00:58+00:00
> it merely states a fact that could be observed by reading the source code

In 4 characters it clarifies something that could take 300 lines, 10 nested ifs, loops, etc; and, that trust disappears the moment someone, later down in the code *does* change the value.

Clarified intent, nearness-to-declaration, and linted protection are real benefits.
by Genego | 2025-11-28 00:01:49+00:00
This will get better over time, there will be ways to make LLM output more uniquely yours. I personally enjoy writing all my blog posts with LLMs, because its the only way I can bring to turn countless of notes and drafts I have while running experiments, into some public facing documentation and blog posts that I would want people to read. There are at least 5-6 years of lost ideas, thoughts and notes that I was not able to communicate the same way I can do now with LLMs. So I definitely found my voice here.
by floatboth | 2025-11-28 00:02:05+00:00
Upstream would accept a patchset that exposed an independent Gunyah-specific UAPI (why not the same one as downstream — crosvm already supports that) instead of pretending to be KVM (it's not a "port", you can't port a hypervisor to a hypervisor).

KVM is available on current compute platforms (laptops) if you escape to EL2 via slbounce; and on Glymur (X2E) it will be available by default (yay!).
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-28 00:04:31+00:00
> TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't even install debian packages out of the box.

It's meant to be an appliance, so it makes sense in that setting. That said, it does support hosting Docker images, so you don't really need much in the way of installing packages IME.
by soraminazuki | 2025-11-28 00:04:59+00:00
Again, no it's not. Most kernel code doesn't run as PID 0. What you're talking about is the idle task, a very small part of the kernel.

I also did have Linux in mind when writing my comment, but this is basic to how any major general purpose operating system works. Besides, I can't possibly exclude Linux when I say "any modern operating system."
by cratermoon | 2025-11-28 00:05:08+00:00
Thank you. I've been telling people that for a while now. The best tools rarely (never?) come from top executives down to the hands-on-keyboards people. The programmers are the ones in the best position to determine what will help them do their jobs, and frequently those tools are not on the approved lists because they are new and haven't (yet) made it to the Gartner "Magic Quadrant".
by chickenbig | 2025-11-28 00:05:36+00:00
> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size

Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.

Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
by Brian_K_White | 2025-11-28 00:06:28+00:00
Buddy. "This is a blunt warning", the reasonable and unreasonable parties in this story are not what you seem to think.

No one owes you a perpetual backup. Not even the people who sold you the first copy.

You are not prevented from reinstalling your os or filezilla by anything but your own apparent dipshittery.

You bought something and then threw it away, and now you cry that you don't have it, and then as if that wasn't ridiculous enough already, you then try to blame this on the vendor.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-28 00:06:35+00:00
Unfettered capitalism is great under certain conditions. Amazing things get invented & rolled out to the world.

When conditions change, cracks appear..

For many reasons we appear to be in an era of slower growth, but shareholders used to growth are still demanding it. That’s sticking business leaders in a really tough place.

The incentives need to change - whether through legislation, or market demands. Until then it’ll be less leg room on flights, more “offers” when you just opened your banking app to pay a bill, and more sanctioned spam in your inbox.

I truly believe plenty of folks are fed up and a backlash is coming that’ll be a mix of legislation and companies emerging that cater to informed customers. I’m optimistic!
by vkou | 2025-11-28 00:07:12+00:00
> You could use the ocean for the bottom level and an artificial reservoir for the top level. You're not going to noticeably affect ocean levels.

Then you have to deal with the problem of sea water corroding everything it touches.

> You might pump 10 billion litres of water, which is .02% of the volume of Mjøsa.

It's not the amount of water that you pump, it's the amount * the elevation delta. Where are you planning on getting the elevation delta from?

Neither of these challenges is technically insurmountable, but this is a field where capex + opex/KWH is everything.
by chappi42 | 2025-11-28 00:09:56+00:00
I was happy from the sideline seeing the recent big Zig donations. But this sudden decision is a shock. Technical issues can be worked around (I wish/think), but leaving such a dominant platform? I don't know. For my small small needs Forgejo works great, but for Zig, a project which I hope has a lot of mainstream success, I'm not convinced, that Forgejo/Codeberg is the best fit (atm). Even Graphene OS which has very high standards is (still) on Github, maybe Zig could brood (brüten) a bit longer to decide if it is really time to leave?
by Clamchop | 2025-11-28 00:10:44+00:00
I've noticed this, too, and have likened it to haircuts: If you gave yourself a haircut, you don't say so, because it inevitably opens the door to a level of scrutiny and criticism that it wouldn't otherwise.

People are just going to lie about using AI and honestly that's fine. An even older idiom is that you don't want to see how the sausage gets made. Not if you enjoy sausage.
by meander_water | 2025-11-28 00:11:45+00:00
This is really cool and interesting timing, as I created something similar recently - https://github.com/julio-mcdulio/pmp

I've been using mlflow to store my prompts, but wanted something lightweight on the cli to version and manage prompts. I setup pmp so you can have different storage backends (file, sqlite, mlflow etc.).

I wasn't aware of dotprompt, I might build that in too.
by komali2 | 2025-11-28 00:12:17+00:00
Author here - they can only do surveillance pricing on you if they know who you are when you're paying. They can't do that at a kiosk or counter because they would only know whose paying when you use your credit card and have already seen the bill.

If you use an app they already know you who are and so the second you open the app it's showing you the surveillance prices.
by arcanemachiner | 2025-11-28 00:12:18+00:00
I consider it to be part of the hacker's spirit to bend or break unjust laws when the situation calls for it.

So I wouldn't gloss over the specific law(s) he broke, so much as I would outright celebrate that he did so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
by piva00 | 2025-11-28 00:12:27+00:00
Inherently? I'd say almost none except for the obvious physical ones and their higher order effects.

Culturally there's a lot of differences that won't be patched for generations, social expectations can come from parenting and/or environment, including their society, interactions between genders shaped by those cultural differences from an early age, so on and so forth. Such expectations shape their worldview and place in it, males being told to be tough, not be "a sissy", being shaped into clamming up emotionally. Females being told they can't achieve things solely due to their gender, having to learn to be guarded against potential male aggression, etc.

There's just too much to even start enumerating in a comment but it boils down to cultural expectations from early age, and how those shape people into gendered behaviours as a reaction, not only from the expectations but also the feedbacks happening across gendered higher order effects of those expectations.
by apatheticonion | 2025-11-28 00:12:52+00:00
I was interested in trying to make a DIY thermal battery as a hobby experiment. Other than using thermal energy directly, I couldn't find a way to effectively convert the heat energy to electrical energy.

Peltier modules can be used to generate electricity, but they are crazy inefficient.

An efficient steam turbine is largely inaccessible to hobbiests and I am scared of steam/pressure. Though I did look at repurposing a car turbo for this purpose. There were additional issues with regulating the amount of heat you wanted to extract (load matching) and recycling waste heat.

I wondered if it was possible to use a Sterling engine, but you can't buy anything other than very small toys online and I don't have the facilities to machine my own.

Haha, would love to get something working, but I suppose I'm not smart enough to figure out an effective way to get that heat back out as usable/controlled electricity.
by jmye | 2025-11-28 00:13:31+00:00
If your entire job, as a VP or director/manager, is getting progress reports, you’re probably a wildly shitty manager and ought to be replaced anyways.

Seems more like the kind of thing a “smartest guy in the building” dev believes to be true, than actual reality at a real company.

Having VPs “clear blockers” is absolutely asinine.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-11-28 00:14:01+00:00
I did sysadmin work for both a .k12.oh.us and a co.countyname.oh.us. Users at both hated the suffix on email addresses. The hierarchy appeals to the nerd in me but I understand the difficulty people had trying to communicate the addresses to others. (Both now use a .com and .gov domain, respectively...)
by WatchDog | 2025-11-28 00:14:38+00:00
A soft-realtime multiplayer game is always incorrect(unless no one is moving).

There are various decisions the netcode can make about how to reconcile with this incorrectness, and different games make different tradeoffs.

For example in hitscan FPS games, when two players fatally shoot one another at the same time, some games will only process the first packet received, and award the kill to that player, while other games will allow kill trading within some time window.

A tolerance is just an amount of incorrectness that the designer of the system can accept.

When it comes to CRUD apps using read-replicas, so long as the designer of the system is aware of and accepts the consistency errors that will sometimes occur, does that make that system correct?
by kees99 | 2025-11-28 00:14:39+00:00
> heat pumps themselves are much more efficient.

For electricity-to-heat conversion, heap pumps are indeed much more efficient relative to resistive heating, yes. About 4 times more efficient.

In absolute terms, though - that is still only 50% of "Carnot cycle" efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

Similarly, heat-to-electricity conversion is about 50% efficient in best case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency

So, in your scenario (heat->electricity conversion, then transmission, then electricity->heat conversion), overall efficiency is going to be 50% * 50% = 25%, assuming no transmission losses and state-of-art conversion on both ends.

25% efficiency (a.k.a. 75% losses) is pretty generous budget to work with. I guess one can cover a small town or a city's district with heat pipes and come on top in terms of efficiency.
by westurner | 2025-11-28 00:14:44+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743372 re: the Cloudflare Merkle Tree draft:

> Problem is PQ signatures are large. If certificate chain is small that could be acceptable, but if the chain is large, then it can be expensive in terms of bandwidth and computation during TLS handshake. That is the exchange sends many certificates which embed a signature and a large (PQ) public key.

> Merkle Tree Certificates ensures that an up to date client only needs 1 signature, 1 public key, 1 merkle tree witness.

> Looking at an MTC generated certificate they've replaced the traditional signing algorithm and signature with a witness.

> That means all a client needs is a signed merkle root which comes from an expanding Merkle Tree signed by the MTCA (Merkle Tree CA), which is delivered somehow out of band.

From "Keeping the Internet fast and secure: introducing Merkle Tree Certificates" (2025-10) https://blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrap-mtc/ :

> The central problem is the sheer size of these new algorithms: signatures for ML-DSA-44, one of the most performant PQ algorithms standardized by NIST, are 2,420 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA-P256, the most popular non-PQ signature in use today; and its public keys are 1,312 bytes long, compared to just 64 bytes for ECDSA. That's a roughly 20-fold increase in size. Worse yet, the average TLS handshake includes a number of public keys and signatures, adding up to 10s of kilobytes of overhead per handshake. This is enough to have a noticeable impact on the performance of TLS.

Are ML-KEM certs impractically large too?
by EliteGadget | 2025-11-28 00:14:47+00:00
There was once a fad of young women (usually in recruitment) posting their holiday photos. Usually they were wearing revealing outfits, one was wearing something so revealing I could see her lingerie. This was a fad for about 6 months on LinkedIn.

What the recruitment companies seemed to never post was actual jobs, the thing that they are supposed to be doing.

After that I barely look at LinkedIn.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-28 00:15:31+00:00
That's a reason they're not legally obligated. It doesn't make me understand their actions in the sympathetic sense, and the sympathetic sense is how I interpreted "but I can also understand".

It doesn't explain the choice they made. "Legally they could" applies equally to removing the download and keeping the download.

The only reason I can think of, to make me understand in a much more derogatory sense, is they want to give a deliberately bad experience to customers that didn't give them money recently enough, trying to make them buy again to keep using the software.