MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rasz | 2025-11-23 18:44:56+00:00
>A 386 was a beast against a 286

386, both SX and DX, run 16bit code at ~same clock for clock speed as 286. 286 topped out at 25MHz, Intel 386 at 33MHz. Now add the fact early Intel chips had broken 32bit and its not so beastly after all :)

In one of Computer History Museum videos someone from Intel mentioned they managed to cost reduce 386SX version so hard it cost Intel $5 out the door, the rest of initial 1988 $219 price was pure money printer. Only in 1992 Intel finally calmed down with i386SX-25 going from Q1 1990 $184 to Q4 1992 $59 due to losing AMD Am386 lawsuit, and only to screw with AMD relegating its Am386DX-40 Q2 1991 $231 flagship to the title of Q1 1993 $51 bottom feeder.
by final_aeon | 2025-11-23 18:44:59+00:00
In my opinion there's no reason to stick to the "old school" / classic emacs controls. They're archaic at this point.

I am an experienced emacs user and I still use CUA mode, arrow keys, and I wrote a package which completely overhauls built-in "word jumping" commands (called bbww on melpa.)

You don't need to worry about upholding traditional emacs orthodoxy
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-23 18:45:10+00:00
Wasn't there some brouhaha about they Voyagers entering the interstellar medium a while back?

So... sure... one might argue we're not going to get star-trek-esque warp factor 9 kind of interstellar travel, but that's different than saying "we'll never have interstellar travel."

And there's an old adage in physics... if a young physicist says something is possible, they're probably wrong. If an old physicist says something is impossible, they're probably wrong. I have "wonderful" memories of an older astrophysicist in the 1970s telling me why it's impossible for humans to directly detect exoplanets.

I agree with the authors primary assertion... Star Trek, Star Wars and all the other "big" SciFi shows are probably more like "Science Fantasy." There was a decent discussion of what "Science Fiction" really was in the preface to one of the Arthur C. Clarke novels (sorry, can't remember which one.) Clarke suggested that "SciFi" should try to limit the amount of hand-wavey science-fantasy. In the stories I've written (and many of the corporate market analyses), I try to explicitly call out one or two bits of physics that change while keeping everything else in line with consensus reality.

But my disagreement w/ this article comes from what seems like an argument with no evidence. My mentors as a young physicist were still fans of Bertrand Russell (which might let you guess my age.) That era of science was sort of high on Karl Popper who was big on falsifiability. If you say something like "feature X is impossible in the future," then you have to wait until the future before you can determine whether the statement is true or false. And the problem with statements like this is a) there's an aweful lot of future out there, and b) we don't claim to understand all of physics.

If the author would have said "It looks very, very unlikely we'll have Star-Trek-ish warp drives by (what was it?) 2250," I would have heartily agreed. As of yet, I don't think we have any ideas about how to bend local space with an anti-matter reactor. (And if you're screaming at me about the Alcubierre Drive, sure, but the descriptions I've seen require "negative mass" which I don't think we have a handle on.)

And as a reminder... the second word in "science fiction" is "fiction". Though I (and I think the author of the original piece referenced in this post as well) would prefer "sciencism fiction." Much of what we call "Science Fiction" really is fantasy dressed up in futuristic looking clothes. Either to escape the mundane present or to hide political messaging. Or because the author thought it would be fun.

In summary... I guess what I'm saying is... Predicting things is hard. Especially about the future. It seems more correct to say "While we can't predict the future, the likelihood we're getting warp drive in the next 300 years is on par with Mets winning the World Series in game seven against the Cardassian Black-Rocks, which is to say slightly less likely than fire breathing dragons setting the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland alight with their igneous breath."
by jedberg | 2025-11-23 18:45:16+00:00
If I understand correctly, this means you can't back up the private key, correct? It's in the Secure Enclave, so if you lose your laptop, you also lose the key? Since it looks like export only really exports the public key not the private one?

Probably not the worst thing, you most likely have another way to get into the remote machine, or an admin who can reset you, but still feels like a hole.

Or am I missing something?

ps. It amuses me that my Mac won't let me type Secure Enclave without automatically capitalizing it.

Edit: I understand good security is having multiple keys, I was simply asking if this one can be backed up. OP answered below and is updating their webpage accordingly.
by lanstin | 2025-11-23 18:45:20+00:00
I don't think they are unifiable, the aims and methods one needs to learn are just too different. Limits of covering boxes and scaling your epsilons and so on, stuff from Tao's class on analysis is far away from being able to deal either non-trivial differential equations or stability analysis. You can prove all sorts of things about dense subspaces of Hilbert space and still get totally lost in multiple scale analysis, and vice versa. (Ed: epsilon was spelled espikon)
by mindcrash | 2025-11-23 18:45:48+00:00
My personal experience is that a different culture/work ethic probably is even more than a hassle than language.

For example, at one of the orgs I worked my team lead was based in (and native to) a country in the south of Africa. While hammering out a big feature req he told us, based in Europe, through Teams text chat he wouldn't be around for a few hours because he wanted to take a afternoon nap.

We thought he was just joking around, and we needed his opinions a little while later because of something we ran into so we tried to dial him in: no response. Chat: no response. Turns out the guy was really off taking an afternoon nap.

Luckily we could solve things without his help, but to us in Europe that was really weird. Later we did some research and discovered that people in that part of the world really like to take afternoon naps, even though they should be at work...
by loumf | 2025-11-23 18:46:10+00:00
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.

If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
by jmclnx | 2025-11-23 18:46:14+00:00
Seems to be an intro to a kind of but lite weight vi mode. I tend to like the regular mode in Emacs.

Maybe a bit OT, but I think I saw here a week or more ago a post about magit, I am toying with using it, but seems to be a rather big package. Plus I wonder why dash is needed:

https://emacsdocs.org/docs/magit/Installing-from-the-Git-Rep...

In anycase to avoid downloading additional packages I may use Melpa

https://emacsdocs.org/docs/magit/Installing-from-Melpa
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-23 18:46:20+00:00
I live in a place that’s rather difficult to serve and I’m just past the range where the full 24 Mbps ADSL2 speed is available so I get 20 Mbps. Once in a while my telco has infrastructure problems, it uses to be common that there would be lightning or power outages and it wouldn’t come back until they did some kind of manual reset, I talked w/ them and the PUC about it and then it seemed like they set it up so it would do an automated reset. The techs tell me if I lived very close to the node they could set me up with much faster VDSL.
by danny_codes | 2025-11-23 18:46:40+00:00
IMO nothing wrong with it. Just misleading to call yourself an AI company when you actually make a CRUD app. I think if these companies were honest about what they’re doing nobody would be upset. There’s an obvious deliberate attempt to give an impression of technical complexity/competence that isn’t there.

I assume it works because the ecosystem is, as you say, so new. Non-technical observers have trouble distinguishing between LLM companies and CRUD companies
by nativeit | 2025-11-23 18:47:31+00:00
Also, honestly, the build. That “genuine concern” they ignored was that the build was critically flawed. I don’t think anyone here would have these takes if a small group of curious engineers tried their hand at a composite submersible, it was when they kept doing it after all the qualified engineers had said, “This is crazy, I’m out.”

The build was kind of dumb, and I’m hardly an engineer. It’s common sense. Carbon fiber composites are interesting because they’re strong relative to their weight. Remove either of those features and they become pointless.

Who cares if a submarine is heavy?
by eviks | 2025-11-23 18:48:25+00:00
> Considering Apple’s focus on consumers first

What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?

> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to

But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
by articulatepang | 2025-11-23 18:48:29+00:00
Many tools offer offline file browsing and full text search. Anything from midnight commander to Alfred to ripgrep.

I think the valuable and difficult thing is high quality, fast, offline semantic search, including indexing (so my files don't go to your servers -- that's an immediate no-go for all the important industries).

I've tried my hand at this a couple times and it's hard! But really hope you succeed, because it would be a big game changer in how we organize and use information. Every company out there would buy this immediately.
by programjames | 2025-11-23 18:48:38+00:00
Talking about the greatness of America has been a theme among Democrats from FDR to JFK, when they spoke about defending and spreading American cultural values like democracy and freedom. It goes back even further to the 1840s with James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny. Banning the MAGA hat in the classroom isn't about political signalling - it's just straight out America hate.

Do you see how silly you sound? Look, here's my issue with you: I've told you my reasons to oppose MAGA hats and welcome posters in the classroom. You refuse to believe those are my reasons. You're calling me a liar, saying I must secretly be withholding some racist motivated reasoning. I get that there are America haters who want to ban MAGA hats, and racists who want to ban these posters. But you're talking to me, not them. If you can only refute people who collectively share two brain cells, then you're probably just wrong on your position.
by boznz | 2025-11-23 18:49:28+00:00
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.

This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-11-23 18:49:49+00:00
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing

While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-23 18:50:15+00:00
Anytime you wake up in the morning and are able to get out of bed and stand up is a beautiful day.

I've never wanted to transfer my brain into a machine. Isn't it wonderful to feel the floor under your feet? To smell the air? To taste a steak? To hear the bees? To see the leaves? To hold your partner?

Every day is an opportunity to enjoy your life.

I don't really know what kind of a man I am, because I have never volunteered to face death.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-23 18:50:34+00:00
Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.
Show HN: Built a tool solve the nightmare of chunking tables in PDF vs. Markdown
by 2dogsanerd | 2025-11-23 18:50:54+00:00
Hey HN, solo dev here. After years of frustration with how LLMs handle complex documents, especially PDFs with tables, I decided to build a solution myself. My approach uses a Markdown conversion step to preserve the table structure, which seems to work surprisingly well for chunking. This little parser is the first public piece of a much larger, privacy-focused AI platform I'm building. I'm pretty much running on fumes financially, so any feedback, critique, or support is massively appreciated. Happy to answer any questions about the approach!
by op00to | 2025-11-23 18:51:15+00:00
That’s not what the Nordic data show. Sweden didn’t “end up doing better.” It had by far the worst COVID-19 mortality in 2020, because it kept society open while its neighbors used strict controls.

The only reason Sweden’s later all-cause mortality looks “similar” is mortality displacement: COVID killed so many frail, high-risk people in 2020 that Sweden had fewer dementia and respiratory deaths in 2021–22. Nordic registry papers explicitly note this. Sweden didn’t outperform anyone. Its early losses were just so large that later excess deaths looked artificially low.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-23 18:52:41+00:00
I think SBCL has better support for annotations. You can claim that a variable is an int and the compiler will thrust you and generante fast code.

You can use Typed Racket to add annotations. The compiler will verify your that your claims are consistent and perhaps add some runtime checks when you read data or use other external sources. It will remove most of the internal checks, but not all of them.

(Probably some features of Racket like impersonators make generating fast code faster, but on the other hand allows Typed Racket and other variants/libraries to ensure external objects behave correctly.)

Disclaimer: I use "Plain" Racket, so both descriptions may be slightly wrong.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-23 18:52:43+00:00
Indeed. Previously, every Patch Tuesday we used to pray that nothing would break in that patch cycle. Now we expect that things _will_ break, but hope that that whatever Microsoft breaks won't affect us, or is something minor, or gets patched quickly.

Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-11-23 18:52:56+00:00
For all we know that is a contingency. DoD is relatively public and transparent, but they don't reveal everything.

If that was a contingency, it would just play into the the whole cyber/information/electronic/space domains aspects of the whole "multi-domain" stuff.

Surely both China and the US have contingencies in place to try to determine if the opposing side is exploiting their PNT systems, and then figure out ways to subvert that in various ways.
by csmoak | 2025-11-23 18:53:08+00:00
The only applications I'm aware of that currently do spectral rendering on the fly are painting apps.

I have one called Brushwork ( https://brushworkvr.com ) that upsamples RGB from 3 to a larger number of samples spread across visible light, mixes paint in the upsampled space, and then downsamples for rendering (the upsampling approach that app uses is from Scott Burns http://scottburns.us/color-science-projects/ ). FocalPaint on iOS does something similar ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/focalpaint/id1532688085 ).

I'm happy that tech like this will open up more apps to use spectral rendering.
by newsoftheday | 2025-11-23 18:54:11+00:00
Right, but my context is that devs often use no passsphrase at all. If someone can get a copy, they have instant access to whatever it has access to. They don't need to even break encryption since the key has none if none has been applied. My stance is simply, at least add a passphrase to the key (though some call it a password).
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-23 18:54:14+00:00
Okay. He invented it. So what? Other companies are selling more and the first mover advantage is moot.

And the other examples you ara giving…

Apple’s valuation went up as it was clear that Apple had a sustainable advantage and was going to see increasing revenues and profits going forward. Where are the companies that invented the modern smart phone?

Microsoft has a sustainable advantage that hasn’t been challenged in over four decades with operating systems, office apps and later cloud services. But their stock was in the doldrums in the 2000s when investors didn’t see a sustainable advantage with increasing revenues

Meta has also been volatile when investors didn’t see a sustainable advantage.

Amazon also has a moat

What does Tesla have?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-23 18:54:21+00:00
Meh. I'm not a fan of modal interfaces. But if it works for you, then knock yourself out. I appreciate the write-up here. I'll give it a try to see if I can see what the author is talking about. The overwhelming majority of code I write now is in snippets inside text documents (think Knuthian Literate Programming) so I don't know how that would work w/ the author's modal setup. But they went to the trouble of documenting it, and it seems sort of like what `vi` people are always yammering about. Seems a decent idea to try to understand it.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-23 18:54:23+00:00
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.

And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.

Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
by arianvanp | 2025-11-23 18:54:33+00:00
Check out `man sc_auth`. There's also an exportable variant where the private key is encrypted using the secure enclave as opposed to generated on the secure enclave:

% sc_auth create-ctk-identity -l ssh-exportable -k p-256 -t bio % sc_auth list-ctk-identities p-256 A581E5404ED157C4C73FFDBDFC1339E0D873FCAE bio ssh-exportable ssh-exportable 23.11.26, 19:50 YES % sc_auth export-ctk-identity -h A581E5404ED157C4C73FFDBDFC1339E0D873FCAE -f ssh-exportable.pem Enter a password which will be used to protect the exported items: Verify password:

You can then re-import it on another device

% sc_auth import-ctk-identities -f ssh-exportable.pem.p12 -t bio Enter PKCS12 file password:

I'll add this to the guide
by kelsolaar | 2025-11-23 18:55:07+00:00
It absolutely depends on what you do, for any work involving computer imagery, a dark surround, i.e., dark UI, around the area of interest, e.g., 3D Viewport, 2D Canvas is a must so that to not bias the work. This one of the main reason why Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Autodesk Maya, Blender, The Foundry Nuke, Autodesk Flame, Baselight Filmlight, etc... all have dark themed UI.
by teiferer | 2025-11-23 18:55:09+00:00
> Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions

How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server?

> The truth is just an F12 away

That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service. In 12 cases that was OpenAI or similar. Fine. But that's not 73%. What about the rest? He literally has a diagram claiming that the startups contact an LLM service behind the scenes. That's what's not described, how does he measure that?

You are not bothered by the only sign that the author even exist is this one article and the previous one? Together with the claim to be a startup founder? Anybody can claim that. It doesn't automatically provide credibility.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-11-23 18:55:29+00:00
Charlie Stross did, in my opinion, a better analysis ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_hig... , discussed on HN at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456 ) where his math seems to show that even lossless matter to energy conversion with lossless[1] conversion of that energy to thrust wouldn't make interstellar travel feasible.

[1] The word "lossless" alone ought to raise eyebrows since, as far as I understand it, FTL travel is far more plausible than circumventing the laws of thermodynamics.
by johnisgood | 2025-11-23 18:56:01+00:00
Yeah, that is why you should not [always (depends on your use case)] generate it on a YubiKey.

You need to have:

- an offline master private key backup (air-gapped)

- primary YubiKey (daily use)

- backup YubiKey (locked away)

- revocation certificate (separate storage) (it is your kill-switch)

Having a second YubiKey enrolled is the standard practice.

What people do wrong is:

- They generate directly on YubiKey

- They only use one device

- They do not create a revocation certificate

- They have no offline backups

You generate your GPG keys on a secured system, load the subkeys (not the master because it is not used for daily cryptography) into the YubiKeys, and then remove the secret keys from this system where you generated the keys.
by kaoD | 2025-11-23 18:56:08+00:00
Sorry, let me clarify, the terms are used imprecisely.

Some people use "raytracing" only for the ray intersection technique, but some people (me included, in the post above) consider it an umbrella term and raymarching, path tracing, etc. only as specific techniques of raytracing.

So what I meant is "'raymarching' is not 'raytracing in shaders' but just a technique of raytracing, in shaders or not".

I was not correcting OP, just adding clarifications on top.

> Raymarching can be polygon based, if you want

But not polygon-intersection-based, it'd still be a SDF (to an implicit polygon).
by fluoridation | 2025-11-23 18:56:43+00:00
That's simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. Optimistic because it assumes that someone, say, replying to a comment on Hacker News, is doing that instead of something incredibly constructive. Pessimistic because it also assumes that those negative emotions necessarily impact the person once the activity finishes. While that may be the case for some dysfunctional individuals, most people will not be compelled to quit their job and bunker themselves up in their room after reading a Reddit post.
by attila-lendvai | 2025-11-23 18:57:04+00:00
well, i wouldn't call that beeing bootstrapped.

in this case the generated scheme code is just a strange form of executable file that happens to need ChezScheme to be executed.

i.e. an ELF64 idris2 linux binary vs. an idris2.scm file that needs ChezScheme to come alive.

as for Idris2 implemented in Idris2: well, yes, that's true for the current version of Idris2. but the first version of Idris2 was written in Idris1. and the first version of Idris1 was written in Haskell.