MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troelsSteegin | 2025-11-05 16:33:06+00:00
This was a good read. I was struck by the quantity of nuanced and applied knowhow it took to build SmolLM3. I am curious about the rough cost it took to engineer and train SmolLM3 - at ~400 GPUS for a least a month, and, based on the set of book co-authors, 12 engineers for at least three months. Is $3-5M a fair ballpark number? The complement is how much experience, on average, the team members had doing ML and LLM training at scale before SmolLM3. The book is "up" on recent research, so I am surmising a phd-centric team each with multiple systems built. This is not commodity skill. What the book suggests to me is that an LLM applications start up would best focus on understanding the scope and knowhow for starting from post-training.
by neilv | 2025-11-05 16:33:10+00:00
I'm personally open to Wayland, and able to move to it (and sometimes have, though once I had to back it out because it was breaking too much in a critical factory embedded appliance) (and XMonad works noticeably better for me than i3wm/Sway). But not everyone can move to it.

Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.

There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...

So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.

For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.

(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
by CSMastermind | 2025-11-05 16:33:33+00:00
>1) did you compare codex cloud with devin?

I have. I tried Devin after the initial release and then again when they did their 2.0 release. Found it to be the worst of the tools I've tried.

More of a tangent but an underappreciated part of Codex is their PR review bot. Just miles ahead of all the competitors we've tried (greptile, charlie, cubic)

>2) how about the new claude code teleport feature from web to cli?

I have not. I rarely use Claude Code these days but I will give it a spin because you just told me it existed.
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-05 16:33:47+00:00
I think window managers these days do a better job on 3 monitors than on a single one that could have the same area.

With an ultra wide you lose the screen concept for managing area and it gets awful because you lose grouping windows on different screens, picking per-monitor workspaces, moving windows across screens.

Either monitors need to present themselves as multiple screens, or window managers need to come up with virtual screens to regain the much needed screen abstraction.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-05 16:34:29+00:00
With very high PPI displays the gamma corrected interpolation scaling is far better than nearest neighbor scaling.

The idea is to make the pixels so small that your eyes aren’t resolving individual pixels anyway. Interpolation appears correct to your eyes because you’re viewing it through a low-pass filter (the physical limit of your eyes) anyway.

Reverting to nearest neighbor at high PPI would introduce new artifacts because the aliasing effects would create unpleasant and unnatural frequencies in the image.

Most modern GPU drivers (nVidia in particular) will do fixed multiple scaling if that’s what you want. Nearest neighbor is not good though.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-05 16:34:59+00:00
> So the Chrome team is going to ship a solution where when it encounters un-un-fucked content that depends on XSLT, Chrome will transparently fix it up as if someone had injected this polyfill import into the page, right?

As with most things on the web, the answer is "They will if it breaks a website that a critical mass of users care about."

And that's the issue with XSLT: it won't.
by acdha | 2025-11-05 16:35:48+00:00
> Which means the most prices can be lowered is 2%.

For people who live near one of those stores and can afford to shop competitively. In many urban environments, the competition is smaller shops or places which know you aren’t going to spend an hour driving elsewhere.

I live in DC, and we have a Safeway near us which often charged 2-3 TIMES what Costco charged. Once a second market opened in our neighborhood, just like magic the prices at Safeway came down.

The corner market was basically never competitive on prices because it’s tiny and carries the small sized products which always work out to a higher cost.
by afandian | 2025-11-05 16:35:50+00:00
I have strong nostalgia for the eMate. Yes, it had a nice keyboard (at least comparable with the era); smaller pitch than standard keyboards. And, of course, resitive pen-based touch screen.

It _was_ a PDA with a keyboard though. It had a good office suite, a web browser, printer drivers, and a vibrant developer community. But you probably still expected to dock it with Newton Connection Utilities on a computer to add software and get data off it.
by QuadrupleA | 2025-11-05 16:35:51+00:00
Yes but software, and especially browser, complexity has balooned enormously over the years. And while XSLT probably plays a tiny part in that, it's likely embedded in every Electron app that could do in 1MB what it takes 500 MB to do, makes it incrementally harder to build and maintain a competing browser, etc., etc. It's not zero cost.

I do tend to support backwards compatibility over constant updates and breakage, and needless hoops to jump through as e.g. Apple often puts its developers through. But having grown up and worked in the overexuberant XML-for-everything, semantic-web 1000-page specification, OOP AbstractFactoryTemplateManagerFactory era, I'm glad to put some of that behind us.

If that makes me some kind of gestappo, so be it.
by fragmede | 2025-11-05 16:36:12+00:00
Hola is the big one, but in practice, if we hypothesis that no one's running a VPN as a charity, free VPN products need to make money someway, and if you're not paying to use it, how else are they gonna make money?

So basically be suspicious of every single "free" or suspiciously cheap VPN. Go with known brands that come recommended by mulitple people, especially from people "in the know".

Though PirateSoftware (a person) has a good bit on why he doesn't advertise for VPNs on his channel.
by georgehe9 | 2025-11-05 16:36:16+00:00
Hi I’m George, I’d love to share lessons we made optimizing data pipelines with AI / embedding calls for our users, which increased the pipeline throughput 5x. We did adaptive batching - discussed in detail how we did it. Developers still simply process data row-by-row, under the hood we queue requests and batch at the right moments (batching is effectively columnar), so no manual plumbing. Would love your thought.
by jamal-kumar | 2025-11-05 16:36:28+00:00
Yeah I actually help out a friend's family business a lot and we recently had to fix the program for something. It's a foxpro application rewritten in '89 from an original dBase port from earlier in the 80s. I legit had to bust out radare2 and hexdump(analysis)/hex fiend(editing) in order to get the changes done because the original programmer passed away (RIP). Was quite the learning experience but I'm glad that things were simple enough back then to make it something like an easy introduction into the world of reverse engineering for money.

I've seen even older in use. There's an auto parts store in the capital city of Costa Rica which was still running dBase III for its inventory system on a green phosphor screen IBM PC. Not sure if that store is around post-pandemic but it certainly was running around 4 or 5 years ago. Wish I got a video but it's in a particularly sketchy area that I don't really have any reason to return to.

Also, if anyone else ever has to dump an old database to CSV or whatever, I found perl to be the best tool for the job as it handles old encodings just fine. You can go from ancient database to spreadsheet really easy this way. Here's the ticket:

https://www.burtonsys.com/download/dbf2csv.php
by avidiax | 2025-11-05 16:38:01+00:00
It's also quite common that the customer is now the one that drives the interface.

It's the customer's time wasted by the UI, but also the customer typically can't be expected to perform enough orders to actually learn a complicated interface.

TUIs persist in industries where there is specialized knowledge needed to even complete the order. For example, an optometrist's office.
by cptnntsoobv | 2025-11-05 16:38:08+00:00
XDP, and the eBPF ecosystem in general, is quite neat. However, a word of caution:

* The BPF verifier's DX is not great yet. If it finds problems with your BPF code it will spit our a rather inscrutable set of error messages that often requires a good understanding of the verifier internals (e.g the register nomenclature) to debug

* For the same source code, the code generated by the verifier can change across compiler versions in a breaking way, e.g. because the new compiler version implemented an optimization that broke the verifier (see https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/4612)

* Checksum updating requires extra care. I believe you can only do incremental updates, not just because of better perf as the post suggests but also because the verifier does not allow BPF programs to operate on unbounded buffers (so checksumming a whole packet of unknown size is tricky / cumbersome). This mostly works but you have to be careful with packets that were generated with csum offload, don't have a valid checksum and whose csum can't be incrementally updated.

As the blog post points out, the kernel networking stack does a lot of work that we don't generally think about. Once you start taking things into your own hands you don't have the luxury of ignorance anymore (think not just ARP but also MTU, routing, RP filtering etc.), something any user of userspace networking frameworks like DPDK will tell you.

My general recommendation is to stick with the kernel unless you have a very good justification for chasing better performance and if you do use eBPF save yourself some trouble and try to limit yourself to readonly operations, if your use case allows.

Also, if you are trying to debug packet drops, newer kernels have started logging this information that you can track using bpftrace which gives you better diagnostics.

Example script (might have to adjust based on kernel version):

bpftrace -e ' kprobe:kfree_skb_reason { $skb = (struct sk_buff *)arg0; $ipheader = ((struct iphdr *) ($skb->head + $skb->network_header)); printf("reason :%d %s -> %s\n", arg1, ntop($ipheader->saddr), ntop($ipheader->daddr)); }'
by noir_lord | 2025-11-05 16:38:34+00:00
Possible yes but there are properties of a TUI vs a GUI where the TUI encourages faster keyboard navigation because when they were common there was only keyboard navigation whereas a GUI comes with it's own upsides (discoverability been the big one).

When I was in college (many years ago) the company I worked for used a TUI for its inventory/back office systems (terminal emulator talking to an AS/400) and once you understood the hierarchical structure and how it worked you could fly through that system because it was all keyboard nav.

Few GUI's have ever been that fast for me even the ones that go out of their way to make everything accessible via the GUI bindable.
by TheGuyWhoCodes | 2025-11-05 16:38:40+00:00
The first prime minister of Israel was David Ben-Gurion.

Targeting the British during the Mandate was an act of anti-colonization, not unlike other factions that wanted independence from the British at that time, and the Irgun did warn the British before hand but they did not evacuate the hotel which was the central offices of the British Mandate and the Headquarters of the British Army
by reidrac | 2025-11-05 16:38:52+00:00
I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?

That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.

I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.

I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
by Ancapistani | 2025-11-05 16:39:07+00:00
Huh?

The purpose of insurance is to mitigate the risk of a very costly but unlikely outcome by paying a smaller amount over time, thereby spreading that risk among those of similar risk.

Not being able to consider individual risk means that insurance makes no sense for those with a low risk profiles, because they’re in the same cohort as those who will _definitely_ file claims.
by d-us-vb | 2025-11-05 16:39:21+00:00
Perhaps not a true counterpoint, but there are systems like the GA144, an array of 144 Forth processors.

I think you're missing the point, and I don't think OP is "being critical of companies making practical designs."

Also, I think OP was imagining some kind of tree based topology, not connected graph since he said:

> ...but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
by tonyarkles | 2025-11-05 16:39:29+00:00
I don't know if they're still using it but around 2010 or so a client from the early 2000s got in touch because the UPS they were using for their SCO Unix + serial terminals server had failed and they wanted to replace it. I was amazed that they were still using it. I was even more amazed that the APC UPS they were going to replace the old one with... had a new version of the SCO UPS Monitoring application that they used to automatically do a clean shut down of the server if the power was out too long. Got them all set up and everything kept humming along.
by jerf | 2025-11-05 16:39:49+00:00
I've been involved in the RSS world since the beginning and I've never clicked on an RSS link and expected it to be rendered in a "nice" way, nor have I seen one.

"XSLT is currently the only way to make feeds into something that can still be viewed."

You could use content negotiation just fine. I just hit my personal rss.xml file, and the browser sent this as the Accept header:

text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8

except it has no newline, which I added for HN.

You can easily ship out an HTML rendering of an RSS file based on this. You can have your server render an XSLT if you must. You can have your server send out some XSLT implemented in JS that will come along at some point.

To a first approximation, nobody cares enough to use content negotiation any more than anyone cares about providing XML stylesheets. The tech isn't the problem, the not caring is... and the not caring isn't actually that big a problem either. It's been that way for a long time and we aren't actually all that bothered about it. It's just a "wouldn't it be nice" that comes up on those rare occasions like this when it's the topic of conversation and doesn't cross anyone's mind otherwise.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-11-05 16:39:59+00:00
FWIW, I didn't mean to reply to you in an argumentative way. Just proposing an answer to this:

> I'm honestly not sure where all these hackernews commenters with low-dpi displays are coming from

I still see 1080p fairly often on new setups/laptops, basically, although 1440p and 4K are becoming more common on higher-end desktops. Then again, 1440p at 27" or 32" isn't really high dpi.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-05 16:40:02+00:00
I took some classes in high school when I was elementary school student where I had access to a PDP-8 which was a pretty crappy machine but could support 1, 2 or 3 terminals with BASIC where you got more memory with fewer terminals. We also had the Colossal Cave ADVENTURE. You had very few registers and it had 12-bit words instead of being based on the 8-bit byte, the "very few registers" made it a leader for interrupt-driven applications because context switches were fast.

I really enjoying using a PDP-11 with RSTS/E, here each user got two 64k address spaces, one for data, one for code, so you got a BASIC experience that was a bit better than the Apple ][ or TRS-80, particularly you could save you work on a hard drive.

In the computer explorers I got to use an IBM 3090 in the later 1980s which was close to the pinnacle of bipolar mainframes running the 370 XA architecture. At this point in time the IBM Mainframes had

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)

IBM really struggled to develop timesharing for the 360 and wound up applying virtual machine technology to give every software developer their own copy of a DOS-like operating system. In the early 1970 it was really a struggle to get time on a 360, by the late 1980s VM was everywhere and you could just log in with your 3270 terminal when you wanted to.

Circa 1980 it was easy for a microcomputer user to "look up" to the PDP-11 and think the future might look like that but actually the PDP-11 became obsolete rather quickly because the user had access to only 64k which was the same problem micros were about to have as memory got cheap and you could afford more than 64k of RAM. Digital came out with the VAX which was basically a modern computer, my high school got one by the late 1980s and it was a really capable on machine where you had good compilers for languages like PASCAL which was great for CS education.
by djoldman | 2025-11-05 16:40:18+00:00
Some choice quotes:

> Prices for a TC2 start at €44.500 excluding taxes (€53.854 including 21% btw/Dutch tax).

> The Carice TC2 complies with the European regulations and can therefore be driven in all EU countries and countries that adopt those regulations, like Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Monaco and Norway.
by conductr | 2025-11-05 16:40:23+00:00
I was just giving some examples, it being theoretically possible in SPA isn't really helpful given that nobody will implement it that way. You're basically living in theory.

I've literally done the before and after on this a handful of times and it's always worse off. Management will never do that, it's always design by committee, the KPIs won't be defined or will never really have teeth, it will turn into someone's vanity project, they won't even pay someone to optimize the code - quite the opposite, they'll choose to build it on something like Salesforce or some other very non-performant enterprise-y platform, etc, etc. All the TUI get these performance gains out of the box without much additional effort. The constraints of the UI are it's strength as it prevents people from adding all this bloat in the first place. When you leave it up to people, especially business users or UX folks, it will get spoiled. It's almost a law.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-05 16:40:45+00:00
The screen is also a continual, addictive flow of short video clips that are largely designed to sell product, stoke FOMO, make people feel inadequate about beauty, etc.

Observe young people using their phones, and you can see the social use is often just occasionally switching from TikTok to a chat app, dashing off a one-line message, and then going right back to TikTok. Big difference from having actual long phone conversations with friends after school.
by jimbokun | 2025-11-05 16:40:46+00:00
> "Our employees have created such a bad mess that AI wont work because only they know how the mess they created works".

This is an ironclad argument against fully replacing employees with AI.

Every single organization on Earth requires the people who were part of creating the current mess to be involved in keeping the organization functioning.

Yes you can improve the current mess. But it's still just a slightly better mess and you still need some of the people around who have been part of creating the new mess.

Just run a thought experiment: every employee in a corporation mysteriously disappear from the face of the Earth. If you bring in an equal number of equally talented people the next day to run it, but with no experience with the current processes of the corporation, how long will it take to get to the same capability of the previous employees?
by dathinab | 2025-11-05 16:40:59+00:00
Until this happened MS was still going around trying to convince lawyers to use their Cloud and telling them that there is no issue.

Including certain contractual "standard"(1) agreements which would make some of their higher management _personally_ liable for undue data access even under Cloud act from the US!!!

(1) As in standard agreements for providers which store lawyer data, including highly sensitive details about ongoing cases etc.

So you can't really trust MS anymore at all, even if personal liability (e.g. lying under oath) is at stack. And the max ceiling for the penalties for lying under oath seem less then what you can run into in the previous mentioned case...

You also have to look a bit closer at what it even means if "the french MS CEO swears they are complying" it means he doesn't know about non compliance and did tell his employees to comply and hired someone to verify it etc.

But the US doesn't need the French CEO to know, they just need to gain access to the French/EU server through US employees, which given that most of the infra software is written in the US and international admin teams for 24/7 support is really not that hard...

And even if you want to sue the French CEO after a breach/he (hypothetically) lied he would just say he didn't because he also was lied too leading to an endless goose chase and "upsi" by now the French CEO somehow is living in the US.

And that is if you ever learn about it happening, but thanks to the US having pretty bad gag orders/secret court stuff the chance for that is very low.

So from my POV it looks like MS has knowingly and systematically lying and deceiving customer, including such with highly sensitive data, and EU governments about how "safe" the data is even if it lead to personal legal liabilities of management.

And I mind to remember that AWS was giving similar guarantees they most most likely can't hold, but I'm not fully sure. Idk. about Google.

Oh and if you hope that the whole Sovereign Cloud things will help, it wont. It's a huge mage pretend theater moving millions over millions into the hands of US cloud providers while not providing a realistic solutions to the problem it is supposed to solve and neglecting local competition which actually could make a difference, smh.
by stephenhuey | 2025-11-05 16:41:14+00:00
My first job out of college was over 2 decades ago, and I was hired to work on a web app which was considered new technology. But an important application there that was used by hundreds of people around the country was written with Pick, and the owner of the company also had some local Houston businesses whose Pick applications he occasionally did maintenance work on. The owner had moved from Chicago to Houston at the beginning of the 80s because he was able to get a high-paying job with no degree, but when the oil bust happened he learned Pick programming from an older guy and did so well when he started his own business that he retired early.