MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-02 20:02:27+00:00
The lack of accessible devices with first party support make mainstream Linux gaming rather annoying.

For many games, people prefer Nvidias's graphical tricks over AMD's, making AMD cards a worse deal, while at the same time Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards. It's not impossible to use their hardware anymore, but you need to know of their bullshit beforehand and even then you run the risk of messing up.

I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).
Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today
by csmoak | 2025-11-02 20:02:31+00:00
MTurk was built by two two-pizza teams at AWS over the course of a year and launched on Nov 2, 2005. It took a few days for people to find it and catch on, but then things got busy.

At the time, AWS was about 100 people (when you were on call, you were on call for all of AWS), Amazon had just hit 10,000, S3 was still in private beta, and EC2 was a whitepaper.

What did you create with MTurk and the incredibly patient hard-working workforce behind it?
by Hasz | 2025-11-02 20:02:44+00:00
Steam and Ubuntu has worked really well for me, big picture mode + hdmi switch has made for a very-close-to-console experience

I am playing mostly single player campaign type games (Assassins creed, RDR2, etc) which certainly improves the picture.

If steam really wanted to put a knife in games on windows, it would develop an anticheat and give it away for free. That is AFAICT the only thing keeping people on windows for modern, multiplayer games.
by johnfn | 2025-11-02 20:03:28+00:00
Does anyone else struggle with getting Claude to follow even the simplest commands in CLAUDE.md? I’ve completely give up on maintaining it because there’s a coin flip chance it disregards even the simplest instructions. For instance, (after becoming increasingly exasperated and whittling it down over and over), my CLAUDE file now has a single instruction, which says that any ai generated one-off script should be named <foo>.aigen.ts, and I can’t get Claude to follow something as simple as that! It does sometimes, but half the time it disregards the instructions.

I use Claude all the time, and this is probably my biggest issue with it. I just workaround by manually supplying context in prompts, but it’s kind of annoying to do so.

Does anyone else struggle with this or am I just doing something horribly wrong?
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-02 20:03:51+00:00
That's a good start that explains some of the memory overhead (along with the sizable Java object header), but we also need to take into account memory locality to explain why this is so much slower.

Main memory access is at worst case order of 100x slower than a cached read. With boxed primitives you very often looking and main memory access, whereas naked primitives can (when the planets align) amount to cached memory access.
by morkalork | 2025-11-02 20:04:19+00:00
They have this where I live and it's great for pumping out web developer and generic C#/Java CRUD dudes. And to be fair, 90% of the work here is doable with their skills. It's just fucking wild talking to one and they have zero clue about theory or advanced algorithms the rare time it does come up at work. Like a deer in headlights blank stare sort of situation
by quotemstr | 2025-11-02 20:04:33+00:00
WASM is a sandbox. It doesn't obviate memory safety measures elsewhere. A program with a buffer overflow running in WASM can still be exploited to do anything that program can do within in WASM sandbox, e.g. disclose information it shouldn't. WASM ensures such a program can't escape its container, but memory safety bugs within a container can still be plenty harmful.
by consumer451 | 2025-11-02 20:04:55+00:00
I did not post this to discuss politics, so please honor my request to not take it there.

Instead, let's discuss how to help the immediate issue: millions going hungry.

Is anyone here doing anything in their community? Does anyone have recommendations? Is just donating to a local food bank the best thing to do?

If one lives in a relatively rich area, would it be best to donate to a more distant food bank?
by asdefghyk | 2025-11-02 20:04:55+00:00
Well Trump did achieve getting the living hostages released. and some of the bodies of the deceased returned. Why did Hamas retrieve the hostage body from under the building rubble and then reburry in a freshly dug grave and then claim to "rediscover it" again... Do not get that .... I see that peoples opinions differ on many matters, and if both sides are not prepared to "draw a line" under past events and want peace, yes the fighting will eventually flare up/continue. seems to perpetuate.
by eastbound | 2025-11-02 20:05:11+00:00
Shifting the goal. The goal was commiseration for poverty, and you want a stable future.

It’s difficult to reconcile the desires of 8bn people. Some don’t care about climate change, some would like to see their granddaughter, some will live through flooding or an earthquake, some would like better health. Most of misery in the world does not come from the lack of money. If anything, disagreements between people are the cause of the lack of money, not the result.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-02 20:05:12+00:00
> it's that it shares the 2B1.1 loss table with all the other federal criminal statutes, and computers are very good and very fast at running the number on that table up.

That's a problem with it, but another big one is that it's inherently ambiguous.

The normal way you know if you're authorized to do something with a computer is that it processes the request. They're perfectly capable of refusing; you get "forbidden" or "access denied" but in that case you're not actually accessing it, you're just being informed that you're not allowed to right now. So for there to be a violation the computer would have to let you do something it isn't supposed to. But how are you supposed to know that then?

On a lot of websites -- like this one -- you go to a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=<user_id> and you get the user's profile. If you put in your user there then you can see your email address and edit your profile etc. If the server was misconfigured and showing everyone's email address when it isn't supposed to, how is someone supposed to know that? Venmo publishes their users' financial transactions. If you notice that and think it's weird and write a post about it, should the company -- possibly retroactively -- be able to decide that the data you're criticizing them for making public wasn't intended to be, and therefore your accessing it was a crime? If you notice this by accident when it's obvious the data shouldn't be public -- you saw it when you made a typo in the URL -- should there be a law that can put you in jail if you admit to this in the process of making the public aware of the company's mistake, even if your access resulted in no harm to anyone?

The wording is too vague and it criminalizes too much. "Malicious hacking" might not always be wire fraud but in other cases it could be misappropriation of trade secrets etc., i.e. whatever the actual act of malice is. The problem with the CFAA is that it's more or less attempting to be the federal computer law against burglary (i.e. unlawful entry with the intent to commit a crime) except that it makes the "unlawful" part too hard to pin down and failed to include the part about intent to commit a crime, which allows it to be applied against people it ought not to.
by hollerith | 2025-11-02 20:05:51+00:00
Yes, almost any competent developer could define a simple document format that would make it easy to write viewers for all the niche OSes, but he cannot persuade content creators to adopt the simple format because most creators (writers) don't see anything wrong with publishing on the web and don't see anything wrong with relying on intermediaries like Wordpress, Medium and Substack to help them publish on the web. Those intermediaries do not want to switch to a simple document format because the user's being dependent on a mainstream browser helps them to track users and to monetize.

So 99% of the time, a user ends up needing the full complexity of a mainstream browser just to read a static document.
by Dedime | 2025-11-02 20:06:32+00:00
I wouldn't say it's perfect quite yet. I just installed Debian on my Framework, and my microphone isn't working. Debugging it for the last 30 minutes has gotten me nowhere, and half the answers on the internet don't apply to my distro. Until basic issues like this go away or have easy solutions, it's hard to recommend it to anyone.
by kees99 | 2025-11-02 20:07:08+00:00
My impression is - rust fares a bit better on RAM footprint, and about as badly on disk binary size. It's darn hard to compare apples-to-apples, though - given it's a different language, so everything is a rewrite. One example:

Ubuntu 25.10's rust "coreutils" multicall binary: 10828088 bytes on disk, 7396 KB in RAM while doing "sleep".

Alpine 3.22's GNU "coreutils" multicall binary: 1057280 bytes on disk, 2320 KB in RAM while doing "sleep".
by mpenet | 2025-11-02 20:08:02+00:00
Clojure will be around as long as the jvm. It’s mostly done at the core level, most updates are to leverage new host features nowadays. The rest is happily provided at the library level by the community (which is still very prolific).

And it’s not tied to the jvm per say, look at clojurescript (and derivatives) or the upcoming jank.

It’s far from dead. As much as I like CL, the ecosystem is a bit of a desert compared to the jvm.
by otterley | 2025-11-02 20:08:05+00:00
> Because if people went to all-pizzas.com for their pizza need then each restaurant and chain would depend on them not to screw them up

This is precisely what makes food delivery ordering services (GrubHub, UberEats, Deliveroo, etc.) so challenging to operate and maintain. Practically every restaurant accepts orders in a different way, and maintaining custom mechanisms for each one is costly. Restaurant front-of-house technology companies like Toast are helping make them operate alike, but adoption is slow and there are many, many restaurants to tackle.
by dingdingdang | 2025-11-02 20:08:40+00:00
Wonder how these play out against the https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver base, would be interesting to hear from that end as to how these things are handled. My understanding is that they address any sec issues that arise on x.org but it would be fascinating if the issues are already mitigated since XLibre updated their xserver port with 1000s of issues that were never addressed on the x.org side of things.
by heikkilevanto | 2025-11-02 20:09:18+00:00
I hate titles like "Why don't you use blah-blah". Usually because blah-blah might be an acceptable (maybe good?) solution to a problem which I don't have. Let me ask in return: Why should I even care about blah-blah. If the first (two?) paragraphs don't give a clear answer to that, never mind!
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-02 20:09:35+00:00
Proof by reflection is accomplished by running some arbitrary program during proof checking that has been proven to only return a "true" result if the goal is true. You can do the exact same thing in an LCF system, and in fact that's arguably what a complex LCF "tactic" amounts to in the first place. If anything, the viability of proof by reflection simply shows that the divide with LCF-like checkers is not really that large.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-02 20:09:54+00:00
Please, I’m begging you, stop talking about Rust. You’re shoehorning Rust into a discussion where it hasn’t been mentioned, just to hate on some imaginary people you think are pushing Rust here. No one is talking about that. You sound deranged and obsessed.

The vast majority of the conversation here is about GC and the performance implications of that. Please stick to the rest of the thread.
by hibikir | 2025-11-02 20:10:14+00:00
Talking about non-necessary is IMO a cop-out: I bet we can verify systems with even fewer features that he is using, or just a different set of features that get him to the same spot. The interesting question is always whether a feature is useful enough.

You get into types at the end. And sure, we don't need static types. Just like, outside of verification, we don't need garbage collection, or bounds checking, or even loops. But are the features useful? What takes us to the goal faster? And remember that also changes depending on who is doing the tasks. A lot of differents in tooling selection, across all kinds of work, come down to preference, not general utility, and they sure have nothing to do with necessity
by RustSupremacist | 2025-11-02 20:10:45+00:00
It depends on how you define supply chain attacks.

Recently, there was an exploit discovered in an abandoned Rust package that was used by many other Rust projects, many unaware of it due to the sheer number of dependencies. Whether by negligence or malice, having a known vulnerability that permeates significant portions of the ecosystem is on the order of a supply chain attack.

https://edera.dev/stories/tarmageddon

Worse yet, independent research suggests that the state is arguably much worse: https://00f.net/2025/10/17/state-of-the-rust-ecosystem/

Given projects that make the claim of switching to Rust to access new contributors, it remains to be seen how many of those new contributors are capable of being retained.
by p1necone | 2025-11-02 20:11:23+00:00
I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free.

Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine).

The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.
by ainch | 2025-11-02 20:11:29+00:00
That's an interesting idea, it sounds similar to the principles behind low precision models like BitNet (where each weight is +-1 or 0).

That said, I know Deepseek use fp32 for their gradient updates even though they use fp8 for inference. And a recent paper shows that RL+LLM training is shakier at bf16 than fp16, which would both imply that numerical precision in gradients still matters.
by leptons | 2025-11-02 20:11:56+00:00
That's great for you, but squashing commits doesn't do anything for our team. It hides somewhat useful information, which never seemed like a good thing to me.

Other teams at my company are obsessive about squashing, and I am glad I don't work on those teams. They are frustrating to work with, they are notoriously slow to ship anything, and their product still breaks even with all their processes and hurdles to getting anything shipped. Teams that demand squashing simply don't impress me at all.
by ktosobcy | 2025-11-02 20:13:07+00:00
Huge problem (for me) with SaifishOS is… annoying UI. I know that a lot of people swear by swipe navigation but it's just darn inconvenient and imprecise (or rather - require a lot of precission to select desired option)… I tried to get used to it for a long time and I simply couldn't. Having to pay effin lot of attention each time I tried to do anything with the phone was simply to much…
by 1313ed01 | 2025-11-02 20:13:41+00:00
Yes, of course. Source code would be nice, but I gamble on that there wasn't a terrible amount of bugs in that compiler. It is version 5.10, so not the first 5.x release, plus with the lack of good ways to distribute patches back then we all know software tended to be better tested. It also obviously works well enough to compile DOS 4.0 (and a bunch of user tools that are included) plus I have tried it already for some quite big code-bases without noticing anything being broken.

I feel like any bugs can probably be worked around and since it is C it is possible some things can be fixed by adding some macros in the include-files. I have thought of making some minor changes to the include-files to modify some of the few things I noticed that are missing from C89. I do not know if it is possible to make it 100% C89 compliant or if the binaries would have to be patched for that, but it seems like it already is 99% of the way.

* Since I can't comment on the comment to this post: Note I said C89. Definitely not going to go for anything more modern. Possibly add the standard integer size types from C99, as those can be useful for more portable code. There are other, bigger, compilers for more modern C versions that can cross-compile to DOS (and also Free Pascal that seems like a nice language for that).
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-11-02 20:14:32+00:00
I am considering making the switch to Linux for my software + data science (primary) and gaming (secondary) setup.

I use a LG OLED TV as screen, so no displayport inputs. Only HDMI 2.1.

How is the support for Linux + HDR + HDMI 2.1 + 120 Hz + VRR + Nvidia (5000 series)?
by yoz-y | 2025-11-02 20:14:44+00:00
When I decided to get back into PC gaming during covid, I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console. It has been like that ever since. For anything other than gaming I use a Macbook.

If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.

That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.
by dzhar11 | 2025-11-02 20:15:08+00:00
Recommendation:

https://github.com/Nanonid/rison

Super old but still a very functional library for saving state as JSON in the URL, but without all the usual JSON clutter. I first saw it used in Elastic's Kibana. I used it on a fancy internal React dashboard project around 2016, and it worked like a charm.

Sample: http://example.com/service?query=q:'*',start:10,count:10
by conscion | 2025-11-02 20:15:45+00:00
> Most of my criticism of Ben’s perspective is against the idea that some kind of emergent morality that we would recognize

I think Anthropic has already provided some evidence that intelligence is tied to morality (and vice versa) [1]. When they tried to steer LLM models morals they saw intelligence degradation also.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/evaluating-feature-steeri...
by bontaq | 2025-11-02 20:15:58+00:00
I would say a lot of people are only posting their positive experiences. Stating negative things about AI is mildly career-dangerous at the moment where as the opposite looks good. I found the results from using it on a complicated code base are similar to yours, but it is very good at slapping things on until it works.

If you're not watching it like a hawk it will solve a problem in a way that is inconsistent and, importantly, not integrated into the system. Which makes sense, it's been trained to generate code, and it will.
by dotancohen | 2025-11-02 20:16:01+00:00
Is it actually run in an Android VM?

I use an OS as a step to run applications. Why would someone use Sailfish if it can not run applications, or do they expect mobile development firms to start supporting a distant third OS? Serious question, there is a real chicken and egg problem here.

I think that I have simple needs from a mobile OS. CalDAV and CardDAV sync, provide a mobile hotspot, record calls. On Android those functions are provided by applications - so I consider myself a user of these applications, not a user of Android. I'm probably the ideal customer for a Sailfish OS, so long as it provides these features or can run apps that do.
by aliefe04 | 2025-11-02 20:16:32+00:00
Thanks for the feedback!

Shodata aims to solve a different problem: lightweight versioning for small-to-medium datasets with zero infrastructure setup. Think "GitHub for CSV files" rather than a full data lakehouse. Iceberg is excellent for production data lakes with Spark/Trino, but it requires running catalogs, configuring S3/Glue, and SQL knowledge. For many ML teams working with <100GB datasets, that's overkill. Our sweet spot is teams who need:

Drag-and-drop versioning (no CLI/SDK required) Instant previews and diff visualization Collaboration features (comments, access control) Public sharing (like the LLM hallucinations dataset)

I'll definitely look at Iceberg's catalog design for inspiration on metadata management. Appreciate the pointer!
by mgh95 | 2025-11-02 20:17:02+00:00
That's good. I generally think these kinds of tools (lsp, analyzers, etc.) should be based upon CLI tools. I'll be more open to when either projects seeking to integrate rust utilize tools such as buck or these tools can be more easily integrated into make/cmake based projects.

There is a lot of legacy code out there and I generally feel like many of the rust advocates forget how important it is to play well with legacy project setups.
by a4isms | 2025-11-02 20:17:21+00:00
The beauty of `const` in JS is that it's almost completely irrelevant. Not only does it have nothing to do with immutability, it's also local. Which means, if I were to write `let` instead of `const`, I could still see whether my code reassigned that variable at a glance. The keyword provides very little in the way of a guarantee I could not otherwise observe for myself.

Immutability is completely different. Determining whether a data structure is mutated without an actual immutable type to enforce is impractical, error-prone, and in any event impossible to prove for the general case.
by samtheprogram | 2025-11-02 20:17:23+00:00
I meant it in the sense of continuing to run old C code like X.org in a safer way without unnecessary rewrites to memory safe languages. These vulnerabilities, like this one that's been in the wild as you say for 30 years uncaught, will continue to be found. Something like Fil-C is really useful in that context.

I also said "would it have" -- I don't really care about timeline. Obviously Fil-C is a recent development, that doesn't make the question I asked any less interesting.
by lucasoshiro | 2025-11-02 20:17:43+00:00
> Clojure solves the same problems Rust solves in a much simpler way

I'm curious about that, can you elaborate? I'm a beginner in Clojure and I only know a few concepts about Rust, but it seems to me that they solve (at least, currently) very different problems...

I only saw Rust being used in places where C or C++ would be used in the past (Linux kernel, CLI apps, desktop apps), while I only saw Clojure being used as a modern and functional Java and JS replacement.

Not to mention how different they are as languages (static vs dynamic typing, native vs jvm, borrow checker vs garbage collection)
by rekabis | 2025-11-02 20:18:07+00:00
Transparency breeds trust.

Sure, it frightens away the short-sighted or particularly excitable people, but anyone who understands how unrealistic perfection is will be comforted by such transparency. Exposing the warts not only sets expectations, but it also assures people that things will (likely) not be just swept under the rug in a company culture of denialism and obfuscation.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-02 20:18:13+00:00
> China and Cuba were also both unquestionably improvements over the status quo

Fair enough. I'd point out that both had low baselines, and the former managed to still fuck that up under Mao. China's living standards dropped post Revolution, and didn't really start materially improving until its leaders had swapped away from communism. By that point, they proceeded to fabulously enrich themselves.

> neoliberal turn in Russia in the 1990s, meanwhile, was an unmitigated humanitarian disaster

Agree.

> unshackled Western capital to the current relentless pursuit of advantage that has yielded today's K-shaped economy

This was happening since at least the 1980s.